Bluesky is apparently honoring takedown requests from the Turkish government. This is among the reasons why the #Fediverse is so important:
@Mediagazer Of *all* the private entities bowing down to unlawful Executive Orders (which, even if they were lawful, would only apply to the Executive Branch), press outlets with #1A protections are the WORST. #Reuters #DEIA #FreeSpeech #FreePress #USPol #Media
Analysis:
When geen-card holder, Mohsen Mahdawi, received an email from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, he suspected it was a trap to detain & deport him.
He had recently been targeted by Betar. And his hunch was correct.
https://www.juancole.com/2025/04/inhumane-palestinian-columbia.html
#fascism #freespeech #uspol #trump #illegaldetention #studentprotestors #columbia .
Honestly, #Trump is sounding more & more deranged.
Ignoring the bizarre word salad “terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”, what he is directing the #IRS / #DOJ to do to #Harvard in his post breaks SEVERAL laws.
He cannot direct either agency. It is outside his scope of power.
Congress has the power of the purse.
#AcademicFreedom is essential to the #Constitution’s guarantee of #FreeSpeech.
Report: Days before masked immigration agents detained Rumeysa Ozturk, the State Dept said there was no evidence linking her to antisemitic activities or support for a 'terrorist' organization."
Yet she was arrested for engaging “in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization."
Ozturk had co-written an op-ed calling for her university to divest from Israel.
' 'Immoral, Inhumane, and Illegal': ICE Arrests Palestinian Columbia Protest Leader
"He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech," said Mohsen Mahdawi's lawyer.'
https://www.commondreams.org/news/mohsen-mahdawi
#palestine #usa #freespeech
"... seizing on the opportunity of COVID, under the guise of preventing misinformation, there's been a spate of laws from Singapore to India to Indonesia ... to supposedly curb misinformation, but have really been used to throttle freedom of speech and expression... Singapore for example ... many of the remaining independent media have been [censored using these laws]"
#AnupriyaDatta, 2025
#Harvard professors sue #Trump administration over funding cut threats
by Katie Cole, April 14, 2025, #WBUR
"The Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors sued the Trump administration Friday over what they call an 'unlawful and unprecedented' attempt to use federal funding cuts to restrict #FreeSpeech.
"The #DepartmentOfEducation announced in late March that it would review $8.7 billion in federal grants and contacts given to Harvard, alleging that the school failed to prevent #antisemitic discrimination on campus.
"The Trump administration then unveiled a broad set of demands on April 4 the university must agree to in order to keep getting federal funding, including cutting all diversity, equity and inclusion programming, and modifying any programming and departments that 'fuel antisemitic harassment.' The administration gave Columbia University a similar set of demands in March, which the school agreed to.
"The lawsuit by the professors' group, filed in #Massachusetts federal court, alleges that the administration's federal funding review violates the #TitleVI of the #CivilRightsAct, which prohibits discrimination in programs that receive federal funds. The court filing says the law requires specific procedures to cut federal funds and that the Trump administration has not taken any of those steps.
"The group said in a press release that the administration's actions are in effort to create a chilling effect among universities and faculty to stop speech that the president does not like.
" 'Eliminating discrimination and protecting all students is important,' said Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard law professor and the secretary-treasurer of the school's #AAUP chapter, in a statement. 'But Trump is defying the Civil Rights Act, terrifying students, and illegally holding hostage grants for hospitals and scientific research so he can accomplish his real goal of punishing academics for our politics.'
"The lawsuit says that the actions by the administration have 'already caused severe and irreparable harm by halting #academic #research and #inquiry at Harvard.'
"This is the second suit that the Harvard AAUP chapter has filed against the Trump administration this year. The first was a joint suit with other chapters, including one from Columbia, over federal efforts to deport #MahmoudKhalil and students that engaged in #ProPalestinian #activism."
https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/04/14/harvard-aaup-trump-funding-cuts-lawsuit
"The Little-Known Bureaucrats Tearing Through American Universities:
A new task force formed to combat antisemitism is using funding threats to force broader changes on campus"
#Trump #Bureaucrats #Universities #Education #FreeSpeech #Politics #Government #FederalFunds #Censorship
"I don't trust all experts. I go and do a journal article and get it published, and oftentimes my articles are calling into question other articles that other experts ... have written. So one of the things we do amongst experts is to challenge each other openly, often, and that's how we build knowledge. "
#JosephUscinski, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Miami, 2024
https://natoandtheged.substack.com/p/the-system-is-rigged-conspiracy-theories
(5/?)
"... I think [conspiracy theories] are, at their core, an important critique of power and of the establishment, and sometimes they are warranted. Sometimes they're not. So what we need to do is be very careful about which ones we want to get rid of, and which ones we're going to allow to stay."
#JosephUscinski, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Miami, 2024
https://natoandtheged.substack.com/p/the-system-is-rigged-conspiracy-theories
(1/?)
"#Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation's most prestigious universities & colleges–that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws," said a dept task force on combating *antisemitism* [#FreeSpeech] in a stmnt.
The task force said it was freezing $2.2B in grants & $60M in contract value.
[read Harvard’s letter: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/092f8701fdf305fd/4d7d152d-full.pdf]
#Trump #law #extortion #dictatorship #education #tyranny
#Trump admin freezes about $2.3 billion in #funding to #Harvard
The U.S. Department of #Education said on Monday it was freezing about $2.3 billion in federal funds to #HarvardUniversity over the school's decision to fight White House demands, including that it shut down #diversity, #equity & #inclusion programs.
#law #extortion #dictatorship #FreeSpeech
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-freezes-about-23-billion-funding-harvard-2025-04-15/
Report: Days before masked immigration agents detained Rumeysa Ozturk, the State Dept said there was no evidence linking her to antisemitic activities or support for a 'terrorist' organization."
Yet she was arrested for engaging “in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization."
Ozturk had co-written an op-ed calling for her university to divest from Israel.
The secret police are no longer secret. We are under occupation. Any one of us could be disappeared next. Legality means nothing anymore.
Another student has been arrested for “thought crime”.
The court filing said Mahdawi was targeted by a pro-Israel organization #Betar USA, which said on social media that “visa holder Mohsen Mahdawi is on our deport list.”
In a previous interview with “60 Minutes” regarding the protests, Mahdawi had condemned an individual who came to one and yelled “death to Jews.”
“I was shocked and they walked directly to the person and they told him, ‘You don’t represent us,’” he said, adding “to be antisemitic is to be unjust and the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5248506-columbia-student-mohsen-mahdawi-dhs-ice/
Sunday night’s post about #CBS is the latest example of #Trump encouraging his appointees to apply government pressure against his critics. In recent months, Carr has flaunted his MAGA credentials & launched #FCC investigations of several media outlets Trump has derided, including #ABC & #NBC. Carr was photographed last week wearing a gold pin with a silhouette of Trump’s head [wtf?].
#Trump urges the #FCC to punish ‘#60Minutes’ over reports on #Greenland & #Ukraine
Trump has a “hope” for his Federal Communications Commission: that the agency will punish #CBS for airing “60 Minutes” reports he doesn’t like.
Apparently angered by Sunday night’s “60 Minutes” telecast, Trump wrote on Truth Social about his ongoing legal battle w/CBS & its parent company, Paramount Global.
#law #democracy #FreePress #FreeSpeech
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/media/trump-fcc-60-minutes-cbs/index.html
Today: "This is the moment just minutes ago when Mohsen Madawi a Columbia University student was apprehended by HSI agents
in the middle of his appointment to become a US citizen. He 's a Palestinian-born green card holder."
-L Luciano
We must mobilize massive public pressure to rid the country of #Nazis in Republican leadership.
*See on L Luciano's X acct, the video was taken by C Helali. Screenshot
#Republicans #Resist #April19
#Deportations #DueProcess #FreeSpeech #1A #Courts #USPol
