The Continuum of Care Program exists to house people experiencing homelessness using proven, evidence-based solutions and strong local leadership. Yet, this NOFO introduces structural restrictions that contradict its stated purpose — capping permanent housing resources, weakening local decision-making, and threatening the stability of community response systems nationwide.
As many as 170,000 more people could be pushed into homelessness if these changes stand — not as an abstract number, but as real individuals, families, veterans, seniors, youth, and neighbors in every state who depend on CoC-funded housing and services to remain stably housed.
What this lawsuit means for our field and partners:
We are fighting to:
Prevent hundreds of thousands of people from losing their homes
Protect proven permanent housing interventions within CoC funding
Defend the ability of local communities to lead response strategies using data and evidence
Stand with municipalities and providers working to keep people housed, stabilized, and supported
The Western Hemisphere is entering a new and dangerous phase of global rivalry—one shaped by old imperial habits, new economic pressures, and resurgent great-power maneuvering. From Washington to Beijing to Caracas, political leaders are escalating tensions over Venezuela’s future, reviving a familiar script in which Latin America becomes the proving ground for foreign powers and a pressure cooker for working-class people who have no say in the geopolitical games unfolding above them.
What looks like a confrontation over oil, governance, or regional security is better understood as a collision of neoliberal extraction, colonial legacies, and competing empires, each claiming moral authority while pursuing strategic advantage. In this moment, it is essential to remember what history shows again and again: ordinary people—soldiers, students, workers—pay the highest price for elite ambitions.
A Long Shadow: U.S. Intervention in Latin America Since the 1890s
The U.S. role in Latin America cannot be separated from its imperial foundations. Over more than a century, Washington has repeatedly intervened—militarily, covertly, and financially—to shape political outcomes in the region:
1898–1934: The “Banana Wars.” U.S. Marines were deployed throughout the Caribbean and Central America to secure plantations, protect U.S. investors, and maintain favorable governments in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Honduras.
1954: Guatemala. The CIA overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz after he challenged United Fruit Company landholdings.
1961: Bay of Pigs Invasion. A failed U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.
1973: Chile. U.S. support for the coup against Salvador Allende ushered in the Pinochet dictatorship and a laboratory for neoliberal economics.
1980s: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala. Funding death squads, supporting Contra rebels, and fueling civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands.
1989: Panama. A full-scale U.S. invasion to remove Manuel Noriega, with civilian casualties in the thousands.
2002: Venezuela. U.S. officials supported the brief coup against Hugo Chávez.
2020s: Economic warfare continues. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and support for factions opposing Nicolás Maduro all sustain a long-running pressure campaign.
This is not ancient history. It is the operating system of U.S. hemispheric influence.
China’s Expanding Soft Power and Strategic Positioning
While the U.S. escalates military signaling toward Venezuela, China is expanding soft power, economic influence, and political relationships throughout Latin America—including with Venezuela. Beijing’s strategy is centered not on direct military confrontation but on long-term infrastructure, trade, and diplomatic partnerships designed to reduce U.S. dominance.
Recent statements from Beijing underscore this shift. Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly backed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, describing China and Venezuela as “intimate friends” as the U.S. intensifies military pressure in the region. China’s role extends beyond rhetoric: loans, technology transfers, energy investments, and political support form a web of influence that counters U.S. objectives.
This is the new terrain: the U.S. leaning on sanctions and military posture, China leveraging soft power and strategic alliances.
Russia as a Third Power in the Hemisphere
Any honest assessment of the current geopolitical climate must include Russia, which has expanded its presence in Latin America as part of its broader campaign to counter U.S. power globally. Moscow has supplied Venezuela with military equipment, intelligence support, cybersecurity assistance, and diplomatic cover at the United Nations. It has strengthened ties with Nicaragua, Cuba, and other governments willing to challenge U.S. regional dominance.
Russia’s involvement is not ideological; it is strategic. It seeks to weaken Washington’s influence, create leverage in distant theaters, and embed itself in the Western Hemisphere without deploying large-scale military forces. Where China builds infrastructure and invests billions, Russia plays the spoiler: complicating U.S. policy, reinforcing embattled leaders when convenient, and offering an alternative to nations seeking to escape U.S. hegemony.
The result is a crowded geopolitical arena in which Venezuela becomes not just a domestic crisis but a theater for multipolar contention, shaped by three major powers with very different tools and interests.
Neoliberalism, Colonialism, and the Repeating Pattern
Viewed in historical context, today’s crisis is simply the newest iteration of a long-standing pattern:
Colonial logics justify intervention. The idea that Washington must “manage” or “stabilize” Latin America recycles the paternalism of earlier eras.
Neoliberal extraction drives policy. Control over energy resources, access to markets, and geopolitical leverage matter more than democracy or human well-being.
Foreign powers treat the region as a chessboard. The U.S., China, and Russia approach Latin America not as sovereign equals but as terrain for influence.
People—not governments—bear the cost. Sanctions devastate civilians. Military escalations breed proxy conflicts. Migration pressures rise. And working-class youth are recruited to fight battles that are not theirs.
This is why today’s developments must be understood as part of a wider global system that treats nations in the Global South as resources to exploit and battlegrounds to dominate.
A Warning for Those Considering Enlistment or ROTC
In moments like this, the pressure on young people—especially working-class youth—to join the military increases. Recruiters frame conflict as opportunity: tuition money, job training, patriotism, adventure, or stability. But the truth is starker and more political.
Muhammad Ali’s stance during the Vietnam War remains profoundly relevant today. He refused the draft, famously stating that the Vietnamese “never called me [a slur]” and declaring that he would not fight a war of conquest against people who had done him no harm.
The same logic applies to today’s geopolitical brinkmanship. Young Americans are asked to risk their lives in conflicts that protect corporate interests, reinforce imperial ambitions, and escalate global tensions. Venezuelan workers, Chinese workers, Russian workers, and U.S. workers are not enemies. They are casualties-in-waiting of decisions made by governments and corporations insulated from the consequences of their actions.
Before enlisting—or joining ROTC—young people deserve to understand the historical cycle they may be pulled into. Wars in Latin America, proxy or direct, have never served the interests of everyday people. They serve empires.
Sources
Firstpost. “Xi Backs Maduro, Calls China and Venezuela ‘Intimate Friends’ as Trump Steps Up Military Pressure.”
Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change
U.S. Congressional Research Service reports on U.S. policy in Venezuela and China-Latin America relations
UN Human Rights Council documentation on sanctions and civilian impact
Cliffrene Haffner attended the African Leadership Academy (ALA) in South Africa during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her university applications were stalling and she felt stressed and anxious.
“Life felt unstable, as if I were hanging by a thin thread,” Haffner said. But it was at ALA that she discovered News Decoder.
“Joining News Decoder helped me rebuild my voice,” she wrote. “It created a place to write honestly and with purpose whilst supporting others in telling their stories. At a time when the world felt numb and disconnected, we used storytelling to bring back hope on campus by sharing our fears, thoughts and expectations.”
At News Decoder, students work with professional editors and news correspondents to explore complicated, global topics. They have the opportunity to report and write news stories, research and present findings in global webinars with students from other countries, produce podcasts and sit in on live video roundtables with experts and their peers across the globe.
Many get their articles published on News Decoder’s global news site.
A different way of seeing the world
Out of these experiential learning activities, they take away important skills valuable in their later careers, whatever those careers might be: How to communicate clearly, how to recognize multiple perspectives, how to cut through jargon and propaganda and separate facts from opinion and speculation.
One milestone for many of these is our Pitch, Report, Draft and Revise process, which we call PRDR. In it, students pitch a story topic to News Decoder with a plan on how to research and report it. We ask them to identify different perspectives on problems they want to explore and experts they can reach out to for information and context.
Then we guide them through a process of introspection, if the story is a personal reflection on their own experience, or a process of reporting and interviewing. News Decoder doesn’t promise students that their stories will get published at the end of the process. They have to work for that — revising their drafts until the finished story is clear and relevant to a global audience.
One student who went through the process was Joshua Glazer, now a student at Emory University in the United States. Glazer came to News Decoder in high school as an exchange student in Spain with School Year Abroad.
“I think the skills that I got out of that went on to really change the course of my education and how I view the world,” Glazer said. “Because when you step into the world of journalism you learn a different way of seeing the world.”
Recognizing our biases
Glazer learned that for journalism, he had to be less opinionated. “You have to really approach things kind of as they are in the world,” Glazer said. “And that is hard to do. That is not an easy skill that we can do as humans because we inherently have biases.”
He said it challenged him to look inwards and recognize his biases and counter them with evidence.
“So I think those skills have really changed the course of how I view having an argument with somebody because all of a sudden, you know, when you have an argument with someone, it’s all opinion,” he said.
For Haffner, who is now a business administration student at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan, News Decoder reshaped how she and her peers understood storytelling.
“It taught us to let go of rigid biases and to make authenticity the centre of our work,” Haffner said. “Students from different backgrounds found a space where their voices were heard, respected and valued. Our stories formed a shared map, each one opening a new room to explore, each voice strengthening the collective journey we were on. In that chaotic period, we created something meaningful together. Something bigger than us.”
Working through the complexity of a topic
Marouane El Bahraoui, a research intern at The Carter Center in the U.S. state of Georgia, also discovered News Decoder at the African Leadership Academy. At the time, he was interested in writing about the effectiveness of the Arab Maghreb Union — an economic bloc of five North African countries. He grew up in Morocco but didn’t want to approach the topic from a purely Moroccan perspective.
“It was like a very raw idea,” he said.
He pitched the story and worked with both News Decoder Founder Nelson Graves and correspondent Tom Heneghan to refine the idea. They guided him in the reporting and writing process.
“One aspect that I liked a lot from my research was the people that I had the chance to talk to,” he said. “It was during Covid and I was just at home and I’m talking to, you know, professors in U.S. universities, I’m talking to UN officials, experts working in think tanks in D.C. and I was thinking oh those people are just so far, you can’t even reach them. And then you have a conversation with them and they’re just normal people.”
He also found writing the story daunting. “It was a little bit overwhelming for me at the time,” he said. “You know, you’re not writing like an academic essay.”
Graves encouraged him to write in a straightforward manner. In school, he had been taught to write in a beautiful way to impress.
“From News Decoder, something I learned is to always keep the audience in mind who you are speaking to, who are you writing to,” he said.
He took away the importance of letting readers make their own conclusions. “You’re not writing to tell the reader what to think,” he said. “You are writing to give them ideas and arguments, facts and leave the thinking for them.”
For Americans under 35, the term “democratic socialism” triggers neither fear nor Cold War reflexes. It represents something far simpler: a demand for a functioning society. Younger generations have grown up in a world where basic pillars of American life—higher education, medicine, economic mobility, and even life expectancy—have deteriorated while inequality has soared. Democratic socialism, in their view, is not a fringe ideology but a practical response to systems that have ceased to serve the common good.
Nowhere is this clearer than in higher education. Millennials and Gen Z entered adulthood as universities became corporate enterprises, expanding administrative layers, pushing adjunct labor to the brink, and relying on debt-financed tuition increases to keep the machine running. Public investment collapsed, predatory for-profit chains proliferated, and nonprofit universities acted like hedge funds with classrooms attached. Students saw institutions with billion-dollar endowments operate as landlords and asset managers, all while passing costs onto working families. When Bernie Sanders called for tuition-free public college, young people did not hear utopianism—they heard a plan grounded in global reality, a model that exists in Germany, Sweden, Finland, and other social democracies that treat education as a public good rather than a revenue stream.
Healthcare tells an even harsher story. Americans under 35 watched their parents and grandparents navigate a system more focused on billing codes than care, one where an ambulance ride costs a week’s wages and a bout of illness can mean bankruptcy. They experienced the rise of corporatized university medical centers, private equity–owned emergency rooms, and insurance bureaucracies that ration access more cruelly than any state. They saw life-saving drugs priced like luxury goods and mental health services pushed out of reach. Compare this to nations with universal healthcare: longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and far less medical debt. Again, Sanders’ Medicare for All resonated not because of ideology but because young people recognized it as a plausible path toward the kind of humane medical system described by scholars like Harriet Washington, Elisabeth Rosenthal, and Mahmud Mamdani, who all critique the structural violence embedded in systems of unequal care.
Life expectancy itself has become a generational indictment. For the first time in modern U.S. history, it has fallen, driven by overdose deaths, suicide, preventable illness, and worsening inequities. Younger Americans know that friends and peers have died far earlier than their counterparts abroad. They see that countries with strong public services—childcare, unemployment insurance, housing supports, universal healthcare—live longer, healthier lives. They also see how austerity and privatization have hollowed out public health infrastructure in the United States, leaving communities vulnerable to crises large and small. The message is clear: societies that invest in people live longer; societies that treat health as a commodity do not.
Quality of Life (QOL) ties all of this together. People under 35 face rent burdens unimaginable to previous generations, debts that prevent them from forming families, stagnant wages, and a labor market defined by precarity. They face the erosion of public space, public transit, libraries, and social supports—what Mamdani would describe as the slow unraveling of the civic realm under neoliberalism. When they look abroad, they see countries with social democratic frameworks offering guaranteed parental leave, subsidized childcare, free or nearly free college, universal healthcare, and robust worker protections. These are not distant fantasies; they are functioning models that produce higher happiness levels, stronger social trust, and more stable democracies.
Older generations often accuse young people of radicalism, but the reality is the reverse. Millennials and Gen Z are pragmatic. They have lived through the failures of unfettered capitalism: historic inequality, monopolistic industries, soaring costs of living, and a political class unresponsive to their material conditions. They have read Sanders’ critiques of oligarchy and Mamdani’s analyses of state power and structural violence, and they see themselves reflected in those diagnoses. Democratic socialism appeals because it is rooted in material improvements to daily life rather than in abstract political theory. It promises a society where income does not determine survival, where education does not require lifelong debt, where parents can afford to raise children, and where basic health is not a luxury good.
People under 35 are not afraid of democratic socialism because they have already seen what the absence of a social democratic framework produces. They are not seeking revolution for its own sake. They are seeking a livable future. And increasingly, they view democratic socialism not as a radical break but as the only realistic path toward rebuilding public institutions, revitalizing democracy, and ensuring that future generations inherit a country worth living in.
Sources
Sanders, Bernie. Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.
Sanders, Bernie. Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities.
Washington, Harriet. Medical Apartheid.
Rosenthal, Elisabeth. An American Sickness.
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Baldwin, Davarian. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower.
That’s why central banks have gone to extraordinary lengths in the past decade to banish the specter of deflation. They’ve succeeded. Indeed, stock markets have been rattled by evidence that inflation is stirring in the United States, which might prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates more rapidly than previously thought.
(On Wednesday, the U.S. government reported that consumer prices rose by 0.5 percent in January, more than expected. “Core” prices excluding volatile food and energy costs marked the biggest monthly gain in a year.)
But the chances of inflation getting out of control are small.
First, companies operate globally, so if manufacturing costs rise too high in the United States, they will shift production to cheaper locations overseas.
Second, there is still slack in the U.S. jobs market because many people who gave up looking for work after the crisis could be lured back into employment, capping wages.
Third, there is no reason to believe the Fed — or financial markets for that matter — would allow the money supply to spiral out of control.
The United States is no Venezuela.
Prices rise and fall all the time in response to factors such as changing consumer tastes and technological innovation. Medical care costs a lot more than in the past, computers a lot less. But a generalized rise in prices across the economy — which is the definition of inflation — is possible only if a country’s central bank prints too much money.
That’s what’s happened in Venezuela, where the money supply has increased by 4,000 percent in the past two years. The result is hyperinflation, forecast by the International Monetary Fund to reach 13,000 percent this year. Goldilocks’s oatmeal is nearly doubling in price every month. Poverty is rife because wages lag price rises. The economy is on its knees.
The United States is no Venezuela. Evidence of a pick-up in wages is good news in fact, considering that workers have been taking home less and less of the economic pie in recent years, while the suppliers of capital have benefited handsomely.
It’s possible that the recently enacted package of U.S. tax cuts and spending increases will cause the economy to run a bit too hot, pushing up prices a bit. But of the many problems facing the U.S. economy, runaway inflation is not one of them.
In 1981, then Fed Chairman Paul Volcker had to raise short-term U.S. interest rates to 20 percent to crush inflation. History will not need to repeat itself.
Questions to consider:
1. What “ripple effect” could a rise in consumer prices cause?
2. How can inflation be good?
3. When prices go up significantly, what might you or your family not buy?
They can be a useful sources when you’re trying to find out what needs to happen or why something is happening. When your story relates to solutions to development or climate change in a specific country or region, find experts from that country or region, as they have a better understanding of the situation on the ground.
Don’t grab just anyone.
Journalists often find themselves short on time and under tight deadlines. They can easily fall into the trap of grabbing sources who will get back to them quickly, or turning to sources eager for the publicity or the attention that being quoted in a news story will get them.
The result is that journalists often ignore the many people with important stories to tell or information to impart: groundbreaking scientists, people experiencing the damaging effects of climate change every day, individuals and groups working on systemic and just solutions.
The perspectives that we find in the media are therefore limited. The problem here is that the sources can then shape the story and that many perspectives go unheard. Bear that in mind that when you go looking for your sources.
And remember: there is a big difference between a stakeholder and an expert. While an expert can help you identify a problem and explain its causes and effects, a stakeholder gives you the first person accounts and the emotions — anger, fear, pain, frustration — that make a story compelling and urgent. The first person accounts are what will connect with readers or listeners.
If you only have stakeholders, you won’t give your readers a sense of scale or the context needed to understand the problem and figure out how to solve it. But if you only have experts, the story will feel cold and readers won’t connect to it. When you’re telling a story about the climate crisis, for example, you need experts to tell your audience what is happening and what we can do and you need humans on the ground to tell your audience why it matters.
Where to start looking for people
It can be tricky to find stakeholders. People who are victims of some problem might not advertise themselves as such. Here are some ways to find them:
Start with people you already know. They might have relatives, friends and colleagues who you can ask. Those people have relatives, friends and colleagues. Through your own personal network you have access to many, many different people. Let everyone know the story you are working on and the types of people you are looking for.
You will find people in surprising places: Cafes, markets, doctors offices and schools. But they won’t come to you if they don’t know you want to speak to them. And don’t forget the power of social media. Just one person you know who has 2,000 social media friends can reach a lot of people you might not know.
The leaders in your local church, mosque or community center know a lot of people. School organizations are great networking places. So are trade groups, environmental and social advocacy groups and labor unions.
Visit places where people live and gather. There is nothing as good as face to face interactions.
Search out the comments sections of news articles. People often post about their own experiences at the end of articles. Sometimes you might be able to contact them through those comment chats.
The best stories reflect multiple perspectives and include both people’s emotions and opinions and information from experts. The ability to find and talk to these people is the best part of being a journalist.
On the face of it, I can understand why the REF team have pressed pause on their guidance development for 2029.
The sector is in serious financial difficulties, and while most are keen to see a greater focus on People, Culture and Environment (PCE), the challenges experienced by pilot institutions with the proposed assessment mechanism were real.
We cannot get away from this.
But of course, where there’s a vacuum, people will rush to fill it with their own pet peeves and theories, up to and including a full reversion to the rules of REF 2021.
PCE and EDI
One of the biggest fallacies being promoted is this view that PCE is what Iain Mansfield, Director of Research at the Policy Exchange Thinktank, and former Special Adviser, called “a euphemism for Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)”. This conflation of REF PCE with EDI is entirely false. In fact, the PCE pilot included five different enablers of research culture, only one of which related to inclusivity. Of the others (strategy, responsibility, connectivity, and development) two were already themes in REF 2021 Environment Statements (strategy and collaboration) so not exactly a dramatic shift in a whole new direction.
Indeed, the Code of Practice and Environment elements of REF 2021 already placed a significant focus on EDI. Equality Impact Assessments had to be performed at every stage of the submission, EDI training for REF decision-makers was an essential requirement for even submitting to the REF, and both institution- and unit-level environment statements demanded narratives as to how equality and diversity in research careers were promoted across the institution. So anyone seeking a reversion to REF 2021 rules in order to eliminate a focus on EDI is going to be deeply disappointed.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment about this attempt to row back on any deeper focus on research culture in the next REF is that having a thriving research culture is an integral part of any definition of research excellence, whilst being perhaps the second biggest challenge facing the sustainability of the research sector after funding. The Wellcome Trust report, and the Nuffield report that preceded it, taught us that poor incentives, highly competitive & toxic environments, precarious research careers, and unmanageable workloads, are leading to questionable research practices, increased retractions, a loss of talent and reduced trust in science. And all this at a time when we really need more talent and greater trust in science. It wasn’t that long ago that this all led to a Government R&D Culture Strategy making a clear case for better investment in research culture for the benefit of society, but still, in the recent DSIT survey of the UK Research & Development workforce, only 52 per cent of higher education respondents said the culture of their organisation enabled them to perform their best work, compared to 85 per cent in the private sector.
The point of adding greater weight, and a clearer assessment mechanism, to a broader range of culture elements in the next REF was thus to address exactly these issues. As a reminder, the international advisory group for the next REF recommended a split of 33:33:33 for PCE, outputs and impact. Reducing the weight allocated to PCE would not only reduce the attention given to promoting positive research cultures, but actually increase the weighting allocated to the element of REF that is most responsible for driving poor research cultures: publications. We know that the publish-or-perish culture is causing significant problems across the sector. Re-calibrating the assessment to put greater weight on publications would run counter to the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment’s first commitment: to recognise the diversity of contributions to research.
Outputs
I do think the pause in REF is an opportunity to think about how we recognise, incentivise and reward the better research cultures we clearly need. I’ve written before about how many elements of our research culture are essentially hygiene factors and as such should not attract gold stars, but be established as a basic condition of funding. There is also an opportunity to supply culture-related data (e.g., research misconduct reporting, and research staff pay gaps) alongside the other environment data already supplied to support REF-decision making. This could be formative in and of itself, as could the use of case studies (a tested REF assessment technology) by which HEIs report on their research culture interventions.
Whatever is decided, no-one working in a research-intensive institution can deny the power of the additional weight allocated to PCE in REF 2029. The knowledge that 25 per cent of the next exercise will be allocated to not just E, but P and C, has naturally been a lever staff have pulled to get culture issues up the agenda. And we’ve seen significant improvements: policy changes, new initiatives, and culture indicators moving in a good direction. So whilst it might feel like an easier move to simply revert back to the rules of REF 2021, there is an opportunity cost to this. A lot has already been invested in preparing institutions for a greater focus on research culture, and more will need to be invested in reverting back to the rules for REF 2021.
Because of the REF’s direct link both to (unhypothecated) gold and (international) glory, nothing really motivates universities more. To row back on efforts to recognise, incentivise, and reward the thriving research cultures that are at the very heart of any ‘excellent’ research institution therefore makes little sense. And it makes even less sense when financial constraints are putting those environments under even more pressure, making it more important than ever that we put people first. Can we do it in a more sensitive and manageable way? Yes, of course. Should we ditch it and run for the cover of REF 2021 rules? Absolutely not.
On Thursday, the White House published a presidential memo — technically, a national security presidential memorandum — outlining its upcoming efforts to combat political violence.
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a heightened attention to political violence makes sense. But this memo doesn’t focus on actual violence. It includes frequent references to constitutionally protected speech and ideas.
While there are quite a few pieces of this order that set off alarm bells, a few of the phrases struck me as especially troubling. Here they are.
‘anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity’
There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” [ . . . ] Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
This is the most troubling passage in the memo, and there’s stiff competition for that title. This is the White House directly identifying beliefs, pointing the finger at them, and saying, “These are the suspicious people we need to watch.” In America, we shouldn’t target people for their ideologies. We should target them for their actions, full stop.
Recent Democratic administrations have engaged in the same guilt-by-association tactics. During the Obama administration, the IRS targeted nonprofit groups with the words “Tea Party” or “Patriots” in their names, identifying groups by ideology and punishing them by subjecting them to extra processes. And its explanation was that this was just a “shortcut” — other organizations with similar profiles had violated IRS rules, so they jumped to targeting groups that used similar words.
In 2023, the FBI distributed an internal memo linking “ethnically motivated violent extremists” to traditional Catholic ideology, a call for viewpoint-based targeting that was only exposed by a whistleblower and oversight from Congress. In 2022, an internal FBI memo linked the Gadsden flag and other patriotic symbols to violent extremism. And while such links do exist, and it makes sense for law enforcement to identify them, it also risks sweeping up ordinary Americans.
A man carries a Gadsden flag at a Proud Boys rally in Portland, Oregon, 2019.
It may well be that some people who engage in politically motivated violence have anti-American beliefs, oppose the traditional family, or dislike organized religion. They should be prosecuted. And if there’s evidence of conspiracy or concrete steps toward violence, that may warrant an investigation. But we cannot start investigating other people simply because they happen to share those beliefs. Doing so would open the door to investigations of any political movement or ideology if any one of its adherents happened to engage in violence.
‘…designation as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’’
The memo also says:
[T]he Attorney General may recommend that any group or entity whose members are engaged in activities meeting the definition of “domestic terrorism” in 18 U.S.C. 2331(5) merits designation as a “domestic terrorist organization.”
Designating something a domestic terrorist organization sounds like a parallel to the process we use for identifying foreign terrorist organizations (FTO). That process was created by Congress in a statute. Being designated as an FTO triggers a number of legal effects, enabling the government to seize assets, revoke visas, bar entry of non-citizens, and prosecute people who provide any direct help to the organization. Congress has the ability to block or revoke FTO designation, and organizations themselves are entitled to judicial review of the decision to include them on a list.
There is no such process for designating a domestic terrorist organization. In fact, the “domestic terrorist organization” definition proposed here has no legal safeguards and no clear significance. It’s completely made up. It seems an organization so designated will receive extra scrutiny from the federal government until it pleases the attorney general to remove them from the list. Donors, speakers, employees, and members of these organizations will all have their speech chilled for as long as the executive branch sees fit.
It’s hard not to compare this to the Hollywood blacklist during McCarthyism. There were, in fact, real Russian spies elsewhere in America, many of them motivated by their ideological commitment to communism. Some of them were passing nuclear secrets to our rival in the middle of a nuclear arms race, the stakes of which were, potentially, catastrophic beyond all human imagination. Many people on the blacklist did have ties to communism or communist sympathies, as well. But putting people on a list because the government didn’t like their politics violated the freedoms we claimed to be protecting.
‘…politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing…’
“Organized doxing” is a strange phrase.
Doxing (or doxxing) is generally defined as publishing private information that makes someone online personally identifiable. It’s also legal in most places, as long as the information was lawfully obtained and isn’t otherwise part of harassment or incitement efforts. Whether you think that’s bad or not, I don’t know that organizing the effort makes it worse. If someone posts your personal information online, your first question isn’t likely to be, “How many people were involved and what was their political purpose?”
However distasteful it might be in context, doxing is protected speech unless it violates some other existing law. After all, doxing describes much of the basic activity of news media, where otherwise unknown information is found and published, and frequently, that information is personally identifiable. That’s especially true when the “doxing” the government is upset about is information related to public employees in the course of their duties, such as the location of ICE agents.
A missive from the most powerful man in the world carries so much force that it is, inevitably, a blunt instrument. When the president uses his pen to take aim at anything, it will cause a chilling effect.
The administration itself has arguably been encouraging coordinated doxing efforts to identify people who said cruel things in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. When the vice president calls on the public to contact the employers of people who made unkind statements, and there have been groups soliciting submissions of those statements to catalog them, it would take exceptional care on the part of any future participants to avoid their efforts turning into doxing.
If organized doxing is a politically motivated terrorist act when an NGO encourages it, but it’s legal when the White House encourages it, the current administration should remember that it will be leaving that loaded gun on the desk of the next president — who may define “permissible doxing” much differently.
‘Investigate institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations…’
The memo directs that the National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices shall investigate “institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in” political violence, intimidation, or obstruction of the rule of law.
To aid or abet criminal conduct requires knowledge of the conduct. To the extent officers and employees of organizations are knowingly breaking the law, I’d like to think that law enforcement is investigating them anyway. It’s been a few decades since I took criminal law, but I’m pretty sure “investigate people who know they’re breaking the law” was on the first page of the outline. Same with people who are “responsible for” it.
So what this memo is adding, then, is to investigate “institutional and individual funders” who “sponsor” the organizations that aid the principal actors engaged in political violence. That reading is also reflected in a call for the use of financial surveillance tools. It’s also consistent with a Justice Department push to investigate a group tied to billionaire investor and Democratic megadonor George Soros.
If there is evidence that a donor was knowingly funding violence, they should be investigated, but the administration hasn’t actually shown such evidence. They simply assert there is a vast conspiracy on the left — going all the way up to its highest echelons — to fund and foment political violence, and so a sprawling investigation of the president’s ideological and political opponents is justified.
We have already seen orders like this get misused
A missive from the most powerful man in the world carries so much force that it is, inevitably, a blunt instrument. When the president uses his pen to take aim at anything, it will cause a chilling effect.
For example, when President Trump issued an executive order on gender ideology that prohibited federal funding to programs that suggest gender is a spectrum, Texas A&M cancelled an annual drag show and the National Endowment for the Arts reviewed applications for their consistency with the order. Neither of these outcomes were obvious on the face of the order.
What will the overreactions to this new memo look like? Donors ending their support because they don’t want to risk an investigation? Groups being denied bank loans or leases because they’re on a government list with no way to appeal that determination? Activists going underground because they want to challenge an orthodoxy, hiding their opinions from the places where they would otherwise be challenged in the marketplace of ideas?
If this is the plan to save American values, what’s the plan to destroy them look like?
Higher Education Inquirer : The People Have Fought Back Against the President Before & Can Again w/ Prof. Corey Brettschneider (Malcolm Nance, Black Man Spy)
The People Have Fought Back Against the President Before & Can Again w/ Prof. Corey Brettschneider (Malcolm Nance, Black Man Spy)
Higher education stakeholders have noted that math anxiety can hold students back from pursuing some disciplines or major programs, but a new analysis from Gallup finds that young Americans over all place less importance on math skills compared to the general population.
While over half of all Americans rate math skills as “very important” in their work (55 percent) and personal (63 percent) lives, only 38 percent of young people (ages 18 to 24) said math skills are very important in their work life and 37 percent in their personal life, according to a December survey of 5,100 U.S. adults.
The survey highlights generational divisions in how math skills are perceived, with adults older than 55 most likely to see math as very important compared to younger adults, and Gen Z least likely to attribute value to math skills.
To Sheila Tabanli, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University, the low ratings point to a lack of perceived connection between math skills and career development, despite the clear correlation she sees.
Tabanli said it can be hard to convince many Gen Z and Alpha students that math content is necessary for their daily lives, in part because access to information is so convenient and they can perform calculations on their phones or online.
“We need to transition from focusing too much on the concept, the domain, the content—which we do love as math people, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it for a living—but students don’t see that connection [to employable skills],” Tabanli said.
When asked how important math skills were for the majority of the U.S. workforce, 40 percent of young adults rated having math skills as very important—the lowest rating of nine skills evaluated, including reading, language, technology and leadership, according to Gallup.
Young people also rated the importance of math skills for the general workforce, as compared to their own lives, the lowest of all age cohorts. Adults ages 55 to 64 (71 percent) and 65 and older (68 percent) were most likely to say math is a very important skill for the general workforce.
Most career competencies that colleges and universities teach, such as those by the National Association for Colleges and Employers, focus on broader skills—including critical thinking, leadership, communication and teamwork—as essential for workplace success. Math can teach students how to solve problems and engage with difficult content, which Tabanli argues are just as important for an early-career professional.
One reason a young adult might not rate math skills highly is because many students face undue math anxiety or a skepticism about their own ability to do math, falling into the belief that they’re not “math people,” Tabanli said.
In response, Tabanli believes professors should help students apply computational skills to their daily lives or link content to other classes to encourage students to invest in their math learning. While this may be an additional step for a faculty member to take, Tabanli considers it a disservice to neglect this connection.
Professors can also strive to make themselves and the content more human and approachable by sharing information about their lives, their careers and why they’re passionate about the subject, Tabanli said.
