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The Palestine Exception, Right-Wing Elite Capture, and New Student Visa Rules
Trump’s aim is a campaign of terror and intimidation against universities and colleges designed to suppress free speech and critical thinking.
May 30, 2025
People in the United States of America continue to allow the normalization of very dangerous measures solidifying authoritarian government, and the administration of President Donald Trump continues to escalate each measure. The latest measure arrived on May 27 when Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended all embassy reviews of applications for student and exchange visas from foreign nationals, stating that a new policy including social media vetting will be announced soon. Rubio also suspended scheduling any new interviews for three types of visas that enable foreign nationals to participate in U.S. institutions: F (for students at academic institutions), M (for students in vocational or non-academic schools), and J (for teaching and research exchange visitors). The new policy has not been revealed yet.
Here is yet another case that should break the people of the U.S.—if not the feckless supposed opposition party, the Democrats—from their political paralysis. The Trump administration inherited a largely informal apparatus of campus repression relying on the defamation, arrest, and suspension of students and faculty members who opposed the U.S. role in supporting what the Israeli government now openly admits is a campaign of deliberate starvation and full land dispossession of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Trump’s administration seized upon the zeitgeist already brewed by university leaders and fueled by a coalition of Zionist and far-right organizations, and seized it with an aim far more expansive than simply punishing pro-Palestinian activism and speech.
Trump is not attacking Harvard, but extorting the institution in an attempt to put its allowable pedagogies and discourses beneath his state.
Trump’s aim is a campaign of terror and intimidation against universities and colleges designed to suppress free speech and critical thinking. The “Palestine exception” has proven to be a useful proxy as its enforcers are not simply the usual MAGA suspects, but include many liberal Democrats and cultural custodians who spent the last few years warning of Trump’s dangers while gladly serving as the handmaids of a repression whose contours they foolishly believed they could limit to one supposedly justified cause. The collaboration with only nominal opponents of antisemitism was a clever move by the MAGA right, as it bound them to silence in a pivotal early phase.
Now the later phase of the Trumpian war on free speech and free thought in higher education is unleashed, and the sorts of powers that Rubio will soon wield over student and researcher visas will allow for the state to pick and choose who enters the halls of academe—and who will be punished for eventually transgressing servitude to the ruling ideology.
Some people are mistakenly calling Trump’s higher education measures an “attack on universities.” Trump’s agenda is far from an attack—it is a right-wing elite capture, in which the current liberal managerial keepers of institutions either are replaced with MAGA counterparts or the current keepers break down and comply (and some already have). Jokes abound about the possible mismatch of some poorly-educated MAGA bootlicker running Harvard or Yale, but Trump’s administration and its congressional lackeys are mostly Ivy Leaguers themselves. U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the most strident congressional Inquisitor of college presidents, is a Yale graduate like Vice President JD Vance. Trump went to Penn. Steve Bannon went to Harvard, like Pete Hegseth.
Trump is not attacking Harvard, but extorting the institution in an attempt to put its allowable pedagogies and discourses beneath his state. He has tried the same at Columbia University, and his administration states that the University of California system is next. The Task Force on Antisemitism led by gadfly former television commentator Leo Terrell functions as a spear tip of moralistic outrage masking the shakedown that Trump’s gangster presidency is actually waging. Trump and his collaborators don’t want to shut down Harvard, Columbia, or any institution of higher education whose trustees will turn over the keys to the MAGA regime. As the DOGE “cuts” demonstrate, the Trump administration understands how to effect ideological capture using traditional but empty Republican rhetoric about balancing budgets and preventing “waste.” The goal is to claim the spoils of the state, and use all state organs to assault private institutions that harbor resistance to the state.
Of course, this ideological capture is far from abstract as it brutally impacts the lives of foreign students lawfully studying and exerting their First Amendment rights (which apply to everyone on our soil, contrary to the Trump doctrine’s insistence otherwise) in the United States. Before both the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs in May, Rubio reiterated his servile liturgy on the pro-Palestinian students targeted by the Trump administration, sometimes at the behest of Zionist organizations like Betar.
“I will continue to revoke student visas,” Rubio stated, while also repeating an argument ad hominem that the targeted students occupied and damaged campus buildings and threatened other students. When asked about the case of the now-released Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Özturk, who was arrested and disappeared to Louisiana for the mere act of co-signing a student newspaper editorial, Rubio reset to the same defamatory lines about breaking campus rules and a visa not being a right but a privilege.
Georgetown University postdoctoral researcher Badar Khan Suri, baselessly accused by the Department of Homeland Security of spreading Hamas propaganda, was chained at the ankles and wrists during his detention at Prairieland Detention Center in Texas, where he was housed from his March arrest until a federal judge ordered his release in May. Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who actually holds a green card and not a visa, remains incarcerated in Louisiana and missed the birth of his child and his graduation ceremony.
While the ultimate goal of the Trump administration is a right-wing elite capture of higher education, especially its most prestigious institutions, the weaponization of the Palestine exception will not be dissipating any time soon. In the wake of federal judges freeing some of the students disappeared for their speech, Trump ally U.S. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) declared that “Palestinianism”—by which he means all recognition of Palestinian people as human beings—is terrorism that should not be allowed in U.S. Fine also endorsed dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza to murder its entire remaining population. After the terrible murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim outside of the Capitol Jewish Museum by a purported pro-Palestine activist, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that even stating “Free Palestine” is equivalent to saying “Heil Hitler.” Hate speech that keeps possible opponents of authoritarianism divided—and causes real harm—tragically is one of the main currencies of Trump’s MAGA movement.
No one should expect any consistency even on the question of antisemitism, because Trump is only committed to hegemonic power for his state and its collaborators. There is no moral principles held categorically, which is why moralistic opposition politics have largely done nothing to stop Trump’s hold on power tightening. While Rubio is railing against pro-Palestine students, Trump’s white nationalist supporters were cheering the admission into the U.S. of 49 Afrikaaner farmers from South Africa, including one who had called Jewish people “dangerous” and “untrustworthy.” Again, Trump wants immigration just like he wants Harvard—just in forms that extend his ideological capture and venerate his broadly racist, patriarchal nationalism.
As international students comprise 5.9% of U.S. university admissions, they represent a mighty financial cudgel. In 2023-4, 25% of international students in the U.S. were studying math or computer science and 20% were studying engineering, they may be less likely to engage in political activism than their domestic counterparts and even before Trump more likely to keep a low profile to their host government (not to mention governments back home). Trump’s coalition includes a lot of people who are genuine extremist Zionists, so expect him to offer up more international students and for the State Department’s new policies to include social media scans of pro-Palestine content. Yet also expect Trump to be ready to make deals with any and all institutions of higher education who will cave to his demands for controlling allowable teaching and expression—and any nations who pledge that their students will arrive obedient. And, tragically, expect a lot of U.S. universities and colleges to fall in line.
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AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented
If we allow the far-right to continue merging political power with AI without guardrails, we will see the rise of a system where freedom is algorithmically rationed.
May 13, 2025
Pope Leo XIV just labeled Artificial Intelligence one of the main threats facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to “human dignity, justice, and labor.” He’s right, but it’s even worse than that: It represents, unless it’s rigorously regulated, a threat to democracy itself.
In every generation, the enemies of democracy change costumes, but their playbook remains eerily familiar. They lie, divide, intimidate, and exploit every available tool to consolidate power. In the 1930s it was radio, in the 2010s it was social media, and now, in 2025, the newest and most dangerous weapon in the authoritarian arsenal is artificial intelligence.
Make no mistake: AI is not just another technology. It is power, scaled. And in the hands of the far right, it becomes the most effective tool for dismantling democracy ever invented.
We’re not just fighting bad actors anymore: We’re fighting machines trained to think like them.
Authoritarians—whether MAGA-aligned in the United States or part of the global movement that includes Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and others—are not blind to the potential of AI. They understand it instinctively: its ability to simulate, to deceive, to surveil, and to dominate. While progressives and democratic institutions have scrambled to comprehend its implications, the authoritarians have already started weaponizing it with devastating efficiency.
Let’s look at the mechanisms.
AI can now generate millions of personalized political messages in seconds, each calibrated to manipulate a voter’s specific fears or biases. It can create entire fake news outlets, populate them with AI-generated journalists, and flood your social feed with content that looks real, sounds real, and feels familiar, all without a single human behind it. Imagine the power of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine, but with superintelligence behind the wheel and zero friction. That’s where we’re heading.
And that’s just the beginning.
Authoritarian regimes can—and already are—using AI to surveil and intimidate their citizens. What China has perfected with facial recognition and loyalty scoring, MAGA-aligned figures in the U.S. are watching closely, eager to adopt and adapt. Right-wing sheriffs and local governments could soon use AI to track protestors, compile digital dossiers, and “predict” criminal behavior in communities deemed politically undesirable.
If the government knows not just where you are, but what you’re thinking, organizing, or reading—and it can fabricate “evidence” to match—freedom of thought becomes a quaint memory.
This isn’t theoretical. In 2024, we saw AI-generated robocalls impersonating former President Joe Biden telling voters to stay home (and millions did). In the next cycle, we may see entire election campaigns waged by AI bots masquerading as voters, influencers, and even public officials.
U.S. President Donald Trump, during the 2024 election campaign, reposted a fake AI image of Taylor Swift endorsing him, over her objection; many believed she’d become a Trump supporter. As the Carnegie Endowment for Peace noted:
Meanwhile, deepfake audio clips of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Slovakia’s opposition head, Michal Šimečka, ignited social media controversies when they spread rapidly before fact-checkers exposed them as fabrications. The destructive power of deepfakes also hit home in Türkiye when a presidential candidate withdrew from the May 2023 election after explicit AI-generated videos went viral. In Argentina’s October 2023 presidential election, both leading candidates deployed deepfakes by creating campaign posters and materials that mocked their opponents—tactics that escalated into full-blown AI memetic warfare to sway voters.
The goal often isn’t just to win; it’s to delegitimize the democratic process itself. Because once trust is broken—once people believe that “both sides lie” or that “you can’t believe anything anymore”—then strongmen step into the void with promises of order, purity, and salvation.
And when they do, AI will be there to enforce it.
Imagine a future where police departments outsource their decision-making to “neutral” algorithms, algorithms coded with the biases of their creators like Elon Musk is doing by training Grok on Xitter. Where AI-driven systems deny permits, benefits, or even due process based on behavioral profiles. Where loyalty to the regime is rewarded with access, and dissent is flagged by invisible systems you can’t appeal.
That’s not democracy. That’s techno-feudalism, wrapped in a red-white-and-blue flag.
It’s already happening in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, the Philippines, and Thailand, according to the Carnegie Endowment. They add:
In the E.U.’s Eastern neighborhood, countries like Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine face a deluge of hybrid threats and AI-generated disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing societies, disrupting electoral processes, and derailing people’s democratic aspirations.
If we allow the far-right to continue merging political power with AI without guardrails, we will see the rise of a system where freedom is algorithmically rationed.
Elections will still happen, but outcomes will be massaged. Dissent will still exist, but only in controlled pockets, easy to monitor and suppress. History books will be written, edited, and distributed by code optimized for obedience. The “news” will be whatever the regime’s AI decides you should see.
This is not science fiction. It is the logical endpoint of unregulated, authoritarian-aligned artificial intelligence.
So what do we do?
We must treat AI regulation as a democratic survival issue. That means:
- Banning the use of deepfakes in political ads.
- Enforcing transparency on algorithmic decision-making.
- Creating unbiased public, open-source alternatives to corporate-controlled models.
- Creating disinformation infrastructure as we would biological or nuclear weapons that are not just dangerous, but potentially civilization-ending.
- Demanding that social media outlets publish their algorithms so we can see how we’re being manipulated.
And we must do it now.
Because history teaches us that once authoritarianism takes root, it rarely gives up power voluntarily. The longer we wait, the more embedded, autonomous, and intelligent these systems become. We’re not just fighting bad actors anymore: We’re fighting machines trained to think like them.
The battle for democracy in the age of AI will not be won with slogans or optimism alone. It will take law, oversight, courage—and above all, vigilance. As always, democracy is not a spectator sport. If we want to preserve the sacred right of self-governance, we must recognize the existential threat in front of us and act with urgency.
This time, the fight isn’t just against the usual suspects.
This time, the algorithm is watching.
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Your Designated Sports Break From Trumpalooza
Here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Then it’s time to get back in the game and face down the bullies.
May 10, 2025
If the overwhelming deluge from the Trumpian firehose of lies, threats, incompetency, illegal actions, and surreality is sweeping you off your feet, driving you to bedridden depression, leaving you passive and breathlessly unable to mount a response, much less resistance, please get into the huddle, take a time-out, and listen up to your Jock Culture coach. (That’s me, of course!)
You need some distraction.
Have you noticed lately how few sports stories are making their way to the top of the news beams? That’s because sports—once upon a time our most reliable source of outrage; speculation; cultish behavior; and lessons in domination, smackdown intimidation, and faux masculinity—has been replaced by a remarkable series of presidential half-time horror shows. It’s now all Trumpiana all the time.
Sports, after all, initially evolved as a bastion of fair play, and even its sometimes questionable interpretations of class and honor are hardly major aspects of Trumpiana.
We need to get back to sports. So here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Of course, since only he truly sells in this numbed media moment of ours, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that we’ll need sports stories with Trumpian subtexts.
Number One: How did some high school athletes suddenly get so rich? There are million-dollar quarterbacks lining up at the NIL pay window waiting to start their freshman year in college. In case you don’t already know it, NIL stands for name, image, and likeness—from which sports gear companies, universities, and the college sports ruling body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), have traditionally profited enormously, even though those athletes were prohibited from benefiting commercially. But in 2021, a series of state court judgements led to a unanimous Supreme Court decision that lifted the ban and it was suddenly pay-off time for “student-athletes.”
It all seems fair enough, although the new system is evolving with shady deals in which colleges and their boosters help organize “collectives” to recruit teenage high school athletes with the promise of booty that ranges from extra shoes to millions of dollars.
The top 20 money-making college athletes are bona fide millionaires, while the average starting pay-off for the top 100 is $583,000. University of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders, son of the former National Football League star Deion Sanders, leads the list with an estimated $4.7 million.
The Transfer Portal
Boosting the growing transactional nature of “amateur” sports is the newly installed “transfer portal,” a computerized system that makes it easier for college athletes to switch schools without having to sit out a season. Money may well change hands there, too.
So far, the Trumpsters have seemed more than okay with all this, but there could be a future glitch. While the current major beneficiaries are the expectables—football and basketball players—let’s welcome crowd-pleasing gymnast Sam Phillips, the first University of Nebraska athlete to come out as gay, now performing at the University of Illinois. Could this turn out to be a rainbow flag for the homophobic Trumpniks? Will they say nil to NIL (at least if it goes to the “wrong” people)? Stay tuned.
Number Two: Even though they’re a microscopic percentage of the varsity athletic population, transgender jocks have been getting an inordinate amount of attention lately, most of it grimly malevolent.
President Donald Trump’s order barring transgender girls and women from playing on women’s teams at federally funded educational institutions, even if followed, will have little effect on overall sports participation. Symbolically, of course, as The Nation sports editor Dave Zirin points out,
Diverse teams can help communities and families stop seeing marginalized people as an “other” and start seeing them as part of the same whole. Sports at its best can challenge the hate constantly generated by the right-wing media machine.
There are certainly reasonable arguments against situations in which trans athletes might physically overwhelm cis-athletes, but the climate is simply too charged right now for a reasonable discussion. This may just have to wait for Trump to be cut from the team.
Number Three: When I started writing about sports in the late 1950s, two of the premier American ones were boxing (the sweet science) and thoroughbred horse racing (the sport of kings). Both were romanticized, distinctly corrupt enterprises run by oligarchs and gangsters on the backs of poor boys and animals. They did well when they produced superstars (Muhammad Ali or Secretariat) but faded in the 21st century. Since then, football and mixed martial arts have provided more reliably entertaining violence, while state lotteries supplanted parimutuel betting as a way to tantalize the desperate with pie-in-the-sky jackpots. Pro wrestling (if you consider it a sport at all) is the only athletic entertainment that comes to mind as more truly Trumpish.
Horse racing is barely hanging on, mostly thanks to influential rich folks (including Arab oligarchs) who own and breed the best horses and the rentable state governments that provide subsidies for the sport. Boxing and horse racing seem to exist mostly to offer some of the saddest sights in sports: punch-drunk former prizefighters without pensions or health coverage and drug-abused horses killed on the track after breaking down in a race. Putting down both sports would be merciful.
The Spread
Number Four: Sixty-odd years ago, at Madison Square Garden, covering my first pro basketball game, I was mystified when the crowd began cheering for the visiting team. At least theoretically, these were, after all, rabid New York Knicks fans.
“Don’t they want their team to win?” I asked the seasoned reporter sitting next to me in the press box.
“It’s the spread,” he replied all too casually.
That was the beginning of the end of whatever innocence I had when it came to big-time commercial sports.
As that seasoned reporter, visibly amused by my naiveté, then explained, the point spread is the predicted margin of victory by the favored team in any given game. If the bookies have established that the favorite is expected to win by, say, 10 points, you could bet on the underdog to lose by less than 10, and be a winner. On the night of my tutorial, those in the audience who bet against the spread could have had a double victory, since the Knicks actually won the game, while their opponents lost by fewer points than predicted and so won the spread.
In those days, except in Las Vegas, sports betting was illegal and considered a threat to the game. Most legitimate newspapers avoided any mention of odds, and the professional leagues they covered inveighed against gambling as an existential danger. In highly publicized examples, they punished players caught betting, even stars, not to mention retired superstars working as greeters for gambling casinos.
At the same time, the sports world constantly flirted with gambling, offering odds disguised as informed predictions and, for a dozen years, a gambler, Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder, was featured on a TV football show until he was fired for claiming that Black athletes excelled because of how they had been bred during slavery (and that the only jobs left for whites in sports were as coaches).
All such hypocritical righteousness seems quaint in these Trumpalooza days as professional leagues, including the National Football League, promote their “official” gambling sites, while betting on games is acknowledged as an intrinsic element of fandom (as, in truth, it always has been). No gambling, no sports. Bet on it!
The Summer Games
Number Five: In March, President Trump established the 2026 FIFA World Cup Task Force, made up of the usual suspects (Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, and Marco Rubio), perhaps to reassure his followers that the gang will indeed all be there when soccer’s major event is held in the United States, especially should the Trumpunks decide to use a classic soccer match to lure immigrants to an abduction party.
Meanwhile, this country seems like an ever less welcoming place for the rest of the world’s favorite sport. As Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins has pointed out, the United States may be anything but a safe haven for international athletes (not to speak of so many Americans). After all, should some foreigner get a little too fast or strong, maybe he or she could be checked for drugs, chromosomes, or challenging thoughts, and sent to a maximum security locker room.
And while we’re worrying (all too justifiably) about the World Cup next year, don’t forget that the U.S. will be hosting the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
Number Six: The New York Yankees are growing hair. When the team played for owner George Steinbrenner, self-ordained as “The Boss,” a blustering, narcissistic bully and liar who was considered a mentor to the young Donald Trump, no moustaches, beards, or hair below the collar were allowed. The son of a shipping magnate from Cleveland, Steinbrenner postured as a standard-bearer for masculine American values. Why did working-class guys buy that?
As a New York Times sportswriter covering Steinbrenner, I was bewildered walking on the street with him when construction workers and cabbies hailed him warmly as a man of the people. They loved the way he bossed those jocks around. In retrospect, it was a portent of the authoritarian cultism around Trump—the urge for people who feel weak or marginalized to embrace a tyrant.
George’s son, Hank, a milder man who avoids the spotlight, runs the team now. His decision this year to allow Yankee players to grow hair where they pleased was generally applauded. Still, maybe George wasn’t as bad as I once imagined. After all, he had only one felony conviction compared to his mentoree’s 34. Steinbrenner’s involved illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential election campaign and, yes, President Ronald Reagan pardoned him.
The Draft
Number Seven: The opening of the NFL season is months away, but the recent draft of rookie players cracked through Trump’s curtain of sound for a day or so, reinforcing pro football as America’s 21st-century pastime. The biggest newsflash was that Shadeur Sanders, the $4-million-dollar NIL player, wasn’t taken in the first round. Football executives evidently found him too brash and self-promoting, possibly overrated, and too… dare I say it?… Trumpish.
I’ve never forgotten that the first time I met Donald Trump, as a CBS “Sunday Morning” correspondent in the 1980s, he lied to me about pro football. He owned a pro team back then, the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League (USFL), which played during the NFL’s offseason. Many people thought the USFL was a conspiracy to force the NFL into a merger or to get several of its teams into the league. That would have been important to Trump, then still a minor-league real-estate magnate from Queens, pushing his dream of making it into the major leagues, the New York City market.
When I interviewed him about that, he swore such a merger wasn’t on his mind. Later that week, he emerged as the principal plaintiff in an antitrust suit against the NFL. It was the kind of early lesson that people like me didn’t learn. We were too smart for that buffoon, right?
Number Eight: Maybe the best that can be said about the “manosphere,” that trendy Trumpian hodge-podge of websites, podcasts, online forums, and blogs promoting misogyny and the false masculinity of “bro culture,” is the relatively small role sports seems to play in it. Sports, after all, initially evolved as a bastion of fair play, and even its sometimes questionable interpretations of class and honor are hardly major aspects of Trumpiana.
Early on, the president touted himself as a good high school baseball player, but when his further posturing as a championship superstar was mostly ignored, he seemed to lose interest in promoting his athleticism, except in bed.
The anti-feminism of Trump’s base has always been predicated on the understanding that once women achieved equality, much less equity with men, the game would be over for the mediocre male. And yet current laments about boys and men losing out to women in educational and employment competition obscure the fact that men, particularly white men, still rule the roost. Trumpy attacks on liberals often emphasize their womanly “weakness.” The tough-talking handmaids in the president’s cabinet are borderline cartoonish.
As it turns out, one of the most consistent opponents of Trumpian anti-feminism is 60-year-old former football player and long-time activist Jackson Katz. He’s sounded his particular call to action in a book, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue.
He recently told Ammar Kalia of The Guardian: “We can’t tell boys that bullying is bad and then equally reward bullies like Trump in power. There’s a lot of fear in the face of a right-wing populist government, but we need men to loudly oppose him, otherwise real people will be harmed. We’re living in a different world now, and it’s urgent.”
It’s urgent indeed, and this has been enough of a distraction. So, suit up and get your game face on. Do something. Donald Trump is beatable if you keep your eye on the ball and don’t pull your punches.
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