NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant | Hacker News Reader

NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant

bsky.app

268 pointsxqcgrek2336 comments

Background: UCLA violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "by acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."

Outcome: These grants are likely in a temporary holding pattern until ucla settles the issue.

The root bsky post says “NSF is suspending roughly 300 grants with UCLA, following a DOJ finding on Tuesday that the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."”

Which is entirely par for the course with the administration and doesn’t seem particularly targeted at Tao. I’m shocked even more NSF grants haven’t been hit, this was a prime DOGE target. They want these headlines.

> "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students"

Of course suspending grants is probably the wrong way to go about it anyway, but since you brought this up... do you imply that it's false? I'm not in the US but I heard pretty interesting things about what was happening in universities following Oct 7.

It’s complete bullshit. Half the students protesting for Gaza were Jewish themselves.

This is the closest to the answer for now, thanks. I remember reading how it was pretty antisemitic with racial shaming and bordering on physical violence but can't remember what sources it was. If half of the protesters were jewish as you say then that's unlikely

Propaganda directed straight from netanyahu. He ordered America to censor the students in public sperches and within days America inexplicably did it.

Yes, it's false.

Students have a first amendment right to express opinions, even anti-Zionist ones.

The administration is using baseless charges of antisemitism as a cudgel to extract fealty and concessions from universities, which they see as opponents of their party.

The accusation from DOJ isn't about student speech, though. It's about the university's actions or inactions, which are not protected and are governed by obligations to Title VI discrimination law.

You're right, but the university is not allowed to censor student speech based on content. The "actions" that the administration claims the university should have taken would have violated the constitution.

Furthermore, the redresses the administration has proposed in similar cases (like the university reporting students who protest to federal authorities) suggest this is more about federal power / censorship than furthering universal free speech.

Free speech just got a price put on its head, capisce?

For a one-time payment it may be able to slide this time, didn't Columbia University have an offer they couldn't refuse?

Pray the Don doesn't alter the deal . . .

> the university is not allowed to censor student speech based on content

Hold on, didn't tenured professors get fired literally based on content of their speech a few years back under the other administration? I am confused

And this does not have to be about censoring speech. There are rules of a place. As I said, you start obstructing a lecture, you get thrown out in a good university

I don't think this is quite correct, at least for private universities. They absolutely have the right to disallow protests on their property. The first amendment protects you from the government -- the government cannot force the university to take these action, but the university could totally do it on their own. It's a little bit murkier with state universities, because you could argue they are a part of the government.

This is a strawman. Of course there is free speech. It doesn't mean it's okay to talk on the phone in a cinema or recite the Bible aloud during a math lecture. It doesn't mean it's fair play to shout obscenities on the train and spit on people. Idk about US but there is a thing called "verbal abuse" and police is 100% callable for that. That out of the way so how about hostile environment for students again? I was downvoted for asking a question and this did not answer it.

Shouting obscenities on the train, as well as hate speech broadly, are constitutionally protected under the first amendment.

Creating a hostile environment for students based on their religion would violate the Civil Rights Act. However, there is a paucity of evidence that the universities did that. Allowing protests probably isn't sufficient, especially when prohibiting those same protests would be unconstitutional.

Even if the protesting students were spitting on Jewish students, that doesn't impact the legality of the protest. The spitting could be prosecuted as battery.

I recommend reading this [1] great article about the sometimes confusing rhetoric used in the media about American free speech.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220313175157/http://popehat.co...

Okay so if I get it correctly they could be kicked out like in the cinema or not, because like I assume regardless of free speech there are rules, but this "cinema" cannot be prosecuted by US gov for NOT kicking a noisy jerk out of it because then it becomes a free speech thing. If taking away grants counts as prosecution? I guess that makes sense.

State schools like UCLA cannot restrict speech in the same way that private organizations could, because they are part of the government. The cinema analogy is therefore spurious.

Oh right. I forgot not all unis are private in the US. Then it makes more sende...

Honest question on this: It is clear that first amendment protects the rights of protesters from persecution by the government. But does that mean that the government would need to endure protests in any federal building at any time?

If not, I think you could make a case that UCLA could kick protesters out, for example if they take over a building. In contrast to a private university, they probably couldn't act on what the protesters do outside of the university. But I do think that they must have some regulatory power on campus.

> But does that mean that the government would need to endure protests in any federal building at any time?

No. It means that the university cannot censor protests based on their content. They can certainly require protesters to get a permit, to stay within certain areas, to act within usual behavior parameters.

> If not, I think you could make a case that UCLA could kick protesters out, for example if they take over a building.

Of course. But that's not the claim made by the administration.

> I was downvoted for asking a question and this did not answer it.

I am 100% sure your comment was downvoted for this sentence:

> I'm not in the US but I heard pretty interesting things about what was happening in universities following Oct 7.

People here don’t like propaganda-fueled speculation. The commenter also literally answered your question. You asked if it was meant to be implied as false and they said yes.

I was not reading propaganda and he did not answer the question. I will make it shorter to make it very clear. The question: "hostile environment for students?" the answer: "free speech, cudgel, fealty". I get it and I agree wit all of that. But it is answer to some other question that was more convenient to the "answerer"

> I was not reading propaganda

I don’t doubt this but it’s also easy to read the comment as though that’s where your thoughts originate.

> But it is answer to some other question that was more convenient to the "answerer"

I disagree on the question being unanswered, however; you did not ask for details but instead for confirmation.

I am saying this with the intention to be helpful; I am not intending to criticize your arguments. My point is simply that you did not communicate your thoughts as effectively as you seem to believe.

Allowing people to speak out against overt genocide committed by a foreign government = anti-semitism. Isn’t that self-evident? /s

Tbh, this standard argument is itself anti-Jewish as it implies this behavior is inherent to being Jewish, which of course is grotesque and inaccurate.

* Jewish /= Zionist

* Zionist /= Imperialist

* Imperialist /= Genocidal

What we have really imo is an extreme colonist policy that is only superficially Jewish. That doesn’t absolve Jews in Israel supporting it, it rather absolves all those who don’t and makes genocidal colonists take responsibility for their own actions.

Also, genocide is bad.

Nice strawman. So how about the actual question which is hostile environment for students? I was downvoted for asking a question and this did not answer it.

Edit to reply: what I remember reading was not about saying "end genocide", it was about saying "you are a jew so go die" kind of stuff. It seemed pretty crazy but I didn't save any sources

If I make a sign that says "Nazis are Evil", and a guy gets upset and says "you can't say that about me" - what do you call that guy? A Nazi.

If I make a sign that says "End the Zionist Genocide", and a Jewish person says "you can't say that about me", they don't feel uncomfortable because they're Jewish.

"Zionist genocide" means a genocide of zionist people. Last time I heard it happened was WWII.

This thread and replies I got is wild!

Do you really imagine anyone here is convinced by your petty deceptions? We know what words mean.

I'm not native English but even I know. For example when we say Ukrainian genocide we mean genocide that kills Ukrainian people. This guy said "Zionist genocide" so what does that mean? That genocide ended decades ago. Who is decepting who and how? Go ahead and unpack for us

Ah right. Well if your not a native speaker - this isn't exactly a formal rule as far as I know, but as a native speaker...

Zionists are ideological people and "<Idological People> Genocide" reads like the ideologues own and are committing the genocide.

Whereas Ukrainian is a denonym and "<Denonym> Genocide" reads like a genocide done to the denonym. Nazi Genocide -> Nazis did it. Jewish Genocide -> Genocide happened to the Jews.

I'm not sure if that is technically how it would work in a formal linguistic sense, but that would be how I'd expect the terms to be read. Zionists can't really be genocided because Zionism isn't a race, so reading "Zionist Genocide" as happening to the Zionists is difficult. Not a reliable rule though, someone could use "genocide" that way I suppose.

> Zionists can't really be genocided

What I see in dictionary is "rational or national group". I guess Zionism does not fall under "national group". I still think the usage is still wrong, unless you can find an example where it is used that way.

In any case this thread justification of how it is okay to attack jews or israelis (or tell me it didn't happen if you have better information than me) for being jews after oct 7 and israeli government response is crazy. Like I'm Russian and I don't support Ukrainian war (by the way not the only shitty thing russian government does, see criminalization of LGBT people etc) so what now, should I be targeted and shouted at by people with signs because of something I can't change? Should I hide my rusianness? At a place I live and study at? Sure it's probably wrong/illegal to take away grants for this but if I was a student at a uni would that be a hostile environment? I kind of think so.

I would say free speech must have some standard in civilized community, but since someone said that hate speech is protected on public uni campuses in US then I can say nothing.

Again tell me if I am wrong and Jews were not personally attacked for being Jews after oct 7. I have a vague understanding of what happened.

What about the hostile environment to the students who protested?

What about it? You tell me, I was not there. I literally posted requesting info...

If you’re genuinely interested in truth, I can tell you that I personally visited the protest site at UCLA in order to get an unfiltered view or what was happening. The signage I saw was largely of the form “End Genocide” or “Divest”. There were also signs criticizing e.g. the border wall with Mexico. A lot of it was critical of Israel, as well as the United States and even the University of California, but none of it was anti-Jewish. In fact there were a few signs of the form “Jews Against Genocide”.

Thanks for data point. So if this is what they take away grants for then yeah it's not a good look...

> "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."

So... did the dean make a public Nazi salute or something? The double standard (if we can even call it a "standard") is getting rather tiring.

uh, no, the president has just claimed that the uni was not horrible enough to pro-palestine protestors and so he'll be randomly withholding federal money until they bend to his pathetic will and permanently destroy the independence of the university by letting his cronies rule it.

> Background: UCLA violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "by acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."

Translation: ULCA declined to violate the First Ammendment and allowed their students and faculty to criticize Israel.

It’s more akin to the civil rights movement/counter movement when some universities ignored various assaults on black students (saying it wasn’t their job to police behavior).

The protesters were fine to criticize Israel, but then turning the rage to the actual American Jews on campus crossed the line.

Provide evidence from reputable sources.

Israeli Jews kill tens of thousands of Palestinian children and we are supposed to care that Zionists feel targeted by the protests on campus? Zionists are literally starving people right now. Do you not get that?

There's a distinction to make between Jewish people and Israel.

Jewish people are fine. The Israeli genocide of Gaza is not.

> There's a distinction to make between Jewish people and Israel.

Lots of Jews don't seem to know that.

I said Israeli Jews. I didn’t say Jews.

Give me a MSM source that claims that student protesters on a UC campus targeted American Jews on campus with their "rage". For this, I do not regard instances where American Jews feel unsafe or threatened to fall under this where they felt that way due to having conflated anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitism, or because of having their own identity enmeshed with modern Israel. (I do not consider identifying with modern Israel part of being an American Jew.)

Preventing Jews from entering the campus and threatening them are not protected by the 1st Amendment — that’s why UCLA settled the lawsuit for millions, because they had a duty to stop those acts.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/29/ucla-lawsuit...

AFAIK the protestors blocked everybody and did not discriminate. And they occupied only individual buildings or sections of campus, entry into campus as a whole was not restricted.

https://x.com/SiaKordestani/status/1785397163662745610

Private actors were preventing people from entering a public part of campus unless they signaled their "anti-Israel" bonafides. The school allowed this to continue, therefore they implicitly supported it.

Nah, the school was just taking the typical "corporate laissez faire" non-position position. It got worse later on when they started expelling the protestors by force. Very disappointing to see a school fighting it's own student body like this.

Which isn't even true, UCLA came down hard on protesters and they did violate the students 1st amendment rights.

why does US law have articles to specifically protect one ethnic group instead of being generic and protecting them all?

They do to my knowledge, the quote is the specific violation of the civil rights act.

They do. The law is literally that you must equally protect all groups

Correct. However, the current administration is interested in enforcing the law about discrimination only against one group.

That's a misguided political party for you.

Looks to me like they've got their sights on a lot more than one group, some are just more obvious than others.

And they aren't even doing that. The administration doesn't give a shit about jewish people. It cares about hurting lefties and has decided that "pro-palestine efforts are anti-semitic" is a cudgel they can use to do that.

I wonder how many jewish researchers lost their funding here and in the other cases. Seems like a misguided approach if this is what they really care about.

Thw law is very obviously being abused here by Trump and his administration to punish unfavored speech and unfavored groups. They dont care about equal protection one bit. They want to punish academics and universities so that Trump et al can controll their speech.

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

Nope, that's more like trumpery. Well-recognized for centuries before the current crop of Trumps was even born:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trumpery

OTOH "Conservatism" is simply the desire to hold on to, or conserve what there currently is, rather than progress toward something different.

Whether the progress is for the better or worse or even if anybody knows for sure.

Truly the opposite of "progressive". Neither one inherently good or bad.

And as can be seen, an indication of the relative greatness of American leaders who can be judged by their ability to wisely balance the interests of all citizens. The US has a history of exceptional true leaders since the beginning, but not every single one. Some have been far from saintly, and some not even suitable for a free country.

Quite a lot of times neither conservative nor progressive seem like as much of a driving force unless their hallmarks are in decline to the point where some things that were perceived as precious to conserve or progress toward or beyond had already been lost to a certain extent, or otherwise under increased threat.

Edit: not my donvote btw

Thank you. We really need to stop letting the fascists/reactionaries cloak themselves in this label of conservative. They're a radical reactionary movement with the main goal of tearing down our societal institutions and effectively destroying America's standing in the world - the polar opposite of conservatism.

Letting them continue to think of themselves as conservative assuages their own cognitive dissonance as to what they're actually supporting. It's plainly dishonest to call all of our institutions corrupt, point to some imagined rosy snapshot of the past 70+ years ago, and then claim you're merely conservative. The conservative slogan would be Keep America Great. Theirs isn't.

One of the things parties around the world have been successful at (as opposed to creating favorable law) is distorting and watering down other parties from within. Labor is anti laborer. Democrats are anti democrat, republicans hate the free market, conservatives want to change everything etc

Did Terence Tao or the other researchers whose grants have been suspended violate Title VI? This just seems like dishonest excusemaking for extortion. UCLA would dispute that they violated Title VI, so the Trump regime is pulling out a bat and breaking their researchers' kneecaps until they agree to give in.

Additional Background: US government provides funding, US government tries to use that leverage to decide how the show will be run.

Over the years I've come to accept the blind spot most people have where, despite all evidence, they assume that the government goals match their own. But it still isn't the case. The prudent approach is to set up institutions that are largely independent of government. Government funding is not an answer to long term problems. Governments are too fickle and the political bandwidth isn't high enough to handle complex arguments like whether researching structure in sequences of 0s and 1s is a good idea.

I know the fashion is to present Trump as some weird aberration but he's been a factor for about 10 years now and won his 3rd election pretty convincing margins. Nobody can say they are surprised that the US government is behaving erratically if it is an environment where Trump is a top contender for high office.

But government funding was set up in a way meant to counteract fickleness. Government actions are supposed to be proposed publicly, accept and consider public comments, and then allow legal arguments about the process and motivations. And funding is assigned by Congress, two legislative bodies with hundreds of members that follow extensive rules and procedures to do anything.

The current "fickleness" is from a single individual. The other branches of government are refusing to check out even criticize his actions. This is what would happen with any funding from individuals. The lesson we should be taking from this situation is either (1) controls on the government need to have more teeth and not rely solely on politicians, or (2) the US accepts authoritarianism right now and no Constitution would stop that.

> The current "fickleness" is from a single individual. The other branches of government are refusing to check out even criticize his actions.

Leading to the observation that it isn't a single individual. It is a large number of people agreeing on what the political priorities are.

> Government actions are supposed to be proposed publicly, accept and consider public comments, and then allow legal arguments about the process and motivations.

The Trump people have done all that on the way to where we are right now. It's been quite hard to escape the debate over the last decade or so. It was heated, public and quite interesting to follow. There were at least 3 elections involved (realistically a lot more, the internal mechanisms of the Republican party have been active), and his opponents have been comprehensive in their analysis of his flaws and the issues with his policies.

> Government funding is not an answer to long term problems

It has been said that government funding is the worst form of funding except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time

>> won his 3rd election

Really - I think that more or less confirms your bias.

Reads as "won the 3rd election in which he has participated". Your assumptions betray your own.

no, it does not read as that

He lost his 2nd election but won his 3rd election.

How else do you propose to word it? As far as I'm concerned anyone reading it differently is suffering from very obvious bias.

An important aspect of intellectual discourse is interpreting any ambiguities in the most favorable manner for the other party. Or alternatively, if the matter is relevant to the central point then requesting clarification.

> Government funding is not an answer to long term problems.

Funding from private sources who are usually more short-sighted and less transparent can't be the alternative. An alternative I can think of are international entities that have some semblance of independence from constituent nations. I think that for a democratic government, public funding is alright, as long as the government is, well, healthy. In this light the issue with funding is simply a symptom of a government that does not serve its citizens well, which is the root cause that must be cured.

> US government provides funding, US government tries to use that leverage to decide how the show will be run.

Pray tell where are the examples from previous administrations of how billions of dollars in funding was yanked or suspended from multiple colleges until they paid "settlement fees" just to make it go away and get their funding restored, without even any due process.

Yes, the gov have always exercised some pressure on institutions or shifting funding towards their priorities. But no one but Trump has engaged in blatant mafia-style extortion.

He has only won two elections. In the first one, he lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote. In the second one, he did win the popular vote by 1.5%, which is hardly a convincing margin.

You're right, Trump is not a weird aberration; he's a natural progression of the Republican Party since at least Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s. I never thought I would live to see the John Birch Society go from radical crazies to mainstream

You state politicians' accusations without due process as fact.

> settles the issue

pays an extortion fee; lets call it what it is

once Columbia capitulated, it was clear Trump would come after everyone else

> UCLA violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "by acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."

Weird in that the main victims here actually pro-Palestinian students and the main attacker got a plea deal just a few days ago:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-30/ucla-mov...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-28/ucla-pro...

> UCLA violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act

Yes, I was just reading that in a DOJ press release authored by known prevaricator AG Pam Bondi.

The Trump administration alleges they violated the Equal protection clause, they haven't proven their case (and will try with all their might to avoid going to court over this). This is just more goon tactics by Trump, it should not get any more legitimacy than that.

The past year has been utter chaos, madness, and sadness for STEM in the US. I hope that Tao's grad students don't suffer from this too much in the immediate term. In the long term, all science is being harmed greatly, and we are causing a gigantic bubble in the pipeline of the production of scientists, most severely damaging those who are graduating soon.

>most severely damaging those who are graduating soon.

When Nixon was getting ready for his recession it was pretty bad too.

It was not like this. Nixon was not dismantling science and engineering.

>dismantling science and engineering.

Not directly, I admit that was just collateral damage.

About like these NSF grants are situated within the big picture.

Nixon is starting to look like a saint these days

It's been 6 months....

It has felt like years a few weeks in.

> The past year has been utter chaos, madness, and sadness for the US.

FTFY.

It's ok, USA doesn't need mathematicians after the AGI is built. If you need to compute something just ask AGI. The subscription, of course, will cost you multiple lifetimes' worth of the minimum working wage (luckily you could take a credit that will be payed off by multiple generations of your descendants), but you know, the progress can't be stopped!

You know... yesterday, I asked Google if Arnold Schwarzenegger was the tallest Mr Olympia of all time at 6'2. Their AI assistant told me that, no, he was not the tallest as there were several Mr Olympias who were taller at 5'5, 5'6 and 5'7. Just now? "No, Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the tallest Mr. Olympia. While he is a well-known and successful bodybuilder, his height is 6'2" (1.88m), which is not the tallest among Mr. Olympia winners. The tallest Mr. Olympia is likely Ronnie Coleman, who is 5'11" (1.80m)."

I'm really not too concerned about being replaced in the next couple months at least.

Are you talking about Google Search's AI summary? I don't know what model they use for that, but I tested Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (the smallest of Google's current models), and it got the answer right.

The physician's assistant recorded my height last week as 5'13". I'm worried now about "I" in general, not just "AI".

Maybe that would be more like "NI", for Natural Intelligence.

That's not very accurate terminology every time either, more like "lack of NI" ;)

I've been worried about that for a while before AI came up on the radar :)

I continue to find it fascinating that essentially none of the public American elite actually have any values at all. for all the whinging about "free speech" and "free markets" and "freedom from government", approximately everyone has rolled over and is publicly fine with the president ruling like a king - using laws and regulations to enrich and ennoble favoured courtiers, to punish his imaginary enemies and to destroy institutions and relationships with the world that annoy him. this is literally centuries of hard work by hundreds of millions of past Americans being blown up because one rich cunt doesn't like foreigners or loud students or science but does like getting massive bribes and praise.

The problem is even if they had values, American voters chose to elect someone without values.

I do not understand this griping about rolling over when over half the nation votes for a treasonous leader. At that point, the only option left is war.

that's an insane pov.

is it really your sincere proposition that after an American presedential election, there should be no expectation of anyone to criticise the winner, no matter what they do? really?

The context of this discussion is a university doing what it needs to gain access to money from the federal government.

>approximately everyone has rolled over

I did not say anything about not criticizing the winner. An "elite" can criticize all they want, but for day to day actions, when the opposing side has all 3 branches of government, willingly given to them by the majority of the population, I can't blame someone for not sacrificing themselves.

My point is this isn't some small group of radicals that weaseled their way in, this is more than half the "country" (if you can call it that), seeing the first term and really his whole life, and saying we want more of this chaos.

Edit: Yes, I know the nominal votes do not add up to half the voters, but practically, if you are to bet on the level of support you would get from opposing the winner, surely you are going to assume the non voters will be fine with however you are treated by the winner, especially this winner with his well known track record.

Effectively, I would expect support of far less than half of my fellow citizens. If you can't be bothered to vote, you're definitely not going to be bothered to do anything more.

> more than half the "country"

2024 voting-eligible population: 244.6M

Voted for Trump: 77.3M

Voted for Harris: 75M

Voted for other candidates: 2.6M

Eligible to vote, but didn't vote: 90M

Unfortunately, the largest constituency continues to be the "can't be fucked to vote" party.

> the largest constituency continues to be the "can't be fucked to vote" party.

It's not that straight-forward as it's not a popular election. Why bother to vote if you live in a deep red or blue state? You can make some sort of abstract argument about civic duty or whatnot, but ... the end result is your vote doesn't matter except for "candidate X got more votes!" type internet arguments.

> You can make some sort of abstract argument about civic duty or whatnot

I wouldn't say it's terribly abstract. If we don't do anything, we probably shouldn't expect results.

Over half the nation did not vote for Trump. 77M people of a total population of 340M did, which is around 23%. Trump didn’t even get over half of the total votes cast (49.8% vs. 48.3%). You are free to be dismayed by these numbers, but please stop supporting the notion that “more than one out of every two people you meet in the US voted for Trump”, it is wildly untrue and really misrepresents the strength of the movement.

When the stakes are this high, not voting is voting for the winner.

By not voting, they are signaling they are fine with the situation, and will not stand with any opposition to the winner.

Edit to respond to below comment due to hitting posting limit:

>98M of the 185M total population of non-voters had the pretty rock solid excuse of not being eligible to vote, right? Almost a third of the country can’t vote (permanent residents, children, ex-cons in certain states, etc.)

Children seem irrelevant to consider, especially with voting trends of the youngest generations. Same with permanent residents and ex-cons, I don't see any reason these would have cast votes in different proportions. The most damning thing is this is after already seeing the evidence of 2017 to 2020 and the response to Jan 6, 2021.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...

>55% of White naturalized citizens voted for Trump in 2024, compared with 41% in 2020.

>51% of Hispanic naturalized citizens voted for Trump, up from 39% in 2020.

>46% of Asian naturalized citizens voted for Trump, an increase from 35% in 2020.

>This is without needing to get into the very real voter suppression effort that took place (we’ll assume every one of those “stands” with the winner).

I am assuming the number of people whose votes were prevented were negligible in comparison to the number of people who were apathetic (or boycotting).

>They also probably skew more to your position given their demographics.

A valuable lesson I have learned from 2016 and 2024 elections is that this is not true. What is most important is that people's feelings about their status relative to others not be disturbed (i.e. man over woman and white over non white), and the candidate willing to preserve that, no matter how horrible, is likelier to win more votes.

>I am not sure why you insist on going out of your way to dramatically overrepresent the size of your opposition

Obviously, the measure of the size of the opposition is subjective, and people are free to make bets as they see fit. However, based on the aforementioned "rolling over", it seems others are making the same bet I am.

You’re aware that, just for starters, 98M of the 185M total population of non-voters had the pretty rock solid excuse of not being eligible to vote, right? Almost a third of the country can’t vote (permanent residents, children, ex-cons in certain states, etc.) This is without needing to get into the very real voter suppression effort that took place (we’ll assume every one of those “stands” with the winner). These people may not be able to vote, but they’re still people, and able to participate in the political process in other ways, and thus not worth ignoring (for example, they can donate). They also probably skew more to your position given their demographics.

I am not sure why you insist on going out of your way to dramatically overrepresent the size of your opposition. If there’s some sort of underdog psychology you are trying to tap into, you should maybe also consider the possibility that staunchly presenting the current situation as “we’re outnumbered and most of our population stands with these abhorrent values” may actually be more demoralizing than invigorating as a battle cry, which is even more of a shame when it isn’t true.

Australia has compulsory voting at 90%+ participation and elects conservatives, by the standards of their politics, all the same. The opposite of what you're saying is probably true: if Democrats would focus less on the demographics-turnout based election model that has lost them 3 presidential and many, many congressional elections, they would win more often.

I'm not making a demographics-turnout based election model argument?... I'm simply stating the, IMO objective fact, that dividing the number of people that voted for Trump by the total population is 23% and not 51%, and even dividing that number by the number of people that voted is 49.8%. I've made no statements whatsoever about what Democrats should focus on. I don't know where this is coming from, my only critique is that it is unnecessarily demoralizing to state as fact that the majority of the population voted a certain way when it simply isn't true. Look, you are allowed to believe that if everyone voted the result would have gone that way, you can also like OP assign blame to non-voters if you so choose, but just say that instead of misstating a voting percentage.

Separately, I honestly don't even know what possible strategy could be inferred from my statement. That I think that ~70% of the population might be open to your message? That I think we should tell people that more people are on their side than they know? Does that sound like a turnout-based strategy?

I think for the past 20 years or so, possibly longer, American politics has been hijacked by people who are just interested in making money for themselves, full stop. Any benefit they provide to the public is incidental, anything they say is lip service. Maybe there are a couple exceptions, such as Bernie, but even he is a millionaire, not an ordinary person.

But yeah, it's just people who are trying to maximize how much money they can get into their pockets. They don't care about the public. They don't care about anything. Democrat, Republican, it's all the same.

The country born out of the scientific enlightenment is eagerly devolving back into medieval mindlessness.

For people despising the Muslim world, those people are working hard to reproduce their fate: going from the most enlightened place on earth to religious obscurantism.

Another way to say that would be: the USA is finally doing to itself what it did to Iran. Toppling a liberal democracy in favor of an authoritarian cult of personality with the support of a fanatic religious sect.

I don't know why people keep painting this conjuncture as some sort of aberration in American history. Intolerance and domination of religion and conservative ideological positions over the state and public sphere is actually the norm, not the exception, if you look back on the 20th century history. From the 60s through the 90s is the exception, really.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bertrand_Russell_Case

One of my earliest memories was staying up late on a Sunday night to see Neil and Buzz on the moon. Now, in the same country that could once put them there, I have to defend that it even happened. Basic health measures like pasteurization and vaccination are under direct attack. It's been a long shitty decline into madness, and it's just accelerating.

You and I both grew up during times when it was acceptable to persecute homosexuals, hit your kids in public and private, and it was "controversial" for women to take jobs other than bank tellers or airline stewardesses.

And we filled our gas tanks with leaded gas and people smoked in windowless restaurants.

While I'm not happy how the world is going right now, it's also important to take stock of where we've been.

It is comparatively easy for a mathematician to relocate, given that, like most scientists, they already have world spanning international networks, and unlike other sciences there is no need for expensive lab equipment. Stuff like LIGO is hard to move around, but there is plenty of places in the world that have a good math library.

I'm guessing that Terence really wants to be surrounded by thinkers of his calibre. So he gravitated to the ivy league. Perhaps in the future there will be a new gravity well where these minds congregate?

That there should be only 8 places in the world where you can find elite thinkers, all located in the US, is such extreme American nationalism and straight up ignorant.

Very very funny.

We can thank Hitler for the exodus of academics to the US and for the creation of the Israel/Palestine issue (without the holocaust/ww2, the state would never had been made).

Yeah. We've coasted for a long time on importation of geniuses and on being the only un-bombed industrial nation ... in 1946.

And now we've largely closed the door to geniuses from wealthy countries. (Why take the risk of living in the USA right now?) We've even taken the first few steps towards deliberately driving out the geniuses we have. I didn't expect that even six months ago.

Academic institutions in the last decade or two started pre-filtering based on ideology goals before taking into account actual research. In general the system was veering off as the massive bureaucracy gained mission creep.

So I hear. But how much has that really affected medicine, math, physics, chemistry, engineering? And is destroying universities altogether really the solution?

What do you mean?

Zionism and Jewish colonizing of Palestine started before WW1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism

Yes, but they didn't steal the land until after WW2. What happened in the decades before WW2 is a strong warning to everybody about what can happen when you have mass immigration of young radicals of military age.

Israel/Palestine started long before WW2.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/World-War-I-and-a...

Yes, but the final push was due to Germany’s neighbors passing the buck on helping fleeing Jews. After the world learned the consequences of that, the political will to create the state was cemented.

Jews were already migrating to British Mandate since the 1900s (read about the Aliyah). Even without Hitler, communist expansion would have resulted in a World War 2 (with different players) and a mass Jewish exodus (from Russia, which happened later on in our timeline). Jews were already carrying out terror attacks on both Palestinians and British troops and Britain was already stretched thin after WW1.

The creation of a rogue Israel happened with decolonization, and while it might have been delayed, was inevitable.

We won't know if Israel would or wouldn't have been created if the Holocaust hadn't happened, but Jewish immigration to Palestine started much earlier in response to renewed pogroms and rising antisemitism in the late 19th / early 20th century. Already in the 1920s there were tensions and occasional eruptions of violence in Palestine.

Stop and think about this rationally for a minute. A first-rate school needs to have an American football team. Otherwise it's basically not in any league.

Don't tell CalTech...

MIT also. Football is such a distraction in the US (I went to a school with a good football team, and people ask me how many games I attended...I can answer none).

That's not what the person said. Give a little bit of the benefit of the doubt when interpreting posts. Using the context of a person who grew up and was educated in the Anglosphere. Obviously the ivy league is going to be one of the more attractive options for finding a larger group of elite mathematical researchers. They have a ton of funding compared to most places and draw in many other brilliant people from around the world. That doesn't mean there's no elite thinkers anywhere else, just that it's inevitably going to be a strong contender for where a very bright person looking for that kind of environment would consider.

Sure, there's also two such places in the UK.

Thing is, I do find myself missing the one I spent nearly a decade living in, because such networks are self-sorting and I didn't realise how rare it was until I failed to find it again after leaving.

(Still, Berlin is doing me good in almost all other aspects besides being able to accidentally find I've moved right around the corner from the same pub frequented by the author of PuTTY and a co-author of the proof that Magic The Gathering is Turing-complete and one of the Debian project leaders (seriously, all three went to the same pub, and I didn't know before I moved to Cambridge the first time back in 2007)).

> there's also two such places in the UK

Oxford and Imperial?

Hah! No, the reason I'd say against Imperial isn't the college itself (but even then, is still third on the list of Oxbridge and), it's similar to why I'm not tripping over smart people here in Berlin: fantastic public transit means the smart people aren't all squished together.

Town and gown, massive town. Diluted organisational opportunity, less room for serendipity in meeting fellow nerds of whatever topic of interest.

That said, I do not know the social organisational structures of much of the USA, so it's plausible that this reasoning doesn't work because the USA has the same spread-out-ness from all the cars, or perhaps everyone in both just knows how to find the nerdy and geeky Schelling points…

But (Old) Cambridge? Geeking opportunities are as densely packed in Cambridge as archeology is within 2km of the Parthenon in Athens. Oxford certainly looks similar to Cambridge in this regard. At least, when I visited, as a tourist, given I didn't live in Oxford at any point.

With the caveat that I have degrees from Oxford and Cambridge but not Imperial

> but even then, is still third on the list of Oxbridge

Is this still true? Any ranking I’ve seen recently generally has it right up there. It feels like it’s a name recognition thing rather than quality meter at this point, like Caltech vs MIT.

Your points about geography are well taken though.

> Any ranking I’ve seen recently generally has it right up there.

Really? Hm.

The listings I've seen, and the first I found, were UK-focused ones, which put Oxford and Cambridge in the top two, sometimes with others as joint-second, then after that Imperial, e.g. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universiti...

But to support your claim, I did just find an international ranking that is confusing me by giving rankings for 2026, and for 2025 and 2026 puts Imperial before (and previous years, behind) both of Oxbridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QS_World_University_Rankings

> So he gravitated to the ivy league. Perhaps in the future there will be a new gravity well where these minds congregate?

Doesn't he work at UCLA?

Currently he is at UCLA which is technically not an Ivy League place but a public ivy. As for thinkers of equal caliber, he is probably quite alone anyway. But if you look at the list of Fields medalists, there is a lot of europeans in that list who are still in europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal#List_of_Fields_me...

Not every mathematicians has the fame of this person. I don't know much about Terrance to be frank, only red a few posts that landed on HN homepage. That's enough to grasp the level of fame he enjoy, I guess.

relocate for 250k?

This. Someone like this could maybe come up here to Canada, and enjoy slightly a more sane political/cultural climate, but they won't be getting this kind of funding. Academics here are already barely holding on, and even in the best of times there has never been the kind of flow of cash available in the US for scientists and intellectuals.

I imagine a similar story applies to the UK and other places in the Anglosphere

Unfortunately, very true. I think Canada ranks last in the G7 on GDP-percentage science funding. Salaries seem to be OKish, maybe similar to Germany, but cost of living (mainly housing, food is comparable cheap) in Vancouver and Toronto is very high.

UK salaries are atrociously bad. Not sure about funding, but it doesn't seem to be great.

We are getting a lot of very qualified Americans applying for our open positions in Europe. Assuming we are not a special case, it looks like a lot of smart people are looking at options beyond the US.

Public support for Israel is steadily falling; this poll was published just a couple of days ago https://news.gallup.com/poll/692948/u.s.-back-israel-militar... and other G7 countries are moving to recognise Palestine.

So will the administration's push to use pro-Israel reasons to censure and penalise the universities steadily get out of touch with what the public want and sympathise with?

What does “recognizing Palestine” even mean?

This is breaking news over the last few days. Some of the coverage https://www.ft.com/content/2fe65dbf-65a5-41f3-aaab-5661c0146...

Sure, but what kind of action does it imply? North Korea is recognized by (almost?) every country too, but that doesn't mean anyone is hurrying to provide aid to starving North Koreans. Similarly the international recognition of Azerbaijan and Armenia did nothing to prevent one from taking Nagorno-Karabach from the other earlier this year.

So "recognizing the Palestinian state" is all good and well, but unless anyone also gets off their butts and actually does something then the situation in Gaza won't actually change.

Yes, recognizing Palestine should be a very simple and uncontroversial thing. And yet.

It’s noble of you to say that countries might as well not recognize Palestine because it will do no good, but by and large the Palestinians have a different view and see such recognition as a first step.

This is not at all what my previous comment said. I said that it might be a first step, but that first step doesn't matter if no further steps are forthcoming.

> Sure, but what kind of action does it imply?

A BBC article from a couple of days ago lists about 150 countries that have recognized a Palestinian state, dating back to 1988 (which is, btw, when North Korea recognized it). I don't know what kind of action it implies.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgp5z1vvj5o

Rabid zionists don't want people to recognize Palestine because if Palestine doesn't in some sense exist then in some sense that erases the crime zionists are committing in eradicating Palestine.

It's crazy but that's how it works. Refusal to recognize Palestine is a form of dehumanization, one of the key stages of genocide.

One of the things that makes a country a country is recognition by other countries. Look it up.

As it’s a threat, it’s cheap and easy words to pacify growing hostility within society.

It has nothing to do with helping the Palestinian and Israeli people or holding the Israeli government or Hamas to account.

Tangle has a great breakdown of what this means in their article yesterday: https://www.readtangle.com/emil-bove-trump-lawyer-federal-ju...

Turns out, it's complicated.

Palestinians don't 'recognize' the Palestine that is being recognized. The borders, the leadership, etc. How can a nation recognize a country that that countries' people don't?

the god of israelites is merely (trying to) reassert dominance because

we have invented universal translators, so all humans can talk to all humans. like in the myth of the Tower of Babel, this pisses of god Israel so they're throwing a huge tantrum

Tower of Babel: The Limits of Human Unity and Ambition

The State of Israel: Victims of collective abuse proceed to collectively deliver the abuse they received

the self-perpetuating orphan state, where each orphan is a tragedy and more than that, it's a derelict form of parenting which made sense in the dessert more than 3k years ago

Antisemitism is just an excuse for these actions against universities, it's a pretext. Not a particularly believable one anyway, but that doesn't seem to matter.

The Trump administration is punishing institutions that disagree with it, or that it dislikes for some reason.

MAGA is heavily antisemitic, you absolutely right that this is pretext. They would have picked something else, this is just the best one at the time.

Considering US support to Israel, I wonder if MAGA is Trump or not...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/christian-zionism-israel-anti...

I've never really understood the relationship between the US and Israel. The US gives Israel pretty much whatever it wants and in return the US gets ... nothing? Israel even (deliberately?) attacked a US ship during the 6 day war, with little (if any) consequences:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

>While millions of American evangelical Christians have long been fervent supporters of the Jewish state because of End Times prophecies

Is that the main reason for this incredibly one-sided relationship?

The main reason is geopolitics. Israel is an ally in the Middle East, a key region to US foreign policy.

So is Saudi Arabia. The US doesn't have such a one-sided relationship with them, as far as I can see.

Those apocalyptic prophecies are a big part of it, yes. Many politicians are believers in those prophecies, and many more count on votes from those believers. There's also the whole "God's chosen people" stuff, and a lot of older people think Israel should be given a blank cheque due to WW2 stuff. And of course some of it comes from wealthy donors like Miriam Adelson, a desire to go overboard to distance themselves from the threat of being labelled an antisemite, a desire to paint themselves as more pro-Israel than the other party, etc.

It isn't much comfort that people who believe in apocalyptic prophecies have significant power in a country with a lot of nuclear weapons.

There's also the effectiveness of the Israel lobby. Various pro-Israel organisations fund almost all members of congress

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Fore...

Yep, zero principles at play here. They would has as happily use “mistreatment of transgender people” as a pretext, despite championing such mistreatment.

It’s all just words as magic spells to justify bad behavior. Semantic content and beliefs aren’t even part of the equation.

it is not an excuse. They are a well represented community in USA and students felt not safe/had different political stance which was enough to push gov to act. How is it different from for instance BLM era with governments, media and democrats punishing some institutions and people that didnt want to say their slogan, were having opposing idea or even just didnt went to publicly bend the knee, ending whole careers and sometimes even killing them without any reason beyond rage? Once again you guys built and used the same tools than Trump is now wielding. A few people that were against biden era politics were pointing this simple fact that by creating a precedent and believing that your cause was righter than the others you just helped your opponent to do the same

What precedent? When did the Biden administration pull funding from universities to control speech it didn't approve of?

democrats didn’t need as they controlled those institutions. they however did it to the police to punish them just like trump did to school. For education, It was their funding and they put in power the people that did the coercion, lied on their resume and instead of having the will to educate the students just pushed down their throats propaganda. if you were against BLM or even a bit vocal about the tactics and negative things they were doing your carrier / studies would have ended and violence was also physically ok.

why do you think no major company care about it anymore? why diversity HR teams or Sustainability teams are getting disbanded? why do we have “sydney sweeney has good jeans” ads now while we had overweight models during biden Era? we are living through a different propaganda era that the market decided to follow like the previous one just to bank on it.

Democrats don't actually control those universities though. That's like saying Republicans control churches because churchgoers are more conservative on average. But we all know the Republican party isn't actually directing churches across the country, just as Democrats aren't directing universities.

So I don't see what kind of precedent was set as far as use of executive power goes. You're saying because BLM happened (which was under Trump BTW), that gives Trump the right now to control speech at universities?

  That's like saying Republicans control churches because churchgoers are more conservative on average.

Anyone can walk into a church and become part of the congregation.

Universities have gatekeepers.

There are many paths to college, and they require neither membership in nor adherence to ideals professed by the Democratic party. College campuses across America have people from every demographic axis - every race, religion, ethnicity, country, socioeconomic status, etc. Amongst them frequently are conservatives and white men. This is because the gate universities keep is based on merit, not ideology.

Indeed, many Republican congresspeople were accepted into and graduated from prestigious ostensibly "Democrat controlled" institutions, despite their conservative beliefs.

  This is because the gate universities keep is based on merit, not ideology.

Many US universities have required prospective employees to demonstrate their adherence to preferred ideological stances, during processes for hiring and promotion.

This is widely documented:

https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-statement-use-di...

I have read information about these mandatory statements on official web sites of universities themselves, so I know the issue isn't a fabrication.

Separately, SCOTUS found in both SFFA vs. Harvard and SFFA vs. UNC, that these universities did not admit students based solely on merit, but also discriminated against some individual students due to their race.

  Amongst them frequently are conservatives and white men.

Funny you should say that. A few days ago, a conservative white man filed a complaint against Cornell. He alleges (supported by written evidence) that Cornell deliberately set out to hire a non-white person for a particular role, and did so by making a shortlist of candidates without even advertising the role. More details here:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/cornell-university-discriminated...

> Many US universities have required prospective employees to demonstrate their adherence to preferred ideological stances, during processes for hiring and promotion

That does not mean the Democrats control hiring decisions at universities. This would be like saying the Republican party controls CFO hiring decisions because corporations might filter for people who are fiscally conservative.

All organizations look for "culture fit" when making hiring decisions, and the culture of a university is one that is typically open and accepting of people from all walks of life. It's counterproductive to hire who think "empathy is a fundamental weakness" for example. They don't fit well with fostering a welcoming educational environment for young people, so typically we look for some degree of empathy in candidates, people who want to build community, foster individuals, and yes, who value diversity.

Notably, this filter is not very good at preventing conservatives from being hired and promoted and admitted to universities, because that happens every day.

> but also discriminated against some individual students due to their race.

This thread is about Democrats ostensibly controlling schools. That some schools were found by a court to racially discriminate in their admitting practices is unrelated, nor does not show affiliation to the Democratic party was used as a filter for hiring or admit decisions.

> a conservative white man filed a complaint against Cornell.

Well, no. From the link you provided:

  I’m an evolutionary biologist, a liberal

Anyway, diversity statements were never about being a political litmus test. Diverse hiring pools are not a white filter. These are just something butthurt people say when they get an outcome they don't like. This seems more a case of a failed scientist being rejected for a tenure track role and blaming discrimination instead of his middling research agenda.

You said this in an earlier comment:

  There are many paths to college, and they require neither membership in nor adherence to ideals professed by the Democratic party.

I have examples to show why I believe that to be incorrect.

I'm not saying that people have had to show adherence to (or loyalty to) the Democratic Party. But they have had to show support for positions and ideologies that are part of the Democratic Party's platform.

In your last paragraph, you dismiss Colin's complaint, without acknowledging the wrongness of the process that I outlined. Instead of seeking the best person for the job, the school made a list of people using race as one of the filtering criteria, and went down the last until someone accepted the job.

The fact you didn't engage with the major point I made here suggests you're more interested in winning an argument, than in furthering your or my understanding of the truth.

I am not interested in trying to win an argument. Your replies are not helping me to develop my thinking. So this will be my last reply.

Have a great day!

> But they have had to show support for positions and ideologies that are part of the Democratic Party's platform.

Even if we just agree that's what's happening here, the overlap of ideology doesn't imply control over the institution or process by the party, because you haven't shown any causality. What's to say university policy isn't influencing the Democratic party's platform?

Anyway, that's not what's happening. People qualified for these positions have no problem answering those questions and getting accepted to these institutions despite any conservative political leanings.

The evidence for this is that conservatives are well represented on campuses across America. They're not a ideological filter placed there by the Democratic party to keep conservatives out of college. They're a tool that colleges came up with on their own to help with culture fit.

> In your last paragraph, you dismiss Colin's complaint, without acknowledging the wrongness of the process that I outlined.

Because you're both misrepresented what's going on. He's doing it because he's upset they didn't hire him. Your opinion is on the basis of what he said, so I don't know what else to add except to wait for the verdict. Either way he's wasn't rejected on the basis of his conservative beliefs.

> Have a great day!

Same.

> Anyway, diversity statements were never about being a political litmus test. Diverse hiring pools are not a white filter. These are just something butthurt people say when they get an outcome they don't like. This seems more a case of a failed scientist being rejected for a tenure track role and blaming discrimination instead of his middling research agenda.

hence why Asian community sued multiple universities for discrimination.

No, those lawsuits were about affirmative action in student admissions, not faculty hiring.

wasnt there a harvard head of faculty that faked her resume and hired through affirmative action?

Democrats don't control these institutions. Look at who is on the boards of these universities (both public and private).

I don't agree, because these actions are part of a bigger pattern of Republicans trying to find ways to ban criticism of Israel. Anti-BDS laws are very popular with the Republican party apparatus and politicians, as well as with older Republican voters.

> Not a particularly believable one anyway, but that doesn't seem to matter

it's well chosen because it's also one that requires no proof, since "anti-semitism" has long been the worst accusation one can make, and one that's very hard to refute without demonstrating unequivocal loyalty to Israel and its actions; it's basically a purity test

When has a dictatorship ever cared about public opinion?

When setting repressive measure to mute any opposition and skyrocketing the budget of their personal security agaisnt all raising threats?

Remember, dictators are never wrong. They can only ever double down.

It's why they are so destructive.

Brian Klaas wrote an interesting article about that, saying that the biggest weakness of dictators/autocrats is that they surround themselves with 'yes men' and quickly lose touch with reality.

Sounds like the tyranny of rocket equation applied to personal security. At some point, the cost to derisk exceeds what is available or logistically feasible.

1793, France. Just ask King Louis XVI.

Is monarchy a dictatorship?

Yes

If they say god appointed the person, is monarchy. If the person say she is going to stay in power because enemies, then it's a dictatorship.

Monarchy just means "rule by one". Dictatorship means, "because I said so".

A king who gets their power from God and can make rules whether or not the people consent is both a monarch and a dictator.

If they have power, yes.

What dictatorship are you referring to?

ALL dictatorships need public support to remain in power. Even medeival kings needed public support from the merchant class.

Well, what they need is obedience, and to obtain it they often reach for the path of spreading fear, doubt, uncertainty, violence, menace, murder, torture, and so on. Sure that's not the less brittle way to grab and retain political power in your claws, as it certainly also foster an environment full of people eager to stab you too death at first possible occasion. But there is not much morale and brillant about greed.

What's going to be interesting is when the next Democratic administration comes into power, they're going to be extremely anti-Israel, given that the Democratic base is fully against Israel now at a 5:1 ratio. There will never be another Democratic President that supports Israel (none of the pro-israel candidates have any hope of ever being President) and this will mean extremely hard anti-Israeli action, using precedent like this to push anti-Islamophobia messages.

You can imagine the next Democrat administration defunding universities based on their collaboration with Israel, for example. Or defunding universities based on their punishment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, etc..

People should accept that Israel lost against Hamas and be prepared for the consequences of that going forward. It's pretty much the same as a Vietnam situation, with the war being won/lost based on public opinion.

Haha, that's funny. What'll really happen is they'll campaign and say one thing, then do another once in office, maintaining status quo for the elite and war machine as they've been doing for decades in tandem with the Republican party, gaslighting the American public at every level.

The party largely fully supports Israel.

I live in Europe and according the common media outlets, the US absolutely, totally, forever support Israel. "largely" is too weak of a word here.

And now honnest question: why is this support so strong in the US ? are the ties with the jewish/israely community so deep between these two peoples ?

The only country the Americans love and worship more than their own country is Israel. I can understand brain dead nationalism for your own country, but brain dead nationalism for another country, especially one doing the things Israel is doing... it's very strange.

There's at least a few factors in play...

Christian sects that believe the second coming of Jesus is not too far away believe that Israel's existence is critical to bring that to pass.

People with anti-muslim or anti-arabian feelings see Israel as a counterweight to muslim and arabian power in the middle east.

There's a lot of people who, consciously or not, equate anything other than total support for Israel with antisemitism.

The real story here is the way Zionism has so deeply and intensely and succesffully managed to tie Jewishness to Israel-iness.

And so many people who are rightfully proud of their Jewish ethnicity and cultural identification -- a rich and beautiful culture that has had absolutely outsized contributions to art, science, culture in the west, with a history of being persecuted and mistreated by said "west" -- have become defacto "citizens-abroad" and advocates for Israeli positions in all things.

That combined with a deep and historical distrust of Islam in western culture...

It's the same story here in Canada. How deep the bank account for this blank cheque is, I don't know.

I should say that as a left wing critic of what happens in the middle east under Israel's banner, I am also deeply uncomfortable with some of the anti-Semitic tinge some forms of the protest take. It's a conundrum.

It is absolutely important to make it clear the criticism is of the actions of Israel, and not "Jews"

You and the other replies focus too much on the Jewish community within the US. Support for Israel is very strong in the US, particularly among Republicans, because of the rise of Evangelical Christians. Evangelicals have ... religious reasons for supporting of Israel. They also strongly identify with Europe and people with European backgrounds. They have an inability to identify with Palestinians.

When it comes to the democratic parties loyalty to Israel I think it's mostly the work of AIPAC that is responsible.

There's some truth to this but it's also an anti-semitic trope. There are a whole bunch of Jewish people on the Left that don't support the current Israeli regime.

Largely as we have people like AOC, Ilhan and Bernie. Maybe a stretch to say they're part of the party.

The Democratic party supports Israel just fine. The party is not run by weirdo academics who can't even remember the Hamas attacks.

The worst that serious Democrats might do is publicly compare Israel's current behavior to the US's lashing out at Afghanistan after the WTC attacks.

The Democratic Party doesn't support Israel at all. The current elected officials do, but not the base. Polls show support for Palestine over Israel at a 5:1 ratio.

This is resulting in current Democratic elected officials being removed from power when their term expires, starting with the US Presidency last year, which was lost BECAUSE of their support for Israel. A YouGov poll earlier this year showed the primary reason Biden 2020 voters didn't vote for Harris was because of Israel: https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling

This is all happening quickly. You won't see any Democratic candidate that supports Israel run for President in 2028.

Sorry, that is a mix of speculative fiction and self-contradiction. The GOP supports Israel at least as strongly as the Democrats do. So how did Harris' support for Israel cost her the election?

Supporting Israel, including acknowledging their right to respond militarily to terrorist attacks, is one thing. Falling deeply in love with Netanyahu's current policies is another. Freaking out and caring only about Hamas is ... a third thing.

Trump got less votes last time than when he lost to Biden. The democrats lost, trump didn’t win. People stayed home.

Good point. I'm not convinced that support for Israel was the issue, though.

There are lunatics in the US who seem to have completely forgotten the 1300-1400 Israelis killed by Hamas just last year, but who can see the human disaster in Gaza. I don't think those people are so politically engaged on that single issue that they deliberately stayed home from the polls and let Trump win ... in order to ... help people in Gaza? I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem to fit together.

EDIT: To be fair those same folks are notorious for shooting themselves in the foot. So who knows?

EDIT 2: Some of the lunatics above are probably anti-Semitic, despite Trump's claims that they are anti-Semitic. But again how does that drive them to help Trump right now?

> completely forgotten

More like the two things aren't even remotely in the same ballpark. Imagine if the US had surrounded Baghdad and intentionally starved the residents. And even that example still fails to account for some of the context.

Sorry? Do you not remember Fallujah?

You mean the siege where the US allowed 70k refugees to leave 10 days in, actively facilitated the entry of aid, and ultimately gave in to the political pressure to relent in slightly over a month? That Fallujah?

For the record I don't doubt for a second that the same people who protest against Israel now would also have been among those campaigning against the US at the time.

Parts of that are true. Parts of it are a bedtime story to help Americans cope with the reality of what our nation did. EDIT: Recall that Iraq had nothing to do with the WTC attacks.

Some people truly try to protest all the horrors of war on all sides, everywhere. Others try to make "Country X" sound worse than anybody else. I don't have your insight into who has what agenda.

From Wikipedia right now:

2024: Trump 77,302,580

2020: Trump 74,223,975

>People should accept that Israel lost against Hamas

It looks to me that the extremists in Hamas gave extremist Israelis the excuse to do what they always wanted to do. And everyone who isn't an extremist lost. Meanwhile, the Hamas leadership are living in 5 star luxury in Qatar.

Relevance to the NSF grant or just practicing whataboutism?

Do you really think the Trump administration is committed to its pro-Israel position? If they flipped sides, how long would it take for 90% of their voters to adjust and be happy again?

Whatever Trump personally feels, he is demonstrably acting in Israel's interests. Maybe they have him blackmailed through Epstein stuff, or maybe he supports Israel due to his family connections or bribes. It doesn't really matter, the end result is the same.

Agreed, but not what I asked.

You asked if the Trump administration is committed to the pro-Israel position. I think they are. There are many potential reasons this is the case, but whichever of them may be true the result is the same.

Given their positions on things like Russia, the Epstein files, free trade, etc. (where the position has changed from things that were either broadly "American" values or positions that Trump directly supported) I would guess it would take a day or two. The core "Trump is infallible" demographic will follow him no matter what. If he said the sun set in the morning, they'd blame the sun when it rose.

It is perhaps the deepest position on the American right now, and extremely unlikely to shift.

To the point that you have people who have politics that derivates from a populist/nativist right wing historical current that was always virulently anti-Semitic, now being the staunchest backers of the current Israeli government.

In the post-9/11 era, hatred of Islam, putting an equals-sign between Jewish and Israeli, and smearing anybody on "the left" who criticizes the actions of the Israeli state as "anti-Semitic", and shoring up the Israeli state with massive financial support ... this is all an ideological bundle that is working extremely well for them.

And is allowing them to siphon off support from "moderate" American Democrat voters who share these biases but not the rest of their ideological bill of goods. It's actually allowed them to build a powerful base of support even when they're doing extremely controversial things.

Nyeah. Maybe. Please don't make me mention an even deeper issue on the US right that is shifting as we speak.

I think this poll is disingenuously quoted here and may not represent public opinion that well.

The questions are very specific rather than general. For example you can disapprove of the military action and the president of a country, but that doesn't mean when asked "pick a winner" you'd pick the other guy.

I mean if the US went to war with North Korea and Pyongyang got flattened, I would certainly disapprove of the US military and the president, but I probably wouldn't consider the other party "winning".

So as always it depends on which question you ask. You can ask questions to get the answer you paid for (speaking as an ex-statistician who worked for a pollster)

Support for Israel among Americans is starkly stratified along generational lines, with young people on both sides of the traditional partisan divide being broadly sick of Israel's shit. This has Israel freaked out, they know their support from America is now on borrowed time and without it, they are doomed. I think this is why they're pushing so hard now, they're trying to secure their strategic objectives (particularly the annexation of Gaza and the eradication of the Palestinian people) before the American baby boomers, their bastion of support, die or otherwise age out of the political process.

Exactly this. Glad someone else can see it. Having studied other settler colonial states (I believe), Israel realizes that Western weapons and doctrine guarantees they'll win every single confrontation with the Palestinians, just like the Rhodesians & Apartheid South Africa. Easily too, with insane KD ratios.

Those two regimes won every battle easily, but what eventually did them in was sanctions. And, when the West sanctions you, you eventually collapse or stay economically irrelevant. Case in point: USSR, Maoist China, Rhodesia, South Africa, etc.

But, the Boomer, Christian Zionist generation is dying out, along with older Germans (and Europeans) who still struggle with some Teutonic guilt.

Irreligious, humanist youngsters across the Americas and Europe now see it's a clear good vs. bad struggle and the Zionists are not the good guys, so Israel likely believes they need to expel the Palestinians from Gaza & the West Bank within one generation or they'll be facing devastating sanctions within 10-20 years.

Given that Israel's economy depends heavily on technology service exports, diamonds, and agriculture, if they don't change posture and end up getting sanctioned, it'll cripple them without a doubt. Just cutting off their technology workers' foreign exchange salaries is enough to shrink the economy by half once that FX channel dries up.

What I don't understand is why not go along with letting at least WB or also Gaza get recognized as Palestine and do what India and Pakistan did going forward. Seems like it would be a lot more likely to work and a lot less risky. Maybe there are some special resources in either place?

A lot of geopolitics that leads to invasion is more about groupthink among whatever ruling class than any actual resource gains.

See Russia->Ukraine, US->Iraq, soon China->Taiwan.

A politically powerful segment of Israel is adamantly opposed to the two-state solution. And the strategic positioning of Israeli settlers over the years on WB land (in violation of signed treaties) has intentionally rendered establishing an independent WB as "logistically impossible" due to "security concerns" (protection of the settlers). There's no way forward without removing the settlers, and removing the settlers is political suicide in Israel, where hard-right parties have an oversized influence in the government.

The poll doesn't ask about support for Israel, it asks about approval for the war in Gaza, a very different question. Easy to disprove of a war that has gone on for this long, while still favoring Israel.

He should go to China, they'd set an entire research institute just for him.

Damn slacker. Who does he think he is, defrauding the people by being an eminent mathematician who also does massive outreach to folks at the almost hobbyist level.

He has a very magnetic personality tbh, on all videos he is cheerful, and enthusiastic at talking about math and science without coming across as a know-it-all.

Would something like this happen if the hostile educational environment was against - say - black people? Or any other ethnic group?

Probably not, but definitely should have.

It's usually favouring blacks heavily. The discrimination is against whites, Asians, natives, non-Socialists, men

I'll give you natives, but men, whites, Asians, and non-socialists can be found in abundance, existing freely and flourishing on any college campus in America.

This is the US not shooting itself in the foot or heart anymore, this one is going straight to the brain. Civilizational suicide.

more like: UCLA grants are targeted by NSF and some of them are suspended including Tao's

This is a patently illegal case of collective punishment by ADL/AIPAC lobby. UCLA is a public institution and should be free of political pandering.

Any alleged incidents of anti-semitism should be litigated individually, based on specific facts thereof, and if proven, then appropriate sanctions imposed on the guilty parties, only.

Not sure I've ever come across an entity that feels they have to explain why or how something is antisemitic.

Hopefully Terence will be able to continue his research in France, we would be more than happy to welcome him!

I really hope Europe has made some plans and put some money on the side for the second american brain drain of this century…

Our money is right there: free healthcare, society valuing equality and justice. It's simply priceless

I think it would be better to tie the grant to the researcher and let them move around if they want. This does not better humanity if they are tied up with a place that is in the political crosshairs by the current administration.

Also, DOGE just doing a blanket cut to NSF research grants was horrible.

This single out Tao but it's UCLA that is attacked. Let's see how US academia is going to react.

250K per year fwiw

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2347850&His...

Related to have a macro view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736458

These grants make up about 75-80% of all NSF grants

Hopefully people will now see the benefit of not centralizing basically all of the power and money on Earth in institutions.

It is extremely annoying how it is a natural fact of life that entities tend to agglomerate and acquire each other, when instead the best way to ensure freedom and openness is through federation.

>Hopefully people will now see the benefit of not centralizing basically all of the power and money on Earth in institutions.

I'm interpreting your comment in the context of scientific institutions being beholden to centralized institutions (i.e. the US federal gov't) via funding. Is that accurate? If so, what's the alternative? The explosion in scientific and technological research in the the 20th century was enabled by the fact that the governments recognized its value and consciously funded it. Prior to that, it was essentially only a small cohort of the aristocracy who saw the value in these pursuits, and was limited by their means and interests.

Yes you are correct in your interpretation. Here's my further opinion:

Those with power and money fund things. Anything else just a name-- "aristocracy", "government/democracy", "private companies".

The reality is, we are all fighting one way or another for the attention and benevolence of those more powerful and wealthy than us, and boy are they fickle. So, you might as well hope for a federation of hundreds of entities, rather than the world we currently have, which is realistically in the dozens at most.

I'd consider that the issue isn't centralisation so much as that can be very useful, but that rich/connected people are not penalised for breaking laws.

It's absolutely bizarre to me that a convicted felon can run for president and apparently win. It's not surprising to then see that position be abused for personal profit and petty revenge.

Centralising research efforts can make a lot of sense if you want to gather the top people to work on related projects (e.g. CERN)

What you are describing seems to me to be a direct side effect of centralization. If the USA was just one country in a sea of two hundred roughly equal countries, the majority would quickly say "we will not allow that person to be a leader".

But since the USA is basically the world's richest and most powerful entity, the rest of the word begrudgingly tolerates the leader that has somehow come to power, simply because they need to keep the money flowing. There's no other spigot in town.

I disagree - we have a general principle around the world that a democratically elected "leader" is the result of the votes from the population and thus should be recognised at representing those people. The problem is when democracy is subverted with various methods such as gerrymandering districts, making it harder for some demographics to vote, removing voter registrations of certain demographics, misrepresentation of facts by the mainstream media etc.

It is a real problem with countries declaring "democratic elections" which are mere shams of democracy.

And why was it possible for that rigging to occur? It sounds like a cop out, but the answer is once again centralization. The operation you described requires money, time, power, coercion, and so on. Isn't that a result of a two party system funded by a few hundred insanely wealthy individuals?

I personally visited the protest site at UCLA while this was happening. It was a huge fenced-off encampment on the main lawn in front of the library. The interior of the encampment was mostly tents, while the boundary of the encampment had signs facing outward for passers-by to read. There were no obstructions or barriers to any buildings, though it would take an extra minute or two to walk around the encampment if you were trying to get to a nearby building. Here are some of the signs I saw:

“We believe that Palestinian rights must be achieved without harm coming to any other group or people”

“My Judaism is not Zionism”

“F** Israel” (without the asterisks)

“Jews Say No To Genocide”

“UC you have blood on your hands”

“Filmmakers for a free Palestine”

“Fund our jobs and education not war and occupation”

“Never again means never again anywhere!”

“Free Palestine” with a drawing of a policeman, gun drawn, facing a soldier on fire; clearly evoking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation_of_Aaron_Bus...

“Israeli against genocide”

“UCLA funds war”

“Our liberations are tied”

“Life in everything yearns for the death of occupation” (had trouble parsing this one)

“From Palestine to Mexico border walls have got to go”

This one’s cut off but it ends with “…violation of international law not anti-Jewish bigotry”

A sequence of maps of Israeli/Palestinian borders in 1947, 1967, present day. The map legend labels are “Palestinian Land” and “Jewish/Israeli Land”. There is also a text-based “timeline” starting in 1948, focusing mainly on Palestinian deaths and displacements.

I expect most people here are (like me) admirers of Terence Tao, and fans of his work.

But, if UCLA is indeed an institution that routinely violate civil rights law, would we still want our taxes to fund it?

For those objecting to any reduction in federal funding, is this because:

A) You believe UCLA complies with civil rights law (perhaps with small, isolated exceptions that are driven not by policy but by rogue employees), OR

B) You believe there should be enforcement of the law, but it should take a different form, OR

C) Something else?

I live in California, and have some interest in state agencies operating within the law, and for the benefit of all.

UCLA, where Terence Tao works, is part of the University of California system (a state school). Like other UC campuses, UCLA receives substantial federal funding.

There are good reasons to believe that UCLA has, for many years, engaged in racial discrimination in both hiring and admissions. But the issue is whether anyone with legal standing can actually take the school to court and win.

IANAL but my understanding is as follows. If an individual were to sue the school, they would need to be an individual student who had applied and been rejected. But any court case would take years. It is likely that, part way through that process, that individual student would have graduated from another college, and no longer be seeking undergraduate admissions. Thus they would lack standing and the case would be dismissed as moot.

That's why in SFFA vs. Harvard, the plaintiff was a membership organization. As Harvard was continuing to discriminate, there were always new members to join the organization who did individually have standing, even as some of the existing members lost standing.

In any civil suit over admissions policies, UCLA holds two major advantages over individual complainants:

- Vast resources: UCLA has deep pockets with which to pay lawyers.

- High stakes: UCLA has a lot to lose.

But the folks who are injured are recent high school graduates:

- Limited financial means: When you were 18yo, could you have scraped together money to pay lawyers? Most 18yo kids wouldn't even have the money to pay the court filing fee.

- Minimal personal upside: By the time any case progresses, these students have already enrolled elsewhere. Transferring to UCLA mid-degree, even if they win, would be disruptive and often undesirable.

UCLA is currently being sued by a membership organization. In a couple of weeks, they will file their response to this complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.95...

One of the people who initiated the lawsuit is Richard Sander, a professor at UCLA: https://law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/richard-h-sand...

Some folks don't like this: https://dailybruin.com/2025/04/21/ucla-law-students-lead-pro...

Racial discrimination in admissions? Prior to SFFA, the admissions process used by major universities was sanctioned by the Supreme Court. And further, UCLA had even stricter rules about race in admissions coming from the state.

  UCLA had even stricter rules about race in admissions coming from the state.

Do you believe that UCLA currently complies with Proposition 209, and has done so since it came into force?

The law that permits the federal government to cancel these grants has less strict requirements than Prop 209. For admissions policies to be a justification here they'd need to be so incredibly flagrantly violating Prop 209 that it'd be a joke.

Under pressure, UCLA commissioned a UCLA professor (Robert Mare) to study the data and prepare a report.

You can read the full report here: https://sard.law/static/sard/pdf/Mare%20Report%202012.pdf#pa...

If you don't want to read the full report, one of the most interesting things is on page 67. It says that North Asians receive lower holistic scores, and African Americans receive higher holistic scores, than similarly situated applicants from other ethnic groups. And this when comparing like with like because (i) it's during 'Final Review' and (ii) Mare's model compared students who were otherwise alike (including on socioeconomic and hardship indicators).

He did a follow up a couple of years later, with newer data, and his findings were the same (although the numbers shifted a bit).

How did UCLA respond to this report? By issuing a press release saying all was good:

  The report confirms that the admissions process at UCLA honors academic achievement and prioritizes acceptance to applicants of exceptional academic accomplishment. Further, data suggest a full range of applicant academic and personal achievements are evaluated by the Comprehensive Review procedure. Professor Mare concludes that the Comprehensive Review ranking for UCLA freshman admissions functions in the manner intended by the faculty and the University. CUAS ...is satisfied with the quality, focus, and rigor of the study.

Sure, the ranking functioned in the manner intended, but that manner was illegal!

The consequences of this Cultural Revolution will be felt for decades.

I would say at least a century

We can agree that decades of soft power are gone. So it’d take twice as much to ameliorate.

> soft power

This term appears to have been redefined by podcast and twitter bros as something really, really bad. They can't define it, but it's bad. Similar to that four letter word that starts with "w."

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. What do you want to call it? Then we can focus the discussion on the issue and not semantics.

For soft power: non-violent projection of national interests and influence.

You would say that based on what?

The effects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution are still very keenly felt in China.

If an alliance decades in the making can be undone in six months it wasn’t much of an alliance in the first place. Just a bunch of countries subsidizing their defense budgets off the backs of the poor and middle class in the US (NATO).

Destroying is much easier than building something, including alliances, trust and deals.

Childish destruction is really in its own category too.

I would say different US leaders over the decades have had varying degrees of financial acumen when it comes to being able to afford things like NATO, without contributing most strongly to pressure on poor & middle class.

Though no doubt a truly rich country has been able to afford it through thick & thin, as long as there is decision-making consistently at above-average levels, with no undercurrents or personal tendencies toward financial incompetence, malfeasance or outright criminality in sight.

When the fool who drops the ball is closer to the top though, expect it to take a whole lot longer to recover the same yardage that was lost, if at all.

Every now and then there are shameful milestones that just can not be recovered from.

Some things you just can't fix.

Let’s not forget the party that does everything possible to help fool and cover for his behaviour and choices.

It’s madness. I’m deadly serious when I call this a Cultural Revolution.

It makes Brexit look like a kindergarten game.

It wasn’t undone in 6 months. This started with the GWOT and ramped up in 2016.

This year was just the tipping point.

No they wont, the AIs which will rule the world decades from now will not care.

It would be like us caring about some chimp wars from time forgotten.

I think a comparison to China's Cultural Revolution is the best analogy for what is happening in the US right now. Ideological purity takes priority over everything else.

[flagged]

Not sure why the religion of genital mutiliation and lying is much better

> Israel is a multiethnic country that achieves high standards of living

Ask the Arabs who live in the country if their standard of living is the same as the rest.

The world's greatest living mathematician has fallen victim to the battle against Thoughtcrime.

Care to provide more context? Does Tao's grants never get rejected?

This is not "rejection" this is cancelling an existing grant.

> Breaking: NSF is suspending roughly 300 grants with UCLA, following a DOJ finding on Tuesday that the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."

https://bsky.app/profile/dangaristo.bsky.social/post/3lvc7ld...

You know the difference between rejection and suspension but not cancellation and suspension?

Rejected is not the same as suspended. Top scientist and mathematicians sometimes submit grants that are rejected. But suspended is another matter

So much for freedom of speech in US Universities. Israel dictates what is forbidden/permitted on US campuses now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao

Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006 and won the Royal Medal and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014, and is a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. Tao has been the author or co-author of over three hundred research papers, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians.

Why is this at the very bottom?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com