That nationalism is the new state doctrin? Foreigners are inferior by definition, so they cannot really help with research anyway, all they want to do is steal secrets. If you think like that, then it makes sense.
The US is definitely undergoing authoritarian tendencies, but it remains structurally constrained by separation of powers, federalism, and independent courts and media, features that fascist regimes systematically dismantle.
If you start calling everything fascism you are essentially helping those you call fascists because they can easily refute your thesis and gaslight you on the very realities of the authoritarian descent the country is going through.
I honestly don't understand US politicians. In my country politicians have egos the size of mountains- they would never let themselves be sidelined.
Democracy is not an on/off light bulb, it's a material under constant stress that can bend a lot before breaking.
But if you start calling it broken, while it's bending your thesis is easily refutable and you get called out for being a radical whatever.
Okay, but that's beating around the bush and a very milquetoast way to describe it.
> easily refutable and you get called out for being a radical whatever.
This is equivalent to being punched repeatedly by a bully and being scared that he'll cry "assault!" when you punch him back. At some point, you cease to exist if you don't act.
I agree that US is not fascist yet, the hierarchy isn't set, and the economy isn't close to an extractive autarky, but philosophically, it's close, don't you think? I mean, ranting against traitors all the time is to me a very, very big point in favor of this being fascism.
It's their neighbors, not the "deep state". Renee Good and Alex Pretti were the enemy within. People in inflatable costumes or pussy hats are the enemy within. Uppity kids in high school who get thrown to the drown and put in a choke hold. People filming ice on public streets. They are the enemy within to MAGA. It isn't distant and abstract. It's personal.
And the "enemy of the people", rhetoric, and the vermin that corrupts the nation’s blood. I mean, these people are not exactly subtle.
But the Trump administration (a.k.a. the executive branch) is trying to systematically dismantle these things. When people refer to fascism in the U.S. government, they don’t mean the entire government. They mean the Trump administration, which is the face of the U.S. government, has a great deal of the share of power, and is seeking more. The brand of far right nationalism, that the nation is in decline and violence must be used to restore it, along with the economic policies and deference to corporations and the wealthy, are things that make them more fascist than just authoritarian.
Saying that we cannot call it fascism until the transformation is complete doesn’t make sense - if a group of people have beliefs and goals that align with fascism, and are taking steps to impose them, you can call them fascist, even if they have not yet realized the full set of conditions that make the government fully fascist.
On a different level I've been unsure whether it'sgood to call it facsism. But it's effectively at least a stepchild.
Ok, but who is calling everything fascism? He's talking about one particular country at a particular time.
So, rhetorical question: was Hitler a fascist during the failed Munich coup? Or did he suddenly became one when he was appointed chancellor? Are we not allowed to see what’s in front of our eyes until they build gas chambers?
I'm European, and from my point of view:
- despite the current executive and its lackeys clearly stating they were going to do exactly what's happening (the dismantling of institutions, the violent, word-wise, targeting of any criticism, the tariffs, etc).
- despite the open attack to US democracy on January 6th 2021
Americans voted for all of this to happen.
What's happening isn't exposing a fault in a particular individual, that's way too convenient.
Not only they voted all of this, but keep believing this paranormal constitutional nonsense where winner-takes-all elections where you rule under no oversight, you have no opposition, and don't even depend on your own party support is actually a sane democratic system.
Of all the countries that slid in authoritarianism during the last 4 decades (from the Philippines to Russia, from Nicaragua to Belarus, etc) not one was a parliamentary republic.
All of them, literally all, where presidential republics.
Honestly I’ve been filled schadenfreude with as the American civic religion collapse. Even the right is giving it up as they view it as too obstructionist.
The silver lining in all this is that the American people might come out a bit less retarded. It’s been fascinating to see the explosion of political thought amongst Americans in the last few years.
I don't buy it, after January 6th and Trump getting re-elected, despite everything it will have to get much much worse before there's a conscious change.
The hypocrisy doesn't matter to them because it isn't (and never was) about the "ideals" of the Constitution, it is about punishing enemies.
That's why they get so upset at the elected veterans that did a simple video saying "the law says you must disobey unlawful orders," the reason that such a statement is viewed literally as "treasonous" and worthy of "hanging" according to Trump.
Using the law to restrict those in power goes against their fundamental understanding of law. There is no hypocrisy, just a completely different view of what is criminal: namely the other guys are all criminals.
We did. And if anyone would stop to actually analyze it, instead of just insinuating that we're all yucky poopooheads for doing so (in the futile attempt to shame us into stopping), they might come to understand why. Whatever the alternative is to how we're voting, as exemplified by Europe, we don't want it. Maybe there are more options besides those two, but no one's offered those or even described what they could be. Europe certainly hasn't.
>not one was a parliamentary republic.
And thank god that we're not one then. We'd truly be hopeless.
Fascism cannot exist without internal enemies, nationalist authoritarianism can. If your president/dictator is whining about internal enemies that infiltrated the government and capitalist society to bring it down, congratulation, it's not simple nationalist authoritarian tendencies, it's fascist tendencies.
Basically: if you add an "interior enemy" narrative to a right-wing authoritarism, you have fascism.
I think you misunderstand fascism. Fascism is not gassing certain minority group of people in concentration camps, that's called crimes against humanity. It might be an endgame to fascism if you are government that is allowed to commit those crimes without consequences, but the road to it is still fascism regardless whether you historically know how it ends. Calling press "the enemy of the people" as Trump did (also known as "Lügenpresse") IS a form of fascism. You don't need to push Democrats and immigrants into gas chambers to be full blown fascist. Overwhelming amount of actions taken by this democratic government ARE what most historians call fascism.
I think you're projecting.
Fascism, in political science, has some clear requirements: a government that controls all branches of power, lack of elections and effective ban of free speech and other political parties.
It also requires ideological aspects such as nationalism and far right politics, otherwise fascism would apply to far left dictatorships which didn't have these traits.
You really going to say that Trump and his Administration does not control all branches of power?
During Third Reich neither press was banned nor elections. Look it up, Google is still free to research. Unless of course you want to endup at conclusion that Nazism and Third Reich wasn't fascism.
That must be why the Supreme Court struck down the primary piece of Trump's economic agenda.
It’s ridiculous, but it’s OK. Because we have other ways, numerous other ways,” the president said. “The numbers can be far greater than the hundreds of billions we’ve already taken in.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/business/supreme-court-tr...
The thing is, fascism has always been a bit of a loose term. It doesn't have a strict meaning. It was invented by one guy to name his government, not describe it analytically.
Mussolini invented the word "fascismo" to describe his movement, Fasci Italiani di Combattimeto.
So any use of "fascism" outside this one instance is by loose comparison to his government (because tight comparison would inevitably be unproductive: no government is exact the same as another).
The best we can do in a literalist manner is identify that the etymology is related to fasces, a bundle of rods tied together in Roman times (tying rods together make them far more difficult to snap in half), and recognize that the implication here is that a fascist government is focused on strength through unity.
It was then broadly adopted by Mussolini's adherents.
So, unless we only want to restrict "fascist" to an identifier for Mussolini's party and government, we have motivation to come up with elements of similar politics/government/partisanship by looking at the elements that made up Mussolini's movement:
- nationalism
- right-wing
- totalitarian
- violence as a means of control
etc.
Personally, I like Umberto Eco's delineation of what makes fascism (because he was an intellectual and grew up in Mussolini's Italy): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
He elucidates fourteen elements that make up fascism:
1. cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. cult of action for its own sake (i.e., intellectual reflection doesn't contribute value)
4. disagreement is treason
5. fear of difference
6. appeal to frustrated middle class
7. obsession with a plot (e.g., "there is a plot by foreigners to destroy us from within)
8. cast their enemies as both too weak and too strong
9. life is permanent warfare (i.e., there is always an enemy to fight)
10. contempt for the weak
11. everyone is educated to become a hero
12. machismo
13. selective populism
14. newspeak
I honestly feel like #11 is the only one we don't definitely have in the US right now. I wold prefer not to waste my time giving examples of the other thirteen, but if someone doesn't think it's obvious, I will respond at some point.
At its essence, if you take these fourteen points holistically, the vibe is "the 'right kind of' citizenry is in a constant state of hatred toward some other, and they should be pressured to take action without thought"
I think this framework really just describes "tribalism", and not specifically "fascism".
But you can really say that “disagreement is treason” means the same thing in fascism and in “the left”? Are you saying, for e.g., that unions and universities execute dissenters as a matter of course? “Fear of difference” under fascism means that differences you can’t control put your life at permanent risk. In the context of tribalism, it means being embarrassed.
So there’s really no comparison between a conservative feeling left out under liberalism to a minority feeling at risk under fascism.
See, this is where I disagree. You can argue that many of these things are "actually happening", but doing so often requires stretching the definitions of these things, or conflating speech with action.
Take your example: I see all sorts of instances where folks on the right have accused others of treason, but there's a significant lack of actual charges. You're conflating rhetoric with action. Rhetoric is dangerous, yes, but the rhetoric we see from the right is just the next escalation in a constant game of escalating rhetoric from both sides.
I mean, calling Republicans "fascists" and "nazis" isn't exactly nonviolent rhetoric, either, especially the latter. There are actual fascists and Nazis among Republicans, for sure, but they don't represent anything close to a majority. There are fascists among Democrats, too!
The rest of your comment is just another great example of inflammatory rhetoric that isn't really representative of a reality that exists outside your own head, unfortunately.
I'd like to hear your rationale for that. In the meantime, I'll add my comments on those points. But first, let me set a ground rule for myself: this review covers the political left in the United States. A circle of thinkers with no sway over the government isn't considered for whether the left matches the qualities of a fascist government. If that circle does have sway, then sure.
>1. cult of tradition
I cannot think of a tradition the left holds in nearly religious sanctity. This might be a "fish can't see the water" thing, so I'd be happy to learn one.
>3. cult of action for its own sake (i.e., intellectual reflection doesn't contribute value)
You didn't list this one, but I will. The left is prone to subgroups fracturing off and calling for extreme reactions (e.g. "defund the police"), and then not strongly quashing these dumb ideas. I think it's a bias to being inclusive and not wanting to deny anything that comes from an oppressed person. Noble intent, but doesn't always lead down the best path.
>4. disagreement is treason
I think you're conflating "cancel culture" with accusations of treason. Trump has literally accused people disagreeing with him of treason ("Air strikes on drug smugglers is illegal, and you should refuse to do so"). Has a modern Democratic official accused somebody of being treasonous for disagreeing on a political matter?
>5. fear of difference
If anything, the left defaults to celebrating difference. And no, "fear of MAGA" is not enough to qualify as fear of difference.
>6. appeal to frustrated middle class
Yes. Everyone does that these days, but yes. It almost seems like a pointless quality to isolate, because any political party would appeal to middle class frustrations. Maybe the better way is to offer hope. In that case, both parties could do a lot better.
>7. obsession with a plot (e.g., "there is a plot by foreigners to destroy us from within)
The left is sliding down this path with fears about the midterm elections. To be fair, after the 2020 election, Trump did spread lies, prepared slates of fake electors, got Republican representatives to vote against counting voters from certain states, and instigated what ended up being a violent assault on the electoral certification. So it's not as crazy as "Democrats are busing in illegals to vote."
>8. cast their enemies as both too weak and too strong
Democratic officials have called this administration dumb, selfish, and cruel. But not weak.
>9. life is permanent warfare (i.e., there is always an enemy to fight)
After the assassination of Osama bin Laden, who was the enemy during the Obama years? That administration even had the laughable "reset" with Russia.
>11. everyone is educated to become a hero
I can't think of much evidence for or against this. Maybe it's just an American thing to lavish praise on "common people* doing amazing things. Neither party truly praises a humble life, despite mentioning it to cloak bad economic policy in "salt of the earth" rags.
>13. selective populism
I'll have to read the original work to see what this term means.
>14. newspeak
I genuinely would like to know some leftist newspeak. Again, fish and water.
There are a lot of reactionaries in today's political landscape.
I don't think it really fits, but the US is sliding towards illiberal democracy.
Ur-Fascism describes the ideology of MAGA exactly. Clearly there's some apprehension admitting this, it's a strong-man political ideology that has evolved many times organically throughout history. It doesn't necessarily imply that the regime is bad or evil or anything but the problem ends up being that the term exists because governments that adopt this ideology end up converging on the same unsavory behaviors despite any initial differences. That convergence is I think what a lot of Americans are afraid of because we're already doing most of them.
EDIT: Illiberalism is a tenet of fascism as well.
So yes, the US has enough of the hallmarks to be considered a fascist state. It doesn't need to tick every single box for that title.
Edit from Wikipedia: Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement that rose to prominence in early-20th-century Europe.[1][2][3] Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[3][4] Opposed to communism, democracy, liberalism, pluralism, and socialism,[5][6] fascism is at the far-right of the traditional left–right spectrum.[1][6][7] What constitutes a precise definition of fascism has been a longrunning and complex debate among scholars.
First, it's very fuzzy. You don't have to have all aspects, but many aspects are present in many systems without it being outright fascist.
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Is 5 out of 14 enough to make something fascist? Are "Appeal to a frustrated middle class", "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as 'at the same time too strong and too weak'", "Newspeak" and "Obsession with a plot" enough?
I think it confuses rhetorical devices like "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as 'at the same time too strong and too weak'" and "Newspeak" as hallmarks of Fascism when they are just a tool.
George Orwell famously pointed that calling things "fascist" and "Nazi" is in itself an example of Newspeak, because it's not used to describe a government system that is far-right, authoritarian, and extremely xenophobic, but it's used as a label to say something is Bad™.
It also confuses its populist roots and enemies at the time. "The cult of action for action's sake," and especially anti-intellectualism.
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Like take Starship Troopers, an extremely fascistic society. Let's score it on Eco's scale. It definitely has "Rejection of Modernism", "Disagreement is treason", "Cult of action", "Fear of Difference", "Life is Warfare", "Everybody is a hero", and "Newspeak". So 7/14.
- Cult of tradition doesn't exist that much per se. Granted, I could have missed it.
- Appeal to the frustrated middle class; as far as we see, there isn't one .
- Obsession with plot isn't really a thing, because the Bugs aren't really a plot; they are a clear and present danger. The internal enemies if any aren't mentioned.
- Casting enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." Bugs are shown more or less realistically, they are a difficult enemy that can be defeated.
- "Selective populism". It's not so much selective populism as state enforced labor to gain citizenship.
- "Contempt for the weak" there isn't much out-group to belong to. The Terran Federation covers the globe, and almost everyone is a citizen. There isn't any contempt for underlings, even if there are military cross branch out-groups. Like real world counterparts jarheads, squids and wingnut.
- If Machismo exists, it's mutated to cover both sexes.
Granted, I might have missed a few, but still, shouldn't Eco's 14 traits light up more for a more fascistic society?
You can still speak against him, as far as I can tell. Compare this to, say, Mao Zedong. If you spoke against him, your life was forfeit, and even that's not fascism.
If this is one of those fuzzy definitions, it definitely isn't on the strong side. Where is the rampant militarism, the worship of death, and of the military?
ICE budget increases.
NG deployed domestically several times.
Renaming DoD to DoW.
Invasion of ~2 sovereign nations
See: the recent events in Minneapolis and the massive increase in funding for ICE. You don't have to look very hard to see what the new brownshirts are doing in blue cities and the MAGAs covering for them.
Oh also the federalization of the National Guard and US Marine deployment to Los Angeles. Things move quickly and people forget but that's exactly their playbook: flooding the zone with so much shit that it's hard to keep track.
ICE
I'm having a hard imagining Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or Italy, to name a few countries of the countries from which scientists have come to work on NIST projects putting these kind of restrictions on American scientists coming to work on non-classified research at their labs.
Did the advances they helped spur actually maximize opportunities for native born people in the long run?
Would we be better off if we had blocked them from researching in the US?
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy. [0]
I use "reasoning" in the broadest possible sense.
Is that really something in need of explaining on a hacker site?
(Or were you ironic? I cannot tell anymore)
Trump's first and current wife are foreign-born. VP's wife was born to immigrants. So, WTF? Republicans never make any sense.
Take COVID for example. We were fine with minor breakouts prior to Trump administration. They came in and Trump saw we are spending $3.7 million on safety measures in Wuhan Lab, fund designated by Obama (here comes first red flag right?) By his standard you could not SEE the protection so he wanted to look like Champion and save tax payers 3.7 million by removing that protection. We all know what came next and boy was damage more financially painful than mere 3.7 mil?
Its like a person who doesn't wear a seat belt because they never been in a car accident so they don't see the point. If given power they would remove mandates to wear seatbelts and have insurance companies deal with the outcome.
This isn't a surprise when religious conservatism enters a traditional marriage with oligarchic conservatism¹. This is more a classical case of "you keep them stupid, while we keep them poor". If even the Enlightenment is a heresy (Burke e.a), you will have to spin the clock back.
But you can't have your cake and eat it too, so the US will become closer to an Afghanistan, led by increasingly unruly lunatics and warlords. Women's rights, scientific progress, educated people with agency; it's all a threat. The conservative rage becomes violent because what it wants and believes conflicts with reality, so they have to smash that all down, including the progress.
Yes, they rather burn society down than to lose control. That is hard to grasp for decent people, so you see an endless stream of opinions trying and failing to come up with a constructive rationale, but when you can understand that there is a class of people with a non-constructive default mode like the rest of us, things will be much easier to understand.
The book banning has been going on for several years, and now we are in the escalation phase. The resent about women's rights, persecution² of transgenders, harassment of universities and scientists, in short: the Gleichschaltung³, should not be a surprise and has little to do with show- and stuntman Trump. It is unruly conservatism coming to its ultimate conclusion, confronted with shrinking religious control, with results of zero sum economics, with a shrinking voter base, with all gerry-mandering options exploited, and ultimately with having thrown away democracy. The clock is being turned back.
__
1. This is the original definition of conservatism, to "conserve" the status quo of a very small class of owners versus large masses of poor people.
I've tried reviewing online archives of German books/newspapers but it's obviously very time consuming. The large LLM:s don't seem to index this area sufficiently.
Jewish/socialist physicists:atomic weapons::”foreign“ AI scientists:automated targeting
I’m not looking forward to the loss of innocence of computer science that is parallel to that of physics from 1945 onward, but here we are.
I don't think that's entirely valid. Nonetheless, there is enough overlap that the question keeps getting raised.
So... perhaps that's what you're missing?
I would guess most if not all. Bezos is the only one who I imagine might not have had detailed discussions. Musk was completely in the grasp of Putin, though that seems to have changed in the past month with the sudden change of heart and disablement of Russian military starlink inside Ukraine. Apparently it was implemented in a single day, and SpaceX staff was confused by the sudden change in heart. That is still consistent with Putin playing Musk like a puppet earlier when they had direct conversations.
I think there are a confluence of reasons for this behavior, and I while I think that foreign influence can't explain it all, it would explain a huge chunk.
Unless you're ready to switch the entire thing off.
The public statements from Ukraine from day zero don't agree with your perspective.
Notes:
This is not the mindset of all MAGA but it's a difficult exercise for most thoughtful engineers to try to live in that mind space for a while. It's a very different world, and I can only do it because I have many conversations with family members to draw on.
The age of counter productive selfishness which escalates to national and international politics.
More problematic than my own ridicule is what this will portend for US science and the US for leading science research. We must fight to keep the US a destination for cutting edge science and research and one way to do that is to attract the best and brightest from all parts of the globe.
It mades all the sense in the world. It is terrible, but it makes sense.
They have brought incalculable shame and future suffering on the US.
Racism and Christian Nationalism
There isn’t much rationality since then.
I will answer this question honestly. I used to be friends with a group of PhD students work worked in labs. Every week I heard their complaints. One relayed a story in which a Chinese lab mate / co-worker was refusing to following their boss (PI) directions or request, and shared secret results with another Chinese student in a competing lab.
- Their boss (the PI) had asked the Chinese student to train other labmates on some specific testing methods, they refused.
- The Chinese PhD student would simply ignore the PI emails.
- Then magically their study results end up leaked to another Chinese PhD candidate.
Chinese PhD types can 'buy' their way into labs. They have so much money no one wants to turn them away. Only the government can force it.
Most people have no idea what day-to-day life is actually like in PhD life / labs. It's a lot less "science" and way more "human drama" than you could imagine.
> Chinese PhD types can 'buy' their way into labs. They have so much money no one wants to turn them away.
The way it works in the US is that labs pay the PhD students, not the other way around. I have never heard of a student paying the lab, ever.
I think this makes sense from a national security perspective (although I doubt there is any scientist coming from these countries who are working on sensitive projects, maybe except China). Since there is too much trouble to figure out who is a spy, might as well ban all of them for the moment.
I do feel a strong nostalgia about the globalization era between the 90s and the 2010s, when I spent most of my life. But I understand it comes to an end, and I'm going to spend my second half of life in a much more splintered world.
I can understand a clearly communicated need for additional security requirements. But NIST operates almost totally in open science mode, with the main exceptions of being industry cooperative agreements. I don’t think this move to shed international researchers by reneging on commitments from the lab has been at all justified from a security standpoint.
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
In other words: they're also looking to bar foreign nationals outside of that quoted list, which to my mind is less understandable.
> The changes are part of proposed rules aimed at increasing security that would limit, to 3 years, the maximum length of time visiting international researchers can work at NIST.
If researchers know that they cannot stay in the US permanently and will be forced to return to their home country in a few years, it guarantees that they must maintain ties to that home country and dramatically increases their incentive to spy. What would you do if your government asked you to spy during a temporary stay abroad, and threatened you with arrest upon your return if you refuse?
A better plan would be to encourage skilled immigration and offer compelling benefits and stability like family visas, free movement, and so on. That way, the best people would make their contributions to science and society here. It’s actually a masterstroke because it deprives other countries of their best people.
The current administration is filled with weak men and therefore chose policies that look “strong” but are actually rooted in personal insecurity
As a side note (tangentailly related) I wonder if the US would have gained nuclear capabilities if it wasn't for foreign scientists.
Does it? AFAIK NIST doesn't work on national security relevant research.
Just feels like side effects of poorly thought out rules from above.
How many Taiwanese, German, Indian, French, South Korean, etc scientists are working in the US? The ones working at NIST are facing being pushed out at the end of September.
The CPC political are the old centre-right PC party that combined with more right secessionist and (evangelical) Christian political parties.
Harper is still lurking in the shadows and pulling strings decade after being ousted as Prime Minister.
I don't know how long ago the library of Alexandria was burned down. But what I do know is that we never learn the lesson. It's rather stupid to store public research data (i.e, excluding classified info) at a single location. There are any number of unpredictable future scenarios that can lead to this same unfortunate outcome.
Scientists and politicians should work together and agree to store and host such research data in multiple countries, including with rival nations. That should make it a lot more resilient against such eventualities. It won't cause any security risk. After all, you were going to publish it anyway. Why waste the information worth a lot of money and effort?
But instead of that, many governments and greedy corporations go after independent groups who do exactly that - scihub and internet archive, for example. We as a species possess the stupidity of stubbornly avoiding the obvious right path.
Do you mean he still has an impact or he is actively impacting things now?
And the bit about collusion with secessionists ... while be ultra nationalist - is conspiratorial and nonsensical.
That's my guess anyway.
And as a bonus upreme court practically ruled president can be lawless as he pleases.
SCOTUS: Nothing Trump does is illegal.
Trump: "does illegal things"
Courts: You can't do this, it is illegal.
Trump: "ignores courts"
Courts: "shocked pikachu face"
ICE came into Maine with almost 2000 "targets". They arrested about 200 people. They ended up bragging about 17 "bad guys", and even that list is possibly filled with lies.
Some of the 200 arrested that weren't actually immigrants include a brown man who passed a background check and flew to Texas recently to fulfill immigration requirements to work for our local Law Enforcement. It includes tons of people who are legal residents and had papers on their person to that effect. Those papers are often left behind when the person gets kidnapped, which includes an unmarked van filled with ICE nuts screeching in front of someone's SUV in city traffic, jumping out, breaking the window to the SUV, dragging the man out, and speeding off, leaving a still running SUV sitting in the middle of the street, with papers. A literal kidnapping scene from a movie, but sure, totally normal and upstanding law enforcement activity. Our own cops, not exactly liberals, are finding it hard not to publicly call them stupid assholes. These cops are mostly Trump voters.
Don't stick your head in the sand and cry when people point out how uninformed you are. Their entire operation is almost entirely false positives. They've sent people who live here legally to other countries without authority.
If the DNC has chosen this hill to die on, I don't think they're going to do anywhere as near good as they should do in November given Trump is engaging in some extremely unpopular and foolish behavior that people, again going beyond partisan lines, could easily rally together against.
Exactly that is happening in places ICE focuses on. Kawanaugh stops with, like, beating or multi day/week/months imprisonment are a thing.
With legal immigrants, strategy seems to be to hold them in as bad conditions as possible until they sign off own deportation.
A quick search [1] on this topic showed 50 people have been wrongfully detained. Even if we increase that figure substantially, it implies an extremely high success rate, which isn't really possible if you're just engaging in widespread fishing expeditions.
[1] - https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
Meanwhile, what do we have here is complete breakdown of legal process, judicial orders being ignored and agency that repeatedly provably lies about everything. Including about multiple murders. All the accuracies rates you listed are absolutely terrible for anything that wants to pretend rule if law matters.
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The article YOU listed shows: nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. 50 Americans detained for being latino and no other reasons. From 130 Americans detained for protesting, 50 had charges dropped or rejected by court. That is so far. These were simply abusive detentions.
These are horrible statistics. In a democratic rule of law country, a few journalists wont be able such frequent and routine abuse of power.
Why are we assuming either/both good faith and competence here? Is there anything about the policymaking of this administration that lends credence to that hypothesis? Are there pre-existing policy proposals you're imagining that have weighed pros and cons about this? Existing abuses you're imagining that this curtails?
No, let's be real here: this is yet another impulsive idea that some crank sold the president/cabinet on.
There is obviously a breakdown in either communication or understanding here. I have assumed neither good faith nor competence. On the contrary, the strategy I supposed above would be in bad faith and a symptom of incompetence.
Deporting researchers from every country to make it look like they aren't ethnically targetting people is in bad faith, and resorting to such measures instead of simply identifying and deporting the problematic individuals demonstrates their incompetence.
So even if the goal was to prevent chinese from spying on US companies, it's too little, decades too late, because China is now at the very top too.
I know a handful of folks who worked at them, and then found a more permanent position in the US.
If you mean internationally, there are some, mostly from Africa.
China spends a lot of money on international Chinese education. According to some , the top schools are now Chinese.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/06/18/...
Honestly the best thing about America, historically has been diversity. Mei can come here and become American within a few years. That’s only possible in America( and probably Canada too).
But now we don’t want international students. The world’s smartest will go elsewhere.
People were sold on that and many bought it. And now here we are living in the aftermath of us propping up systems incongruous to our own and living it down. It comes down to jockeying politicians like J Kerry and company who pretend they work for the people but in all honesty only work for themselves (remember Kerry never threw out his own war medals but rather reproductions he bought in the PX). Jane Fonda, her vanity sunk the nuclear energy industry for fifty years.
The first extreme begins with a true premise, but arrives at a false conclusion. The premise: as with manufacturing, the US should be minting more of its own scientists.
This is true. The US should have a more robust manufacturing base of its own. It should be educating more scientists.
However, the conclusion does not follow, namely, that the US should ban collaboration with, invitation, or employment of foreign scientists.
You don't build such things by going cold turkey. You cannot rebuild American manufacturing overnight, and you can't increase the number of home-grown scientists overnight either. This takes time and requires deeper shifts in the culture.
The second extreme is one that denies the premise above, or at least seems to deny its importance.
Collaboration with foreign scientists is good. That is unquestionable. There's also nothing wrong with attracting scientists. The problem is not collaboration or attracting talent, but rather a kind of parasitism that tries to make up for a country's own deficiencies in this manner as a permanent policy.
This is the sort of "high agency", not waiting for permission mentality that works great for a startup thats making tinder for cats, but is really bad for foundational institutions that provide a critical service to not just the nation but humanity in general. I feel like musk and his DOGE initiative infected the government with this move fast and break things bullshit. Or they were at least correlational with it
This was first reported at least a week or two ago and only now are they getting aroun dto thinking about making it an actual rule (which takes time and process). The rules that aren't really rules for plausible deniability serve several purposes including normalizing compliance in advance.
I'll set aside opinions of the rule because people can really feel differently about the long and short term balance of security and soft power...but not rule rules is an approach to government I really struggle to see both sides of.
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
> Sources at NIST contacted by ScienceInsider say they have yet to see any written versions of the proposed rules, which have been conveyed in meetings.
And:
> Many researchers from these countries—particularly China—have been informed that their lab access will be reviewed by 31 March, and terminated if they have been at NIST for more than 3 years or pose “too high a risk”
So, the high-risk limitation is actual, and affected researchers were already notified by NIST. While no low-risk limitations are mentioned by or attributable to NIST. That part appears to be hearsay and speculation confidently jammed into the headline.
I find that to be misleading. Bob should be ashamed of himself. I hope he can do better. It took me a single paragraph to more clearly reword the article, and I'm not a professional writer.
The word "could" seems to conflict with "It's all foreign guest researchers by end of September."
If you think that's what he meant, then it's clear that Bob has made things incredibly ambiguous since we disagree. Do you think he might have written the article, and especially the headline, in such a way as to make it more clickable?
I do.
I'm puzzled by autocrats beyond a certain limit. Their actions don't really seem to fit any logic, if their intention is to be become unchallengeable and unassailable. This seems like ceding the advantage to any future rivals.
I think I've now reached the point where it doesn't matter. Capitalism itself has made maintaining any kind of technological or scientific edge impossible. You don't need to break into some lab or plant sleeper agents or even coerce someone who has family back in the home country. No, it's far simpler than that.
When the US developed the atomic bomb some in American policy and military circles thought the Soviets would never get the bomb or it would take 20 years. It took 4. The Soviet hydrogen bomb was detonated th eyear after the US detonated ours.
In that case, the Soviets did run a sophisticated operations but also a bunch of people just gave them stuff for ideological reasons.
Let's compare that to EUV. The US restricted both the export of EUV lithography machines from ASML to China as well as the most advanced chips. The second was a mistake (IMHO) because it created a captive market for Chinese alternatives and it became clear to China that it was in their national security interest not to be dependent upon the US for chipmaking or chipsd.
Now China doesn't need to do anything sophisticated. It just needs to throw a bunch of money at some key reserarchers and engineers from ASML and elsewhere and say "hey, come work for us". What are you going to do?
Also, the US likes to paint this picture that China engaged in industrial espionage. And maybe they did. But they did so with the full knowledge and cooperation of US businesses who outsourced to China knowing this was going to happen but hey, it increased short-term profits, so who cares?
At the same time as the US cuts science funding so Jeff Bezos can be slightly wealthier, Chinese universities are surging in global rankings for research [1].
There's no getting this genie back in the bottle. It's too late.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/us/harvard-global-ranking...
Which was rather infamously not used in the actual research but was gatekept and used to verify the work of the domestic scientists.
At the same time as the US cuts science funding so Jeff Bezos can be slightly wealthier, Chinese universities are surging in global rankings for research [1].
This is the crux of the issue.
We've allowed extremely short term capitalistic interests of the wealthiest of the wealthiest to dictate our national policy in a great many areas, including taxation, academics, immigration, etc.
I liken the situation to a game of chess - on one hand, you have a team of Grandmasters and a supercomputer taking the time to evaluate each move and understand the positives and negatives of any possible move. On the other hand, you have a pigeon, who is there because someone who has already been the beneficiary of tremendous luck has convinced their side that putting a pigeon on the board is good for everyone involved.
Here to save our country from a communistic plot
Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks
To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks
Tons of American leaders and industrialists and what we would now call "Thought leaders" openly and proudly talked about how awesome Hitler was and how great the Nazis were for dealing with the jewish problem. This wasn't because nobody knew Hitler was a hateful and Bad guy, they were proudly declaring how important Mein Kampf was to them and how well it described the "problem"
Henry Ford bought a local newspaper so he could print the fabricated propaganda "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to an American audience. This is not a fucking joke, this is accepted history!
A decade later, Smedly Butler made credible accusations that several top Bankers had worked with the literal fucking Nazi party of Germany to overthrow FDR and install a Fascist government under Butler, because FDR was a communist or some bullshit. It was screamed and cried as a "Hoax" in the news at the time, but most historians agree that there was a conspiracy to do that, but it did not get close to execution.
These people only shut up when Germany finally declared open war against the US and started killing Americans and really only when the death camps became public knowledge and really turned some of america sour on the whole "The jews are the problem" thing.
But they never stopped hating. They continued their hate quietly, raising hateful kids and families, pushing local institutions to support hateful educations like "Slavery wasn't even that bad and the North was the aggressor in the Civil War" because they really are fine lying to your face. They fly the Confederate flag "for heritage" while they descend from french canadians in a northern state. They obsess over affirmative action "Taking up seats in top universities" as they actively avoid getting educated because education is a "Liberal propaganda" thing and meant to "brainwash" their hateful kids into being less stupid.
They build an entire alternative media ecosystem, going all the way back to Henry Ford's bullshit, and literally never ending, where THEY are always the victim, always suffering from oppression, always having a "War on christmas" or other horseshit for when their blatantly unconstitutional desires are shut down, or a business stops prostrating itself for them. They teach their kids that scientists are all part of a socialist satanic conspiracy to lie to them about everything from evolution to plate tectonics to (of course) global warming, and when that turns away supporters, they cover it up with a claim that science is all a fraud because the scientists want a "paycheck", as if there is any money in government funded science, because uneducated America is apparently so hard up and failing that a middling salary in a high pressure environment is considered worth selling your entire world for.
They attempted a coup on FDR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
It has been mostly whitewashed in favor of "the greatest generation" and the WW2 hero narrative.
Restricting foreign scientists here is yet another way we are paying for this whitewashing and romanticizing of US exceptionalism today.
There are enough "enemies of the people" in the US at the moment that the MAGA leadership doesn't have to go after American citizens.
There's been rhetoric about how some Americans are not "real americans" but America seems a way off 1934 yet, and they're going about it in a different order. History never repeats, but it usually rhymes
Yet still roughly half of America wants this.
Republican support has dropped 2 points in the last year.
Tell that to any trans person that is an American citizen. They are literally trying to make "trans" into a terrorist designation.
Tell that to the many Latino American citizens who have been arrested by masked armed ICE agents, thrown into unmarked cars and taken away simply because of the color of their skin.
The US hasn't reached the level of "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" or "Denaturalization Law" yet, although you can easily see it's on the cards. The Brownshirts were around over a decade before then
It is more than willing to implement its extreme nationalism via executive orders, regardless of what the law says.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-03-01/pdf/2024-0...
EO 14117 resulted in 6+ months of work for my team
I know the administration was already doing that and largely xenophobic, it just also makes sense now that the same administration went to war
unrelated nuance then yeah?
I think there are of course valid security concerns and this could be logical solution free of way more problematic issues of dealing on case by case basis.
On the other hand this will play more to people choosing some other country to advance their science aspiration and slowly but surely erode pool of talent for the US to help it stay dominant.
Practically the US have used people like Wernher von Braun on good scale and very sensitive areas and it worked just fine for the country. Qian Xuesen might of course have couple of words on the subject of course