Journal: Courage, Cowardice, and Collaboration
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Fascist Propaganda and Cultural Control in the Trumpenreich
While it is only natural for concerned observers to focus on Gestapo kidnapping raids in our streets, or the ongoing transformation of our already-existing migrant carceral complex into literal concentration camps, it is important to remember that the Trumpenreich’s war to transform American culture and its institutions into ideological factories that support the Swine Emperor’s bespoke brand of fascism, is also continuing at an alarming pace. Weaponizing a combination of federal funding, spurious “civil rights” investigations by a white supremacist Justice Department, and even the FCC’s power over mergers and broadcasting licenses, the Pork Reich has actively worked to control the ideological slant of important cultural institutions like the media, and especially American universities. Shamefully, the greedbag executives and cowardly leaders of these organizations have, with only a few exceptions, overwhelmingly surrendered to this ideological interference by a fascist regime that is openly contemptuous of journalists, scholars, and intellectuals.
Recently on this front, Trump threatened to deactivate instruments of federal funding to force the complete capitulation of Columbia University; an institution that it must be noted, already fundamentally agrees with and was happy to enact Trump’s policies targeting anti-genocide protestors and professors on American university campuses for fascist repression. In fact, this ideological alignment towards silencing dissent and protecting the US-backed, Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, is a big part of why I haven’t written more about Columbia and its surrender. After all, a pro-genocide university looking for an excuse to do fascism against its own students doesn’t represent a good case study when you’re trying to answer the question “can our fascist president force higher education to become propaganda organs for his criminal regime?”
From out here, it doesn’t really look like Trump had to to “force” the largely pro-Zionist leadership at Columbia to do much of anything, and given the conditions placed on the school by the fascist Trumprenreich going forward, I think it’s an open question whether or not you can even call Columbia a university anymore at all. As it turns out, one of the most respected scholars that has ever graced the halls of Columbia, Rashid Khalidi, feels the same way – and as such, the Palestinian-American historian and Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, has cancelled his special guest lecture series at the school for this upcoming fall.
I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump
“Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.”
Although it is not the primary reason I’m highlighting his open letter, I’d just like to take a moment to congratulate professor Khalidi for having the courage so many of his colleagues at compromised higher education institutions around the country have lacked, to both denounce Trump’s fascist takeover of higher education, and refuse to be complicit in the institutionalization of the Swine Emperor’s ethnonationalist fantasies as official history and educational policy. Khalidi, and the type of honest, anti-colonial, anti-genocide scholars he’s delivering to the American higher education system are absolutely in the crosshairs of this entire fascist project to seize control of our cultural institutions and output; taking a stand here, probably signals the end of his long and illustrious career in American academics. Of course it probably doesn’t hurt that the seventy six year old Khalidi is already retired, and as the professor points out quite aptly, it’s pretty hard for him to teach a course about his specialty, modern Middle Eastern history, under the blatantly ideological confines the Trump regime has placed on Columbia anyway.
“Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews. Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings.
Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.”
Still, if educators in America had either half a brain, or half a heart, a great many more university professors would be refusing to teach at institutions collaborating with a fascist regime to subvert truth, journalism, and scientific reality this fall. Professor Khalidi isn’t wrong when he points out that the suits running Columbia have allowed their university to be transformed into a militarized security zone, and a fascist propaganda machine that fundamentally inverts the role of educators in our society – an “anti-university” as the professor noted. Not only is it impossible for a genuine educator to function under those conditions, but even attempting to do so will likely result in open fascist collaboration with an increasingly Third Reich-esque Trump regime. Society has a term for people who only collaborated with the Third Reich to spread racist, eliminationist, antidemocratic propaganda for a paycheck; that term is “Nazi propagandists” and history doesn’t speak of them kindly.
Finally, I would also like to draw attention to the mechanisms Khalidi describes by which the regime is conducting the transformation of Columbia into a fascist ideological outpost. While the regime’s deal with Columbia represents the most abject surrender to Trump’s agenda by an “institute of higher education” to date, the terms the administration and the university have agreed to should look pretty familiar to anyone who has studied how the Swine Emperor is exerting control both inside the US government, and the cultural institutions his executive powers allow him to influence.
“It has accepted an “independent” monitor of “compliance” of faculty and student behavior from a firm that in June 2025 hosted an event in honor of Israel. According to Columbia’s agreement with the Trump administration, this “Monitor will have timely access to interview all Agreement-related individuals, and visit all Agreement-related facilities, trainings, transcripts of Agreement-related meetings and disciplinary hearings, and reviews.” Classrooms are pointedly NOT excluded from possible visits from these external non academics.”
While the terminology changes slightly from institution to institution, this practice of installing Trump-loyal ideological Czars or snitches throughout institutions the Swine Emperor seeks to control, is becoming a noticeable pattern. This is the method by which the Trumpenreich seized control of normally independent government commissions like the FCC, and it appears to be part of their plans going forward for controlling both higher education institutes like Columbia, and large American media corporations like CBS; both of whom just agreed to install a Trump-loyal rat inside their power structure recently. The installation of what amounts to regime-controlled ideological policing inside cultural institutions isn’t a new idea, but it’s certainly not one that’s compatible with anything that could reasonably be called democratic life.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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