True, not much data yet, but a cery real day to day factor for conference organizers. We have had two Canadians skip a US conference last month due to the dramatical worse general climate. Zoom instead. This is NOT just about immigration and passport control. It is the new ugly American zeitgeist that changes enthusiasm.
We will probably be skipping the US for two international conferences I have helped organize. Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax are all great alternatives for larger meetings from 2027 ti 20??.
The 2nd, and supposed to be final, term of the current US President is scheduled to end on Jan 20th, 2029.
I am hopeful that my fellow Americans will elect a responsible, intelligent, virtuous leader in 2028 to be sworn into office on that day.
I know I'm asking a LOT. However that's one of, if not the most, important jobs in the world. We all deserve to have someone at least that qualified there.
The trust is already gone. He was voted in twice and there was enough support for the party as a whole that none of the other branches of government can contain him.
Plus he said that he intended to make the changes such as his supporters would never need to vote again. Things have already been dismantled in such ways that it will be impossible to build them back as they were.
Not to doom and gloom you out of hoping for the best but the Rubicon is rapidly fading into the distance.
I must have completely missed those speeches. Looked it up,
At a "Believers' Summit" event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action in West Palm Beach, Florida, on July 26, 2024, Donald Trump told an audience of Christian voters:
"You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote."
He also said: "Christians get out and vote. Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It'll be fixed. It'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians."
Looks like we’re out of the short term loops and well into the decadal effects with this man.
As a European, I’d like to add that the impulse response on the collective memory will be multi-generational.
That's how we're already interpreting it, that he will "fix" things, i.e. cause irreparable damage. There was no suggestion that he would stay on after his term, only that the damage would be so deep that the switch couldn't simply be flicked in the opposite direction.
This is it. It's not uncommon to see people on this very forum defending many of his policies, so the hope that the population has simply been duped and everything will right itself in a few years is a hard one to hold. One begins to question so much of America and see how much we had actually been turning a blind eye to since the end of the war.
I kid you not but some of the Silicon Valley elites believe themselves to be philosopher kings and wish to lord over the rest of us in some bizarre techno-monarchy system.
Weren't they planning to make their own techno-monarchic sovereign state? I remember reading up about one venture that actually received funding from your usual VC suspects.
Even the folks in Wall Street weren't this dystopian, come on.
Yes, it has to get much much worse before it can get better. Another half-competent democratic presidency now would only result in an even worse republican one next.
So was Harris unintelligent, extreme or senile? Why can the Republicans run a candidate who is evidently dumb, extremist and senile all at the same time, but the Democratic alternative has to be perfect?
You're delusional if you think the reason Trump has support is somehow because of Biden.
He has support because he's a populist leader that's going to tell you the country is failing and we need to burn it all down and, of course, it's brown people's fault. And that type of populist messaging really resonates with stupid, poor white people. Which is a growing fraction of the US as people get poorer overall.
There's no "middle of the road" between neoliberals and outright fascists. The democrats need to shed their (literal) old skin and become a real left-wing party, with aggressive anti-corporate messaging.
That this gets downvoted shows that people have still not learned a single thing. You're spot on, it's tragic that so very few people understand this, based on how incredibly little I see it voiced online. In fact, you're the first I've seen voice it in ages.
E.g. if Harris (another, at best, incredibly mediocre candidate) would've won, the post-Harris Rep presidency would've been even worse than the current one. Until there's a competent non-Rep president, every single subsequent Rep government will be worse, until there will be no more fairish elections - and likely we're already there. Someone like AOC - not policywise, people don't vote on policy, it doesn't matter. Attitude-wise. It's abundantly clear the DNC hasn't learned (or more likely, doesn't want to learn), so the next president will be another Hillary/Biden/Harris candidate who will either lose or make the next Rep win even more decisive.
I think maybe it gets downvoted because it comes across as victim blaming and has echoes of abusive reasoning. The left must change what they want because otherwise the right will throw a hissy fit and start opening concentration camps?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. It could be helpful to point to actual policy failings of Harris rather than handwaving about mediocrity.
When Harris actually completed to be presidential candidate she came in fifth. She was on stage a couple of times saying 200 million Americans died of covid - you have to be fairly thick to not realize that isn't so - she'd misread 200,000. They had to keep her away from interviews to stop similar stupid leaking out.
I don't recall this ever happening and, if it did, it was not a big enough deal for anyone to care about it. Certainly not a single person I know who didn't vote for Harris said this was the reasoning.
The reality is she was much more intelligent, better spoken, and higher qualified than Trump. That's not the reason she lost, and anyone proclaiming otherwise is stupid. Yes, stupid.
Misreading a number seems incredibly insignificant to the number of outright idiotic things Mr Trump says on a daily basis. Why the disparity in expectation/response?
The misread number was almost two thirds of the entire population. That's the sort of thing I'd expect someone to catch as they're saying it because of how absurd it is.
So misreading it and not immediately catching it is the issue? It seems incredibly human. And you really feel this is worse than the dumb things Mr Trump is on record as saying?
I understand why one might take my comment that way, but I'm advocating for the exact opposite: democrats should start acting as a real left-wing party, with aggressive messaging on oligarchy, healtcare, the depravity of the right, you name it.
The democrats, as they exist now, are almost "controlled opposition". There's much to wager that if they succeeded Trump II, they wouldn't undo 10% of the damage he's done. I fully believe Harris could have done a correct job at maintaining the status quo, but that's not what the people want or need.
The democrats should stop showing weakness and trying to build bridges with fascists, and instead speak 24/7 about how vile and stupid this entire circus is. Then they should start advocating for big changes that will hype Americans: free healthcare, extra taxes on billionaires, etc.
That seems like a much more reasonable position, thanks for taking the time to clarify. All I can say is what a unspeakably massive pity it is that there hasn't sooner been a reform to the electoral system that would have allowed for a less reactive governance.
Indeed. I don't know how much comfort it could bring you, but know that almost the totality of western democracies are slowly succumbing to right-wing populism, not just the US. While flawed, I believe the current electoral system is only a minor part of a much deeper issue, that being the prevalence of money in our democratic processes.
The people largely have been duped by populist messaging.
If you notice the people who defend Trump or his policies don't even really believe them. Half the time the defense is, "well he's not really going to do that" (Trump is a liar). Or, "that's not actually happening" (deporting citizens or permanent residents).
While these defenses are completely delusional, it at least highlights that most Trump supporters consider him untrustworthy. They support Trump because they're living in an alternate reality where everything is great and nothing bad has happened yet. Everything is always just around the corner, but they kick the can down the road in their head.
> It's not uncommon to see people on this very forum defending many of his policies
From what I've seen on the wider internet, the support for Trump is mostly a personality cult. The policies are getting support because they are his policies. They are on the Good Side, and the woke leftists are on the Bad Side. If Trump changes his views, most of his voter base will change with him.
The big question is: what's going to happen when Trump isn't in power anymore? Will he be able to motivate his voter base into a JD Vance presidency? Don Jr.? He's not getting any younger either - what if he dies?
With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.
> From what I've seen on the wider internet, the support for Trump is mostly a personality cult.
I agree with you but the point I'm trying to get across is that a disturbing amount of seemingly right minded people actually support him now on a policy level. Maybe they always did and feel comfortable to say it out loud now? I don't know.
But the deportations, skipping due process, defunding science, excluding foreign students, dismantling aid programs, cutting ties with Europe and Canada, stripping trans people of their rights, pulling support from Ukraine, not following the Paris Climate Accords, etc. etc. It's all stuff I've seen people here genuinely argue for.
> Maybe they always did and feel comfortable to say it out loud now? I don't know.
They always supported it. Lee Atwater put it best:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N***, N***, N***.” By 1968 you can’t say “N***”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N***, N***.”
Atwater was a political consultant for the Republicans, he was an adviser to Reagan and H. W. Bush, and chairman of the RNC. Not some nobody with an opinion that doesn't reflect core conservative strategy. He laid it out for us right there. They pushed the racism down and then they abstracted it to make it more palatable to people. But racism was still always the animus. It was his "Southern Strategy" which courted disaffected Southern whites which formed the basis of the modern Republican party. One of the reasons that today's Republicans claiming the mantle of Lincoln is so absurd.
That was how conservatives thought until about 2008. Then all of a sudden someone (Obama) came along that really opened the flood gates when it came to big conservative racist feelings. You'd still have groups like the Tea Party who would frame their views as fiscal, but then someone else (Trump) started saying the quiet part out loud, when he ran with the whole "birther" movement, an explicitly and overtly racist idea.
This set up a real ideological battle in 2015-2016. You had the neocons represented in Jeb Bush, who were happy to keep the quiet part quiet. But the foil was Trump, who came down his golden escalator shouting the quiet part: "Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers and we need to build a wall to keep them out". That message resonated deeply with Republican voters. Jeb, Rubio, and Cruz ultimately lost in 2016 because they weren't willing to say the quiet part, and after Obama, Republicans really wanted to hear it.
Since then, it's been a constant drum beat of conservatives attempting to undo all of the social progress of the last 50 years.
Now, this is not to say that everyone who supports Trump does so for the quiet part. But, MAGA is an explicit quiet part movement, so for those who don't, you have to figure out your exit ramp. The 2021 insurrection was a good and obvious one, but if you're right minded and still on board today, you better figure out your exit soon, because whatever fiscal policy you think you're voting for, you're not going to get it; this road leads to apartheid, genocide, and no where good.
It is not just that. He works on support of the whole ecosystem - from heritage foundation through tech leaders to fox news. The ecosystem will keep existing and will find a new preacher. The same people who use their talking points now will keep voting for the same set of policies. Just about only exception are tariffs in their current implementation - those are genuinely the Trump thing. But everything else is Trump executing long known conservative goals that are accepted by conservative voters.
> With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.
Trump represents traditional conservatives. With exception of tariffs, he is doing exactly what they wanted for years. Likewise, republican moderates never disagreed or opposed Trump policies, they just wanted someone more presentable for it.
There's a big difference between claiming to want something, and actually wanting it. The primary goals of most politicians are staying in power and self-enrichment, which in practice means doing whatever corporate America wants and handing out tax cuts (Republican) or subsidies (Democrats) to the rich. All the other stuff they claim to care about? That's literally only done to get more votes, most of them really could not care less about it.
Outlawing abortion, mass deportation of immigrants, killing foreign imports? Great to claim on election rallies to motivate your voter base, but it was never meant to be achieved. It's far more efficient to milk a "the Democrats want to murder babies" tag line for a few decades than to actually ban abortion and have to deal with the fallout when their voters see women they know dying because they can't get the healthcare they need. Claiming to do something about immigration is more efficient than actually doing it and losing all support from the companies relying on immigrant labor. Claiming to be tough on China is far better than losing votes due to tariffs making all prices skyrocket.
Traditionally the Republicans wanted to get in power, do nothing, and blame the Democrats for their failures. Trump screwed this up by actually doing the stuff he claimed he was going to do, and it's either going to end in an electoral bloodbath for the Republicans or a fascist theocratic dictatorship.
Many elected leaders on both sides have made significant campaign promises without trying to keep them. Even Obama once talked about not renewing the Patriot Act… Yet it keeps getting renewed… (One could simply do nothing and let it expire!)
In a darkly humorous sense, Trump embodies one civic ideal better than others before…
They could start with a bill that requires any politically charged bill title to be renamed to something boring, yet truthful and still relatively concise instead.
It's really difficult to 'vote against patriot...' it's a lot less difficult to not vote for the 'spy on Americans, everyone is a potential terrorist' act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
Though there are some general ideas within that wide-reaching legislation that deserve a review and carefully constructed process, rather than a slip-shod 'fix it fix it fix it' now knee jerk law.
> They could start with a bill that requires any politically charged bill title to be renamed to something boring, yet truthful and still relatively concise instead.
Well, even if it wasn’t Constitutiionally impossible for Congress to bind itself in the future this way, it would be impossible to enforce such a subjective rule. (And e en if you could enforce such a rule on formal names, it wouldn't stop informal names with emotional appeal from being popularly used, regardless of the formal name.)
I generally agree with your analysis but it ignores the switch that happens to every failing democracy: when populism ceases to be a tool and becomes the actual goal.
It's difficult to imagine how those tariffs benefit the oligarchs behind Trump and the GOP. They also seem very much ready to actually ban abortion federally this time, and carry out massive deportations. No matter how destructive to the country and their image these policies could be.
And here's pure speculation on my part: when you listen to interviews of the current administration it's like they don't even try to make what they do look good, or defend themselves. They are acting with the same shamelessness you would see in Russia, meaning they probably don't fear the next election day that much.
As for the democrats, they're basically controlled opposition at this point. The geriatric establishment only cares about retaining enough donor money, and will absolutely not put up a fight against the republicans.
The boot lickers, self-interested cynics and useful idiots currently in the Republican party are indeed what's sustaining Trump. They could end his ambitions in a week if they collectively worked to, or at least if a sizeable minority of them did so, but so far, they'd much rather focus on their own benefit or personal partisan idiocies than realize that they're helping establish normalizations of deviant governing (such as it is) that will have repercussions for decades, and could later badly bite off a big bleeding chunk of their collective asses. It's stupid and self-serving nearly through and through among the deplorable pile of garbage that is most of the modern MAGA-GOP.
None of this is to defend the democrats much either. They have had their heads up their asses politically in so many crucial moments that they did a lot to facilitate the voting in of this bullying orange buffoon, and currently, they're just barely raising the bar from a bare minimum of effort in trying to fight some of this president's more destructive policies.
Then there are the top-level Tech CEOs and how they're so grossly bending over and presenting their asses to the new administration. With Musk at least there's an element of authenticity to it since he's been espousing the views he currently shows off for quite a long time, but with people like Bezos and Zuckerberg, and others, the cynical and fundamentally cowardly about-face is particularly grotesque to watch.
I just wish the “democrat” wing of the uni-party had the self-awareness to realize why that happened.
Reality simply is that the only thing that got Trump elected twice is the abuse against the American people that has been ignored by the ruling class across both parties, which is back to its old ways of destroying the indigenous to plunder wealth and import brown people to work for them to support their decadent lifestyles.
Have you been following along? They're deporting the brown people and to hell with the economy.
I'm not sure what abuses you're talking about but this is a country where black people were being lynched within living memory. There's long been a fascist undercurrent in the United States and it's finally bubbling to the top. There is still widespread support for what is happening after everything we've seen and there are even supposedly educated and well-off people in this very thread defending it.
Blaming it on the left is a total cop out at this point.
At risk of speaking too much for someone else: They are not blaming the left, they're blaming the democrat party -- and are far from assigning them total blame imo.
At the risk of getting lost in the bushes before GP themselves can respond, I'm not sure that's a reasonable defence. First of all it's a two party system, so the left and the party of the left are essentially interchangeable. They said that "the only reason" he won is because of this "abuse" from both parties. Indeed there's no suggestion that the democrats are taking all or most of the blame there, but my response was only on the basis that they were being blamed at all, which they were. I'm not sure there's anything that justifies the behaviour we're seeing, to me it seems unreasonable to expect one party to change their ways from relatively moderate politics because the other side, so to speak, will otherwise threaten to dismantle the democratic functioning of the state.
The Democrat party is indeed incompetent, but GP's reasoning is part of why we've ended up with Trump again. The Democrats and Republicans are not the same, and if drastic change is needed, I know which party will be easier to change. As if inventing independent parties solves any problems. Don't pick sides; do the right thing, and the people who agree with you will be on your side.
It doesn't really matter though. If there's going to be a potential flipflop between nuttery and normality every four years, you can only really book things in the future for a couple of years after the start of a "normal" phase. And even that is assuming there aren't held-over issues that need to be legislated away by the new guy.
At that point, why even bother with the hassle and uncertainty?
This is part of why France lost status for large events and organisations in the early-mid 20th Century until now. Quite large political swings at regular intervals and fairly ready-to-protest population = not ideal for basing stability. And it doesn't matter that France was far more stable than most countries, it was simply much less stable than America, the UK and regrettably, Germany. Frances solution seems to be not to really compete for international industry or science, but to focus on French culture and language to fit their tourism strategy.
Even if the next president is sane, it will take a long time to change the culture. Once border control agents get more power (or the feeling that they can use their power more arbitrarily), they will want to keep it. Also, the legal framework is not going to go back in time, either.
60/40 feels very pessimistic to me (meaning I think the election is more than 60% likely to occur on Nov 7, 2028 and the results heeded more or less as usual).
This approach seems overly mechanistic to me. You can have an election, and yet the results of said election can be completely predetermined like they have been in russia for the past 20 years or so. The US toyed with gerrymandering and disenfranchisement even before it officially embraced the current flavour of fascism. So the soil is fertile enough to take the next logic step towards a full dictatorship.
I would say you are both correct. The coup began in 2020 with the widespread lies about the election and smaller attempts at using violence to affect the outcome. E.g. where armed men appeared outside voting booths. Or when the Biden-Harris bus was forcefully stopped in Texas: https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2024/a-trump-tr...
Then the clear culmination happened on Jan 6, 2021, that is certainly correct as well.
It isn't going to be easy to transfer the cult of personality from Stalin to Beria. :-) If they consolidated the police state by then they could transfer that, not so much the cult of personality.
The cult — maybe. But if you are bringing a comparison with the Soviet system — the autocracy itself remained for 40 more years, only to be promptly reinstated through Putin.
In a different comment so people can vote on this idea independently: I am not a Trump supporter, but I have many Trump-supporting people I interact with on a level that I don’t think they’re lying to me.
Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning. This is not a “I wouldn’t vote for a felon/rapist/whatever” type of red line that falls apart when you question it - they are universally against it. I sincerely think screwing with the election terms or dates to prolong Trump’s term is likely to cause immediate and shocking support evaporation. Enough to embolden Congress to do stuff, and he won’t have enough control over any armed agency to do anything to Congress.
I think that a Trump who is trying to avoid prosecution for $crimes is much more likely to throw his weight behind a GOP candidate in early 2028. Vance or whoever. That’s his best chance to stay out of jail (for prosecutions political or legitimate, doesn’t matter). After a few solid months of propping up another GOP candidate, Trump’s base will be even less rabid about him specifically. He’s going to be old news in late 2028.
If Trump doesn’t support another candidate in 2028, then I’d start to worry. I just don’t see it happening - the game theory very obviously says he must support a not-him candidate by early 2028, and doing that will make it even harder to pull off shenanigans.
It's hard to believe that trump will run in 2028 at the age of 82. assuming he's alive then (not implying assassination but just rather natural causes)
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning. This is not a “I wouldn’t vote for a felon/rapist/whatever” type of red line that falls apart when you question it - they are universally against it.
What were their thoughts and reactions after Jan 6? Clearly it was not a red line for them, but just curious if you discussed it with them right after.
If your hope is 2028, then you are effectively abdicating responsibility for your future to chance, at best.
When 2028 rolls around, the 4 years of straight up corruption, illegality, and power concentration will mean you wont have the tools to enforce your rules.
You are at your strongest, least tired, least weakened now. Today.
There is no tomorrow.
Americans have never lived most of their lives in a banana republic, so its understandable that they act as if there is a continuation of things.
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning.
Yeah because it didn't happen (yet). Standard Trump supporter maneuver. If you went back to 2019 and asked them if they'd support someone trying to overthrow the result of a presidential election, you'd get the same visceral negative reaction.
He treats ideas like cattle, not pets. Throws out a lot of seeds and sees if they take root. It creates a lot of havoc because his detractor's analysts have to write a researched article about every seed. Meanwhile he's always got seeds growing.
pretty sure trump has forgotten all about greenalnd and i would bet money it doesn't come up for the balance of his term. the man has the memory of a goldfish
Trump doesn't need a memory. He's being told what to do by Miller, Vought, and the other Heritage/2025 crazies.
They were very, very angry about the Greeland/EU mineral deal, which is why Trump immediately slapped a huge tariff on EU imports.
But Trump only cares about Trump. As long as he's getting attention, being on TV, scamming people, and cheating at golf, he's perfectly happy. He has no long term goals beyond that.
Trump is in terrible physical health, and his cognitive decline will only accelerate. The odds of him making it to 2028 aren't good.
The Republicans have until the mid-terms to either fix the next election or install a no-compromise terror state.
Terrorising the population with ICE, suspending due process, and removing habeas corpus all suggest the plan is the latter. As is the absence of realistic reporting and criticism from a (mostly) captured MSM.
Sooner or later confrontations with ICE will turn violent, and then it gets very dark indeed.
Its nto a captured MSM, its a broken information market. The MSM on the center and left work normally. On the right, theres straight up market capture and collusion with the party.
This is why you can't get a working conversation in america, because the exchange of ideas and information is broken.
Yeah - I think there’s a very small core of people who genuinely think Trump will win a third term, and a slightly larger core of people who want him to. Then a much larger set of people who are engaging in some very unwise trolling.
I just think it’s telling that all the rabid Trump supporters I know aren’t there. Zero of them want to see him on the ballot a fourth time or otherwise pull shenanigans.
At this point they don't even know who he'll be running against.
But put a name there, and I guarantee you that they will immediately flip and claim that they have to support Trump, because the alternative is going to be literal communism or whatever.
Surely if shenanigans around changing eligibility to vote and maybe a bit of tampering with vote machines (won't be detected if there's no-one around with the authority to validate voting), then it won't matter if Trump has many supporters or not.
I would expect him and his handlers to look to other authoritarian regimes to see how to safely have democratic votes without any chance of losing power.
As soon as the mothership beams down the right marching orders, their brains will turn off and they'll fall in line.
It's happened with every other thing he's done.
They don't support it until he does it, and then when he does it, they'll be ready to die on that hill.
He isn't the candidate people who actually hold on to any principles voted for, because he very explicitly has none, and he expects his supporters to not have any either. The only thing that matters is winning.
This is an old pattern going back a good decade at least in conservative circles.
Everybody ingests at least some of their worldview and opinions from external voices. That's a reality of humans trying to navigate a complicated messy world. But it was really shocking seeing family members hold reasonable view "A", until the local talk radio station sprays out "A bad, B good", and then bam, instant complete retroactive reversal like they never thought "A".
That's not a conservative problem, that's an anyone problem. Most of the liberal zeitgeist has done a 180 on globalism and tariffs this year, as a very prominent example.
The problem isn't that a political party is acting as hive mind, the problem is that the core pillar of conservatism they practice is 'I will use the law as a weapon against you, but I will not ever be bound by it'.
Which is no way to run a society, any I cannot have any respect for its disciples.
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term
This will change in the lead up to 2028. This is a pattern we've observed over and over again with Trump supporters, they draw a line, and once it's crossed they adjust to the new standard without fail. Trump now enjoys more popular support than ever before.
> That’s his best chance to stay out of jail
Absolutely zero chance he goes to jail. Not just because he's a former president and a billionaire, but also because it's a political impossibility. Even assuming Trump can't make a third term happen, and that the Democrats aren't indefinitely disaffected, holding Trump accountable is something that Democrats have proven themselves consistently unable to accomplish, nor do they want to, because it's a losing political agenda.
I think that's genuinely interesting anecdata (even if Trumpists have changed their mind before), but ultimately the executive decides whether they're going to follow the constitution, not the people that originally voted for them and Congress has been utterly spineless when it comes to other things that play badly with the base like trashing the economy.
And on the original topic, whether Trump ultimately decides to enjoy being kingmaker for the next presumptive nominee (someone's got to be pitching him an Apprentice style TV show...) in order to enjoy a happy retirement is moot when the presumptive nominee for Republican candidacy is going to be someone with similar policy and behaviour extremes. In fact, in some respects the prospects for things like collaborative scientific research if someone who espouses Trumpism but isn't Trump are probably even worse due to them being less incompetent and less straightforward to flatter/bribe into declaring that actually $organization or $country isn't terrible wokes or dangerous criminals after all and they in fact have a very strong relationship. Vance seems to believe some of his schtick. Sure, the successor probably won't be favourites to win a free and fair election in which they're saddled with Trump's mistakes and lack his charisma or cult, but if you're doing medium term planning you can't count on that faction being out of power forever
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term.
They said the same thing on Jan 6, 2021. Trump supporters had a very negative visceral reaction to that day.
But on Jan 7, 2021 the propaganda machine started up again and minds began changing one by one. Today, the very people who were running for their lives on Jan 6 are in support of officially teaching in schools that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats -- the very lie that cause the violence of the day, that caused so many to say "I do not support this". Four years later they voted for it again.
So when I hear tales of a Trump voter who is against something Trump has done, I just remember that they voted for him again after he caused an insurrection against the United States in an attempt to illegally overthrow a free and fair election.
If a voter can find their way to excusing that, they will find their way to excusing a third term. Here's how: "Yeah it's not ideal, but what am I supposed to do? Vote for a Democrat? They would be worse. We are choosing the lesser of two evils." Works every time.
I remember their visceral negative reaction when anybody brought Project 2025 in discussions. Now, of course, Project 2025 is used as the actual blueprint and nearly fully implemented, and they are seemingly OK with it.
So no, these people are not to be trusted, there can be no negotiations, and no further reconciliation until they change their minds. Being "conservative" and "right-wing" is one thing. Being pro-Trump after February 2025 (and arguably January 2021) is nearly a crime.
Model risk — events of such magnitude may affect the probability of existence of Manifold, betting markets in general, and even the US dollar (in USSR-Russia transition, roubles were made worthless three times in a row).
Unless you are an actuarial expert with decades of experience in hedging geopolitical risks, you cannot meaningfully trade such events.
It's looking like a rather large assumption that Democrats manage to rebuild trust with the public. You would think 2024 would be enough of a crisis for Democrats to get their shit in order. And yet here we are with the same fucking dinosaur generation running the party.
This is a red herring. There is no winning for any party that isnt the Republican party, because there is no actual mechanism for non right wing voices to be heard on the right wing information ecosystem.
The issues is that Dems must bring their A game, to compete against a clown squad that can and will fabricate issues that havent happened, and force the dems to debate on it.
This is also a thought experiment, not a real issue, because Americans do not have that long a time horizon.
The strongest, most unified, and capable you will be is now. By the time elections come around, you will be hounded, disorganized, isolated and unable to coordinate.
Huh? Harris campaigned with Dick Cheney. She removed torture from her platform to do so. She promised to keep arming Israel. She promised to be more harsh on immigration than Trump. She warbled about having "the most lethal military" at the DNC.
This was all tacitly endorsed by the party. So, how did you get the impression Democrats running from the right?
don't get your hopes up - I fully plan on moving to Canada and sending my children to college there even if we elect a "better" president in the future
the fact that roughly half of of the electorate is fine with how things are as well as virtually all of the republicans in the senate and the house are too "scared" to do anything (complete BS as this is the very definition of their job) is really an embarrassment of civilization and humanity - apes are more evolved than we are
Regardless of people’s politics, Americans have not done that for at least 100 years now. What would make you think that would change now that basically all of the western world has followed our lead, largely because the American corporate authoritarian ruling class has imposed it on the rest of the western world over the last century?
It's the truth. Kamala was well-spoken and overly qualified. She had answers to cost of living and healthcare. Meanwhile, Trump just said "you're poor because of brown people!!1!" And... that messaging won.
The reality is Kamala is a black woman, and Trump has been attributing everything evil in the world to people who are not white. Are we going to play stupid and pretend that has nothing to do with it? Or, are we going to at least try to be honest with ourselves about the current state of American politics?
There's no denying that the white racist constituency is a major part of the Trump coalition, but it's not all there is to it; remember, Latino men went in almost 50% for Trump, and a surprising number of non-white immigrants in general voted for him.
Hence the emphasis on Harris being a woman, not just non white.
The reality is people like feeling superior to others, whether it be lighter skin looking down on others, or men looking down on women. And even those below not wanting their own to make gains (such as other women).
My immigrant non white grandmother told me she wouldn’t vote for Harris because she’s a woman. This is a woman who basically did what men told her to do her whole life, and I suspect she doesn’t like the idea that maybe she could or should have fought for more for herself (or her daughters).
Way to absolve the joke that is the American voter of any blame…for voting for a person who committed treason, and said he would pardon those who committed treason. Which he did.
Sorry neighbours, but it's not about Trump. Trump is one man. The Republican party is effectively captured by that one mans 77,302,580 supporters.
Changing leaders isn't enough to fix it. You all broke it, and until you re-establish norms for democracy, reinforce the checks and balances, and start holding criminals who hold office accountable, it's not going to get better.
Hard agree. The first-past-the-post single representative election system that is the foundation of the two party system in the US is breaking the country. It encourages politics where the current winner has no reason nor expectation of compromising on anything; now is their time and they are justified in breaking everything the previous winners did. It encourages politicians to act like babies, not grownups.
What I (as a non-US citizen living outside the US) never understood about the US political system is
1. Apparently none sees the (to me obvious) downsides of a two-party system where there is only black and white with cold-war logic of being either with us of against us, no grey zones and willingness for compromise.
and
2. monetary interests are so close to the political system by construction: candidates need to raise a lot of money during their campaigns which they get from companies, private persons and which is tied to their person. How can you not assume that all those people who get into office (senator, president, even judges as I learned recently) with money they got from someone is not in a conflict of interest right from the start? To me it seems there cannot be any independence.
Your second point explains the first. There is a one-party corporate-captured system with two wings. One pushes the country rightwards, the other pretends to oppose it, but never makes structural changes that would push the country back towards higher taxes on the rich and higher public spending, even when it has the means and the opportunity.
Behind this is the biggest propaganda and PR machine in history, with mass media, social media, lobbyists, think tanks and policy institutes, client journalists, astroturfing operations, and individual politicians all generating compliant prepackaged talking points that either support the corporate line or distract opposition with noise.
It's not that simple. People who vote dem or rep understand the two party system is bad and has a lot of consequences. That's not at all a minority opinion.
The problem is that people are realistic enough to also realize they can't just magically, out of nowhere, break the two party system. The "vote third party!!" people are useful idiots, and we all know it.
The fall of the two party system must be thorough and deliberate. We cannot start at a presidential election, much less like two months before the election, which is always when the "vote third party!" people crawl out of the woodwork.
They don't actually give a single flying fuck about third party. Otherwise, they would vote third party locally and then on a state level so they can build up their reputation for the presidency. And, they would at least decide on which third party to support. But they're too busy fighting over each other to decide that. So they're delusional enough to think their .5% polling candidate out of 5 other .5% polling candidates can overthrow the dems and reps.
It has to be coordinated. Two party system has been build up for a very long time. We need legislation on PACs, on voting, on the electoral college, and we need the cultural shift.
You think I don't want a third party to win? Of course I do. But I'm not stupid, and I recognize that just going out and randomly voting for a third party is just a vote for the status-quo. This is part of the reason (just part, don't worry) that Trump won.
Until you, and others, can name me one specific third party and then also make your community and local representation at least 50% of the same third party, then I don't care. I don't want to hear it, nobody wants to hear it, you sound stupid, keep your mouth shut.
We have to do the work if we want results. Yeah, that means you too.
The thing that we can do is emphasize electoral reform (of the kind that enables viable third parties: runoff voting etc) as the major item in primaries. Basically no Democrat should win the primary unless this is a major item in their platform.
Note that, unlike many other reform suggestions, this one is actually viable because Congress can mandate it nation-wide, like it does today with single-member districts. All it takes is majority vote in both chambers (and yes, they should throw the filibuster in the Senate out to pass this if that's what it takes).
They're already printing out "Trump 2028" MAGA hats, don't get your hopes up too much. Now that they've permeated every level of power with their cronies, making them relinquish power will be much harder. Prepare for the worst.
If such a candidate presents himself then s/he would win. You have pretty much nailed the reason why Trump won. Everyone saw him as the second least competent presidential candidate. Bad leadership is a real problem and it has created a vacuum which Trump has roared in to exploit.
But there's a more fundamental problem, where neither party has offered suitable presidential candidates in the last 3 elections. Your system needs a bit of a reset. The Democrats have to return to their roots, and the Republicans have to get over the Cult of Trump. But i'm hopeful in time these two problems will resolve themselves in time and not mutually reinforce each other. Trumps Republican Party has a hard expiration date, and the Democrats will eventually have to listen to their voters if they want to win elections.
> neither party has offered suitable presidential candidates in the last 3 elections
Were we witnessing the same elections? Because I saw one side of the ballot as suitable 3/3 times, and the other side… not event close. Were they perfect, no, but the difference in quality has been baffling 3/3 times.
The actual reality is that many people have a belief system that is wildly different than their fellow countrymen. And whew, what a set of beliefs to act upon and force upon the world.
Saying they weren't perfect is still elevating Harris considerably above what many people saw her as in my opinion. The people who want police reform or support the defund police movement aren't enthusiastic about electing a hard-ass prosecutor. People who have no investment portfolios don't care about the stock market doing alright. People who care about social services don't like someone who is supported by and courting rightwing personalities. And progressives don't want "nothing would fundamentally change" after watching little substantial changes or reforms over the last 2+ decades while many people are barely hanging on by their fingertips.
Someone making $100K+ in a prosperous urban area might not see those things as too big of a problem. But someone making the median US wage or less while home prices continue to rise and police departments extort locals and basic education standards fall while secondary education prices rise have a big problem both for themselves and their children. I am not surprised people weren't enthusiastic voters, because many saw it as lose-lose. When people are offered either a slow death or a fast death, many will refuse to choose at all.
You cannot get people to vote on the "least bad" option, I thought this much at least has been made clear in the last decade. The enthusiasm will be so low that you cannot get enough turnout to beat the hard-line fans of the other side.
Please present good candidates with a progressive program and an inspirational personal charisma and people will vote for them over the fascist. Does anyone have a sliver of a doubt that an Obama would beat Trump with a leg tied behind his back?
This is not true, anymore, and we have the data to show it. The structrural issues with the information and news market in America (and most western democracies) has created a systemic issue, which has changed what makes a "good" or "efficient" candidate.
One team has to put out someone like Obama, and the other team can put up someone like Trump who can promise the moon is made of green cheese, and be lauded as a truth teller.
Working on facts, having them verified, building policy is not a competitive advantage, versus being able to pick a narrative and create facts that your voters want to hear.
What's there to stop left-wing populists? Bernie Sanders is both more popular and less unpopular than Trump. Apparently he can (i) have principles, (ii) have a numbers-based program of concrete measures and (iii) be an effective communicator, all at the same time.
Instead we field unlikeable Clinton, borderline senile Biden, replace him at the 11th hour with unremarkable and un-primaried Harris... Then we wonder how even a dumbfuck like Trump can beat them.
Someone who doesn’t even agree reality is reality won. A system that is able to prop up an alternate reality, won.
I like Bernie, I think he has the right attitude and voice to fight this kind of media battle.
The debate on Bernie vs Clinton is fundamentally reorganizing deck chairs on the titanic. Any Democrat candidate is playing with their hands tied behind their back, even when they facts, policy, research, effort, and genuine ability on their side.
Fixing the dem primary process - very much yes. Recognize that the playing field itself is prejudiced.
They're not divisive enough. Not nearly enough racism.
Populism works because you need to create an enemy within that will cause your following, the majority, to feel as though they are persecuted. As though they are victims.
This was pretty easy to do with white conservatives, the majority, because you can just tell them brown people are stealing their money and causing crime and drugs or whatever. Oh, and also woke, because women on TV. It's a lot harder to do with the left.
I mean, who do you point to? The bourgeoisie, typically, but uh oh - they own everything. They fund your campaign, and your news. So... who is going to spread your populist messaging? That's, like, the most important part of populism. That's why Radio started WWII.
Also, in the US we have a culture of rampant individualism. We don't hate the bourgeoisie here because we all have a delusion that we're just temporary poor, not systemically. One day we will be millionaires, so we can't target them! That's us! All made up of course, all propaganda, but ultimately still a huge challenge someone like Sanders needs to overcome.
This is exactly why the democrats are in crisis, they refuse to look at themselves in a mirror. Harris was completely unsuitable she was soundly rejected for her personality and politics. She gave no compelling argument for why voters should choose her beyond the fact that she was not Trump. She was also badly let down by the Democrat party who rushed her on as an 11th hour replacement, and the Biden administration which gave her no opportunity to come to the public's attention over 4 years.
Biden.... He was more or less a decent person, but sadly he was mentally unfit for the job. Especially for the last 2 years the world witnessed the painful cognitive decline of an elderly gentleman. Nor did they appreciate the gaslighting by the administration, and media, telling them that Biden was fine when he obviously was not.
Hilary..... I can't remember what was wrong with her, maybe it was a complete lack of charisma, i dont know. Either way she was a mediocre choice at best.
Even without Trump the people who voted for him are still there, still have the same opinions, still want the same things, and can still vote for them. All it takes is for a candidate to credibly offer those things, and if that candidate is competent and disciplined..
We can blame them too, but Trump would absolutely never have been a suitable candidate, regardless of who was in his ear. The man is allergic to truth (see Sharpiegate for a particularly poignant example)
He could serve a third term and probably will attempt to do so, the two term limit could be wiped out with the stroke of a pen and Trump has a record for doing a lot of unprecedented things.
Why are so many so focused on Trump? If the current VP becomes the new P, will it be any better? What about the people behind it all, the ones financing and organizing the whole thing for which Trump is only the public figurehead whose function is to distract and get all the attention?
I think he'd be very likely to be elected if Trump runs as VP on the same ticket and they both publicly state that it would be a 3rd Trump term in all but name.
It's not even a new gambit. Putin did exactly this back in 2008 after doing two terms as president, swapping with his then-prime minister Medvedev for 4 years. Medvedev was also a nobody before becoming the prime minister, and there was absolutely no way he'd be elected if people didn't treat him as a figurehead for 4 more years of Putin's rule.
There is something to be said for, to date, nobody on the right wing in the US managing to even partially recapture Trump's particularly inexplicable brand of charisma. Everybody who has tried has just flamed out (e.g. DeSantis cratering like Wile E. Coyote just looked down).
I think it might take more than a stroke of a pen -- it seems like the easiest legal way would be to bribe the House to elect Trump as Speaker, bribe a pair of Republicans to run and win in 2028 and then in 2029 have each of them resign, promoting Trump back in to office.
The bribing might be costly but people are more than willing to buy Trump's merch.
Just get SCOTUS to rule that the 22nd Amendment only applies to consecutive terms because argle bargle reasons that supersede the language of the amendment.
Why are you substituting words with random alphabet characters? Are you able to read the original post? Are you unable to grasp how it adds context and data point to the discussion?
My wifes company banned travel to the US. It is a few thousand people in British Columbia. She was planning to go to the Microsoft Build conference in Seattle and was told she could not go.
It will take time for these effect to manifest. Conferences are organized quite far in advance, so most conferences this year and part of next year would likely not be able to change locations anyway.
But because they are planned in advance they might be even more careful then. They won't just take the status today into account, but also their fears of how much worse it could get.
I can appreciate that but as an Indian, the thought of subjecting myself and my devices to search for “problematic” material to attend a scientific conference is not something I am willing to do. To me, the USA is the USA.
Also, while there are a lot of people unhappy with your state, I wouldnt say the same for your citizens.
I'm a Canadian who moved to the SF bay area after graduating. A lot of my smartest friends who came with me at the same time are actively taking steps to move back due to the political environment.
The scientific community inherently has their eyes wide open to seeing reality as it is, and the assessment that the US is a hostile place to the reality-based community is a no-brainer.
I was born in the Midwest, have lived my entire adult life in SF, and recently was relieved to get my permanent residency in Canada - moving to Vancouver, BC soon. My co-founder (who is Canadian but has lived in California for 25 years) and I know we won’t be able to attract world-class talent to a country that is trying to go back in time to pre-Enlightenment era.
I was travelling to the US a few times during previous administration and each time somebody from the team was taken into little dark room for questioning, I was not travelling to the US much before so I was of opinion the way how US border treats travellers was weird to say the least, at least compared to other countries I was travelling to. Sometimes it was worse depending on particular border agent. Interestingly I travelled recently during new administration and did not notice much of a change.
We were travelling for business from EU. My feeling was that those of us who were travelling most frequently were pulled, but apart from slight inconvenience it ended OK. We started placing bets who will it be this time :) I always had paperwork ready, letter from business I was visiting, hotel booking, phone number to business rep who would confirm my credentials, but I was never asked to produce them. Though, I don't know about travelling with family, I am not much of a touristy guy..
I have friends and colleagues based in South America, when conferences are held in the USA, they never can attend, or want to. When they're held in Europe, they just appear with little hassle, it's quit perplexing to me how hard the USA makes it for them.
It's been this way forever, according to them, they're never going to even bother now.
It’s fascinating that people still see these things as new or unique to our current administration. This has been an issue for decades that were often ignored or minimized because it only affected smaller more marginalized groups of people. For example conferences involving HIV/AIDS had to contend with these issues for decades due to the blanket ban on HIV+ individuals from entering the country, even for a scientific conference. Often the conferences would continue leading to schisms in the communities and competing conferences that would ultimately disagree on fundamental principles in science and policy.
You know how if you pile lots of flammable things in the corner of your garage and it's fine for years, and then a toddler strolls through with a book of matches, then suddenly you get a new and unique fire?
The conferences and scientists leaving are the results of decades of policy undermining education and human rights, coupled with the rise of the alt-right, normalization of racism and misogyny, with a soupçon of neo-nazism that allowed a populist regime to rise to power. All of that was the pile of flammable things. The extrajudicial deportations, conferences and scientists leaving, and tourism crashing are the first tendrils of smoke rising in the corner. It's not too late for America to fix it.
The system in the US is capable of running on nothing but hope because of the availability of lending and investment. "Unfortunately" that means the average person won't receive an impossible to ignore signal that something is going bad until bankers and investors lose hope. By that point, something would have had to have happened that can't be fixed in the short term by a reversal or a sudden period of sobriety.
For a concrete example, the stock market is going up and down every time the tariff threats change tone, but the layoffs that the tariffs will make inevitable won't be done until companies run out of financiers who can be convinced the setbacks are only temporary.
The shipping people off for indefinite imprisonment in El Salvador without due process or appeal is new. I realise the people they've shipped are not conference delegates but it's still a bit off putting.
> leading to schisms in the communities and competing conferences that would ultimately disagree on fundamental principles in science and policy.
Ignoring the original topic and the rest of the comment, this part sounds like actually a useful thing?
If the different groups don't converge, that suggests that at least one of the consensuses is being driven by something other than verifiable facts (groupthink? conflicts of interest? politics?). Which I'd think is a useful thing to bring to the surface like that.
Has anyone done the legwork to demonstrate the degree? The linked article is lists around 6 conferences. Which is not a huge number, in the grand scheme of things, given how anti-Trump the US academy seems to be. More than 5, less than 10 and I assume conferences move around fairly regularly.
It is annoyingly typical that they managed to interview a "historian who studies international conferences" yet fail to contextualise how large 6 conferences is in the scheme of things. Thanks to the Magic of the Internet [0] I can see that hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century which isn't that informative (averages to >333/year over 3 centuries I suppose).
It's far too early to say. You can't move a conference to a different country on a short notice. You can only hold it with whatever audience you can get, postpone it, or cancel it. For larger events, it's already too late to move events scheduled for 2026, and possibly even for 2027. Maybe there will be some data in a couple of years, but until then, anecdotes and informed guesses are the best you can have.
It's harder of a choice the closer the event date is, but sometime it's just the most responsible thing to do. You won't see many people coming to your event if it's now in a war zone for an extreme example.
It’s not the choice that is hard, it’s the logistics of changing such. Huge event on such a short notice. It’s simply not possible, so you can cancel if you feel your guests would not be safe, yeah. But who would agree to that? It could very well bankrupt the conference.
Indeed, in my own field we are talking deadlines for hosting bids at least a year in advance and an announcement about ten months before the conference is held. Organising a conference with possibly thousands of attendees is a massive undertaking and you can see the link below as to what one of these calls to host looks like.
Here's another example [0]: "Hacker Conference HOPE Says U.S. Immigration Crackdown Caused Massive Crash in Ticket Sales". A quote: "“We are roughly 50 percent behind last year’s sales, based on being 3 months away from the event,” Greg Newby, one of HOPE’s organizers, told 404 Media in an email." No reason to think this conference is especially different from others like it.
An article from Nature, which is targetted at scientists, is the sign you are looking for. The fact that you are getting on HN, is indicating that you get to know of this before other people.
I can say that this is definitely an issue in converastions for me.
this is on a much larger scale and supported by ~40% of the USA who think Trump can do no wrong, and agree with his racism and unconstitutional imprisonment of brown people who are here to just visit or get an education. Basically now if you're not white, you are a suspect if you are coming/going internationally. I'm pretty sure some heroic person will eventually whistleblow a tape recording/email/memo that cites this as the new operating norm for the current regime.
This is bound to happen for a lot of other events besides scientific conferences. I know of a guy that wouldn't go to a retrogaming convention for fears of being detained at the border.
Its not just like you get refused entry and get sent on a return flight, there is risk of incarceration, rummaging through your digital life etc. It could be very disruptive and negative.
The risk of being turned away at the border always existed.
Yes it’s drastically increased now, but that’s a quantitative change which will have a quantitative effect.
What we are seeing now is a qualitative change in traveling behavior and that’s reflecting the qualitative change in the severity of punishment that may occur if there is a problem while trying to enter.
You are also asked if you have ever been denied entry into a country when travelling abroad. Even if nothing else happens and you do just get flown straight back, it can make future travels harder.
Yes, I run tech conferences and international attendance is dropping rapidly this year (we're shifting to aggressive local marketing, but it's still sad.)
My colleagues outside the US say that a big part of why they are bailing on the US is the public response.
They see France protest over their own internal retirement politics. They don’t see the US public protest over global destabilization through our politics.
It isn’t just Trump. The American people are completely failing to read the room.
So I am done supporting my fellow Americans as much as possible too. Enjoy your conference randos, but fuck me food and shelter and healthcare seem a bit more essential.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that in the US things are stacked against people who would want to protest or engage in any kind of activism.
Take a day off work to go to a rally or peaceful protest? “At will” employment means you can be fired the next day, no reason given. You got fired? Virtually all workers in the US get their health insurance through their employer, so now you and your family just lost access to medical care. It’s a really rough job market in many sectors, so it could take a few months to get a job. But since you got fired without cause, you can at least try to claim some unemployment benefits. In California, that maxes out at something like $450 a week.
Meanwhile in France if they want to fire you they have to give like 3 months notice (or pay you out for that time). Healthcare is socialized so no worries there. And if you still can’t find a job in a few months IIRC there’s fairly reasonable social benefits available.
> One thing you need to keep in mind is that in the US things are stacked against people who would want to protest or engage in any kind of activism.
This is the kind of exceptionalism that got you into this mess. You don't think things are stacked against the populations in countries like Turkey and Serbia?
Yes of course France is very different in terms of the freedom of the population, but why is that? Because they demanded it!
You don’t have to convince me that this is a bad thing for America. Yes it’s exactly how turkey and russia and other failed/failing democracies got to where they are.
What you need to keep in mind is once enough frogs are boiling things get worse fast.
No logical breakdown from an armchair is going stop parents with hungry kids.
This is the failing to read the room part I mentioned. Our biology is composed of biology not philosophy. It is self selecting. It’s biological imperative is select self.
Ok good you got some sort of Excel sheet breakdown. That’s just words.
This is what I’m talking about; American public is so dissociated due to economics that straight up ignores externalities. 8 billion people are the externality and it’s going to be hard for 300 million to ignore them and live in their narcissistic bubble much longer. Third world countries have rebuilt and don’t see the specialness in Murica or the point in sewing their shirts if they’re going to be so low affect.
Americans have to change not because of some philosophical position but because of physical reality not really caring about the excuses of 300 million; only half of which is cogent, and half of that actually intelligent. It’s not looking good, Bob.
I went to a protest. I was anxious about being photographed and added to some biometric database to be used for who knows what purposes. My wife and I had a serious discussion about whether to go, the possible risks, the possibility of violence, but I ultimately convinced her to go as our civic responsibility. I left our phones at home as a precaution so as to avoid being geolocated to the site.
What I found upon arriving was an unserious mob of hippies laughing and taking selfies to post on social media. I'd made signs supporting the rule of law. The signs of the other participants were an unfocused smattering of various political goals from "tax the rich" to banning Teslas. They included what I thought was an excessive about of profanity and crude insults. I think these are unserious people and what they're doing is performative and utterly pointless.
I do not see any viable action for individual citizens to take. Everyone out there clamoring for people to do something is just pushing their own political agenda. We had an election, one side won, that's how things go, ok. What's happened since however is a clear violation of the US Constitution in more ways than one can count, but it seems there is basically no one aware of or concerned about this. I feel like I'm at a football game where one side just took out a gun and shot the referee and while he lies on the floor bleeding to death both sides are still arguing over whether there was a foul or not.
There are various activist movements, groups, interests, communities.
You have to find your people. It can take a while. Change takes time, big social movements were decades into the making in the fringe before they reached the mainstream consciousness.
I don't know what it will take to make the fascist regime fear for their safety, and their supporters fear for their existence in society for having elected an autocrat intent on eliminating the existence of vulnerable groups. And I don't see a path to restoring social freedoms in red states with Christian nationalist radical majorities passing laws declaring Jesus as king and banning websites with LGBTQ content from minors.
are you ready to die for the principles of your country? if not, then there is no point. things are bad, but they have been way worse in the past (remember, we had legislators getting caned on the floor of congress, citizens locked up en masse without trial, everyone's bank accounts confiscated and held for weeks, biological experiments run on minorities, and underage citizens assassinated by drones). in the face of the injustices that the administration is going to commit, you should have ready for yourself the answer to two questions:
1. given a sober, nonpartisan review of past history, how far is too far for this administration?
2. what are you willing to do to stop it, how much are you willing to sacrifice.
i suspect that nothing the administration has done to date really clears the first bar. be prepared for the day it will, save your energy till then.
The person you're replying to has a vastly over inflated view of the risk of holding a sign, and when it felt too cringe they quit to slag off the other protestors. I would not expect much.
> I do not see any viable action for individual citizens to take.
Get involved with your preferred local political party. Push for policy preferences that won't drive turnout for the opposing party and won't give that party a chance to nominate a clown and then still win.
Seems like politics produced the mess that the U.S. is now in, so I doubt that politics will be the solution. What's required is for the general population to realise that they do still have the actual power and remind their "leaders" of that fact.
Honestly it sounds like you just want to give yourself an excuse to stop engaging. This reads like "I ate a salad once and I didn't like it, so I'm done with vegetables entirely, it's hopeless". Then the rest is you complaining that other people are unserious?
Going to protests is usually not much fun. There are all kinds of people there that you might not feel much in common with. People will make signs that focus on things you don't care about. This is normal! Protests can also easily burn a person out, so people try to have fun if they can because it's important to sustain pressure. The fact that someone dresses up, has a joke on their sign, meets a friend and smiles, or takes a selfie is not an indictment of the person or their protest.
Resist the urge to wallow in contempt for those people, particularly when you haven't done anything that has been effective.
> What I found upon arriving was an unserious mob of hippies laughing and taking selfies to post on social media. I'd made signs supporting the rule of law. The signs of the other participants were an unfocused smattering of various political goals from "tax the rich" to banning Teslas. They included what I thought was an excessive about of profanity and crude insults. I think these are unserious people and what they're doing is performative and utterly pointless.
You don't think this is completely by design? Social media is probably the most powerful cultural force that every existed, by an order of magnitude. Just flood instagram with quirky posts about protesting with your favourite Marvel superhero franchise quips, and The Algorithm will take care of injecting it into the brains of five hundred million people before lunchtime.
Americans are doing stuff. I call my reps and their vms are full. I go to their offices and there are lots of other people there. There's been protests at state capitals, Bernie & AOC have been giving speeches and zoom meetings about organizing and canvasing. Lawyers are suing and judges are trying to use the system despite the supreme court gone mad. It's tough to get a big group photo, but people are doing stuff. I'm as angry and jaded as anybody, but I dislike this defeated "nobody is doing enough so fuck it" thing I keep seeing. It's laying the groundwork a self fulfilling prophecy.
Certainly some people must be doing something but it's notable that your response is the exception in a sea of people sharing the reasons why they've decided to do nothing.
I'm thankful for others trying to do things, and I'm sorry for anyone already so defeated they're not only resigned to doing nothing they're bragging about it online.
It's important to understand that this has always been the case at any point in history where widespread protests affected change. And that people have won demands in situations with much worse oppression.
The reality is that it's not that hard. It requires learning new things and getting out of your comfort zone, lowering your expectations a bit and not expecting to do one thing and be done. This is how protest movements have always been.
Find something that aligns with one of your values and show up. Learn about more actions, join a chat group or calendar, and find what you can go to. Do not expect there to be one massive action that everyone shows up to first time. Do not burn yourself out.
Humans are social. Just showing up on the street reminds people that things aren't OK and there is something to protest about. Over time this builds people's consciousness and more people practice taking collective action.
All of this. I'm pretty strongly introverted, but I've been pushing myself outside of my usual patterns to show up to protests over the last few months. Most weekends I have at least one to go to. It does help to be around other people who are as concerned as I am.
Take burden off workers in the sweatshops and learn to sew a shirt. How many new shirts does a person need a year? 2-3? That’s like what, a cold December?
Be a human not a battery in a Matrix pod propping up ad companies and Hollywood.
We live in a Newspeak bubble; it’s freedom to stare at screen.
Local culture in the US is hyper-normalized around money making metrics.
Boomers did all the drugs and lived. They convinced GenX and Millennials to Netflix chill, order grubhub and watch AI content
> Take burden off workers in the sweatshops and learn to sew a shirt.
Presumably they're working there because it's the least-bad option? If so, removing it so they have to go with the next-least-bad option might not be much of a help.
Yeah the usual uncreative answer “copy paste the Newspeak”
This answer is a euphemism for “don’t rock my boat.” Because if they ain’t sewing your shirts, you are. Your freedom from such is due to blowing Vietnam (and elsewhere) to a crater, fostering existing conditions. Not exactly informed consent.
The rest of the world doesn’t buy this analysis. They lived being oppressed by US military. They see Americans as the Taliban, not a great white hope Americans have been propagandized to see themselves as.
Ah yes, a sanctimonious tech bro reducing everything to a Twitter size sound bite.
We know; you’re scared of change because you have seen your lived experience and know you cannot grow a potato.
But you’re just a meat suit and your personal story and literacy aren’t anyone else’s concern. And that’s under the political norm. You prefer no guarantee of healthcare. The risk someone else will obsolete your research. Oo so titillating.
Fine, have it your way. Let us continue under American norms where I can give zero fucks your meat suit exists.
Fortunately for me I have generational wealth thanks to the building and auto booms in the US, and EE degrees, hands on building useful machines and technology. SWEs exist so long as open compute platforms exist and there’s no guarantee governments around the world will forever allow that.
Should you find yourself shut out of employment opportunities, thoughts n prayers.
Yes your brief firm comment surely establishes truth.
They see weekend warriors focused on their paychecks.
They don’t see coast to coast collective pushback for long term stability. Sure, America is big and pockets of tribal thought.
And so it’s unreliable. A hodge podge of asocial cults flip flopping around the rules every 2-4 years because of its distributed, async social nature, does not make a reliable ally.
And who knows how much personal travel? Me and my partner are just setting off on an indefinite working trip around the world. Starting in SE Asia to try to save a bit of cash, but we have no longer-term plans yet.
We've long dreamed about spending 3 months in the USA. Driving across Montana. Living in NYC. Just being there, absorbing it all. (We've both been a bunch of times and love it.)
We're both white Australians. Middle-aged. Low risk. But there's no way I'm travelling to the USA now. Why would I bother? If I need some North America I'll go see Canada. Or we'll just visit Europe.
In 2015 a PhD scholar attending a security conference was sent back citing national security concerns. This was absurd as she was an Indian, studying in Montreal and has no past involvement in any untoward thing.
In 2017, a friend doing his PhD in artifical intelligence in Germany was made to undergo a thorough interview at the border to determine if he is a threat on account of his work. Again, this was absurd to say the least.
In this March, my SO (French) chose to not attend a tier 1 conference in AI where she was going to present her work. She, having the brains for both of us, was prescient enough to cancel her trip in Feb-March, a bit before the current border policies came into full force and europeans were detained.
I have never gone, nor will I ever go to the United States. Not for scientific purposes or leisure. For over a decade I have been voicing concerns about hosting conferences in a country which is inaccessible or hostile to a vast section of the scientific community. I am glad to see this shift.
This kind of false equivalence only brings the quality of conversation down and also waters down the gravity of what's really happening. I just never expected anyone would go so low as to equate people being turned away at the border or worse, be detained, questioned, and a pile of other abuses, with a pigeon detained for carrying what was suspected to be a spy message.
No, it's not the same everywhere. No, it's not because some countries are too dumb to be criminally abusive. And no, this is not just an inevitable outcome from "being too capable at detecting real threats".
If you go so far out of your way to water down and defend the indefensible you make it close to impossible to find any charitable interpretation, instead of moral complicity or trolling.
I am going to the Defcon CTF Finals at the Defcon conference this year. Coming from Europe, I know of multiple people who will participate remotely because of the political climate. I would have to lie if I said that I didn't think about skipping the USA either. In the cybersecurity space especially things have always been difficult.
This, Harvard, WHO, NIH, and NSF changes create that sucking sound you hear, a brain drain, and people deciding not to go to the US or to leave. Such myopic stupidity in the White House weakening America's power and reputation.
It's on purpose, at least according to some observers (Slobodian, Stiglitz). The clique behind Trump and Project 2025 want small (special) economic zones with as little interference as possible. Basically laying the ground work for exploitation, 19th century style. That requires dismantling the federal state. They don't care about the other consequences, because they don't have to bear them.
They’re fairly explicit about the idea that the last 100-200 years need to be undone. By that they don’t mean the technical progress. They mean human equality. The idea that there might be a connection between those two things is lost on them.
Isn't there a history of security researchers and open source programmers being detained or threatened when visiting the US? So the same thing is being done to the US's domestic researchers as well now?
I ve heard about these problems for many years. In particular, many indian phd students were reluctant to travel to European conferences for fear that there might be complications when returning back to America. The unreliable current administration must have turbocharged these fears
The one science not rejected by the current US administration is Ballistics. The problem is that China can probably do it better than America. (I do realize that Nature does not have a specialty topic journal on ballistics and weapons.)
Law abiding people always have something to fear when due process is being thrown out the window. If the government can just assert criminality without having to prove it then they can mete out punishment to any law abiding people.
> Trump derangement syndrome.
The only people deranged about Trump are the people supporting him.
Those two German teenagers, Charlotte Pohl and Maria Lepère, were denied entry because they broke immigration law and visa terms by misrepresenting work intentions.
I won't spend time researching the second article. One was enough waste of time.
So you want me to be perfect with 0 mistakes, while you don't have to be? Why are you on this site if you don't extend good faith? How can I be completely irrational when you don't even bother to read all of what I posted?
Admittedly, it was a quick google search as I'm not an expert on this topic. I just know that I've heard many instances of it.
Why didn't you do the search yourself? You could've saved me the trouble.
Assuming that you are American, you live in a country where they can go through your phone when you are at the border and detain you for weeks if needed [1]. That's an issue.
I'm open to admit that I was wrong on the first article. You were open enough to read it.
You're not open enough to read the second link.
That seems to be the factual account of what is actually happening here. Everything else is opinion.
Feel free to post evidence that no US citizen has been screwed over by ICE or CBP without due process.
The thing is since we're just throwing people to El Salvadorian prison with no trials, we can't actually believe anything this admin is saying.
Of course Trumpies will tell you it's completely justified. That's, of course, impossible to know. If we wanted to know if it's justified we might, oh I don't know, hold a trial? Eh?
But we're not doing that, presumably because the powers to be understand they probably aren't always justified, so a trial would put their entire operation at risk.
> One of those is the International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA), which announced last month that it would relocate its 2026 meeting from New Jersey to St. Catharines, Canada, after a survey of its members suggested that many international researchers would not attend a US meeting.
> Organizers of the International Conference on Comparative Cognition have made a similar call. Its 33rd annual conference next year will take place outside the United States for the first time in the society’s history, in Montreal, Canada.
> The Northwest Cognition & Memory (NOWCAM) meeting relocated its meeting earlier this month from Western Washington University in Bellingham to Victoria, Canada.
> The International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has cancelled its conference, originally planned for August 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, because cuts to federal funding meant it was “no longer financially viable”.
> The 2026 Cities on Volcanoes conference in Bend, Oregon, has been postponed to 2030 or 2032.
> The International X-ray Absorption Society cancelled its upcoming 19th conference in Chicago, Illinois
Your comment should be taken down for being a crock. This is further evidence that Trump's very existence causes some people to blindly worship him.
But the interpretation of how to enforce them certainly has changed with this administration, that much is undeniable? I don’t remember prior admins kicking out all foreign Harvard students or sending masked plainclothes ice agents to arrest US citizens protesting outside detention facilities?
This isn’t just my opinion - this administration is actively defying a 9-0 Supreme Court decision finding it acted unlawfully, and ordering Noem to return around Mr Garcia no later than April 7th. To say that because “the laws haven’t changed” that it’s all a media invention is crazy to me.
Mayorkas got impeached and ignored court orders also. Although an impeachment is seen as purely political now so perhaps it carries no weight. No one on here was fretting about Mayorkas ignoring courts though or ignoring immigration laws on the books. I think that's an interesting point about all this is just speaking like a bureaucrat or laundering an agenda through sympathetic courts makes it more legitimate than how Trump communicates with the public. In reality they both ignored courts.
That's comparing apples to lemonade. Mayorkas impeachment centered on alleged systemic refusal to comply with immigration laws (ie, basically policy disputes), that the Senate did not agree with. To my knowledge he never refused a court order or defied a court order.
Kristi Noem was ordered 9-0 by the supreme court to return a man who lower courts found was unlawfully deported to a foreign supermax prison, and has told anyone who asks that she has no intent to every comply with the ruling to return him because she does not recognize the authority of the court here. This goes well beyond the partisan political maneuvering of Mayorkas impeachment.
These are not equivalent cases at all, and this administration's behavior is a marketed departure from the state department's enforcement of the laws before. You could separately argue it's a warranted departure, but I cannot see how arguing it's business as usual and just made to look bad by the media follows.
I am not arguing what Trump or Biden/Mayorkas did is business-as-usual. No, I think Trump messed up and he personally seems to disregard the limits of the executive branch. But, according to AI, 8 million people were encountered crossing the border under the last term so let's say at least 8 million people made the journey making it one of the largest human migrations in world history. What I am arguing is that there are people, maybe as many as half the country, who are in favor of it happening and that concerns about immigrant rights to seek asylum and due process are actually an attempt to launder an open borders agenda through legal procedures. Meaning, I think when you get to 8 million arrivals, the concerns about ensuring due process for asylum claims we can kind of tell are bogus that maybe this wasn't just an uncontrollable event and you either committed negligence or... favored it happening and worked to ensure more of it.
What happened to Garcia seems like an administrative error, sure. But it also seems like splitting hairs because he was probably going to be deported regardless so comparing the situation to a fascist dictatorship to me is disingenuous. Is it an error? yes. Were his rights denied? Yes, in a technical sense. Are we now a lawless dictatorship? No, and where was anyone saying this for other presidencies? I actually just think people are upset that the migration they favored is being reversed.
The article reiterates allegations house republicans made that the Senate did not affirm. I am unable to find the specific court orders he was in violation with, just this repeated assertion. Again, you can argue against the policy of Mayorkas, but neither the courts nor the legislature ultimately seem to have found him in violation of the law.
And all I was arguing with was that this was not business as usual and the media is not making something out of nothing. This is a big change in policy.
What happened to Garcia is really not splitting hairs and I really encourage you to look into the case more thoroughly. He was under a court order _not_ to be deported because he had credibly made the case to the courts that he was in danger from the very gangs the government later accused him of being a member of. The executive branch is unambiguously ignoring the Supreme Court currently. This is the most salient and unambigious example I am aware of, but there are many additional cases and actions of the government in the same direction. I can only conclude the court system is not working as an equal branch and a check on the executive right now based on the statements and actions of the adminstration.
I am not arguing the policy, I'm arguing that the checks and balances of the US government are being ignored in pursuit of the policy. The bill of rights, especially around due process, is being interpreted to not apply to foreigners. And that is alarming if you wanted to visit the US and believed those checks and balances would be in force.
People have been saying the executive branch has been needed too much power since Bush jr. No president since then has meaningfully rolled back executive power, and they deserve some criticism for it. But the increased criticism of Trump's second term is not for nothing. I believe ignoring the courts is actually acting like a dictator, even for a policy (cracking down at the border) that the polls I've seen show majority of Americans support. How you execute a policy matters.
I mean many laws especially regarding the border were simply abandoned under the previous admin. It was basically an open border. So yes we've returned to the norm. That's not a bad thing. If anything it makes people visiting the US safer.
If I grant you that, then at the very least we both agree _something_ has changed then and it isn’t just the media.
But I don’t think it’s just that- what do you have to say about Noem v Garcia then, where the Supreme Court ruled this administration was not following the law?
Can you explain this perspective? I consider an open boarder to be something similar to what we have between states. I can go to New Jersey, and back again to New York, and no one asks any questions, no one checks my papers, I don't need a visa or a reason to be in NJ, and I don't need to declare anything I bought in NJ to NY customs.
By contrast, the US boarder under Biden was enforced with millions of deportations, expulsions, and legal processing. While it's true more migrants were allowed in under parole and asylum programs, and some Trump-era restrictions were lifted, the US-Mexico boarder did not resemble the open NY-NJ boarder.
So given the the checkpoints, border patrol agents, deportations, surveillance systems, legal entry requirements, physical barriers, detention facilities, visa controls, asylum processing, and international boarder agreements, I can't see how it was "basically open".
A friend's relative was detained at the border and had their phone searched on political grounds. There are multiple videos of people being whisked away by masked police and government. Not to mention all the other screws that have been turned on academia that I've heard in countless stories from people in my circle.
The media is not doing us any good, but the fear is not imagined.
> There is no risk for people visiting the US and not doing criminal behavior.
There has been extensive coverage of the US detaining people without charge under the new regime's immigration policies. The fourth amendment has been effectively suspended for foreigners. They are literally putting people in jail forever simply because they don't like them.
> There has been extensive coverage of the US detaining people without charge under the new regime's immigration policies.
Can you cite any examples? Mahmoud Khalil (who you referenced in another comment) was not charged with a crime, but he isn’t being held in perpetuity:
> There is no criminal charge against Khalil. Instead, the government's argument depends on a section of the Cold War–era Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which provides that aliens in the U.S. may be deported if the secretary of state believes their presence will have serious negative consequences for U.S. foreign policy. […] On April 1, 2025, New Jersey federal district judge Michael Farbiarz stated his court has jurisdiction over Khalil's case, and issued a stay on Khalil's deportation while it considers a separate case challenging the constitutionality of his arrest and detention. On April 11, 2025, Louisiana immigration judge Jamee E. Comans ruled that Khalil is deportable, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio's assertion that his continued presence poses "adverse foreign policy consequence". The judge said she had no authority to question that determination.
> The fourth amendment has been effectively suspended for foreigners.
This is not true.
> They are literally putting people in jail forever simply because they don't like them.
How many examples do you need? Mahmoud Khalil remains jailed in perpetuity without charge. In any reasonable world that should be enough. We can keep going.
(Just to head this off: I know you're going to say he's a criminal. That's how the scam works. But if the government could show he's a criminal they'd charge him with a crime. They don't want to, they just want to jail him, LITERALLY because they don't like what he was saying.)
It’s really amazing how ignorant people can be despite the evidence. No laws needed to change for the risk of abuse by the border authority to go up. Tell me about your opinions on civil asset forfeiture.
Half of politics can be explained by framing it around the idea that for a sizable chunk of the population the last 50 years have inflicted a wound to status. The civil rights era changes, demographic changes, and the consequences of the Triffin dilemma leave a large group of people with the living memory that they had more status in the past than they do now.
The natural urge to find a cause results in externalizing blame, elites being one targeted group. It makes sense that lashing out at them is an attempt to heal the status wound, even though the chance that this succeeds is zero.
Mate, not everything in the world is some 4D chess conspiracy. I think it's more likely they just don't want to get send to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador tbh.
If I'm reading the user right, and I'm not positive I am, they're more framing the people who support the administration's (reprehensible) agenda as being on a revenge kick for losing a small amount of their original privileged status.
I think it's a fine argument to make, and I'd even agree -- it's just put really obliquely.
You read it correctly. In an attempt to appear less partisan, I made the writing too oblique. My apologies.
A revised version would read:
Over the past half-century, shaped by civil-rights gains, demographic shifts, and the dollar’s reserve-currency burdens, one once-dominant segment of the population has felt its social standing erode. Its members still remember when the political, social, and economic order tilted decisively in their favor.
Politics now orbits the "status wound" this group carries. To soothe it, they cast blame outward, at elites, newcomers, or any symbol of the new order. Each target offers momentary relief, but none can restore what was lost.
These status-injured people don't realize that status isn't a zero sum game. You can give people who have previously been discriminated against civil rights and it doesn't take status away from the previous in-group.
He's not referring to the scientists. He's referring to a large subset of supporters of the present administration, stereotypically lower middle class white men. They have seen other groups (women, black people, Hispanics, gay people, etc) gaining rights over the last half century or so, while they are no better off and often worse off.
This group also has a grievance against scientists, whom they see as complicit because of their campaign against climate change, among other things.
The present administration is heavily weighted towards supporting the backlash from this group. This weighs heavily on scientists, and is seen as a win for the former group.
The parent is saying the status wound is being experienced by those doing the firing and detaining.
Another way to state this is that those in power today are out for revenge because they feel as though the past ~50 years has been punishing to them. So they are lashing out against those who’ve gained in that period of time. Science and intellectualism in general is one of those gains.
This doesn't really work when you're trafficking in "explanations" about how Group A thinks invented by Group B for the purpose of delegitimizing Group A's disagreements with them.
Though just to be very clear here, at every step of the way this group has voted for and voraciously supported the very same elites that have been pushing hardest on the accelerator pedal for some of their problems. The Dollar's status as a reserve currency was not itself a burden. The problem was caused by the Republican Party's continually trumpeted fake "fiscal responsibility" whereby the surplus was still centralized (monetary inflation), but the proceeds were handed to Wall Street to bid up asset bubbles instead of being spent on policies that would have helped Main Street.
You’re displaying a form of racism by portraying this as about “lost status” rather than the decreasing material well-being of the public and the collapse of technocratic systems benefitting people in a regime of inflated credentials.
Your theory doesn’t explain, eg, why Trump is more popular than a typical Republican with minorities. Nor does it explain Obama voters who switched to Trump.
While you dressed up the language, you’re still just calling others “istaphobes” to avoid contending with real class issues — and making an ad hominem argument rather than contending with their legitimate disagreement.
Obama voters who switched to Trump are not a portion worth talking about. They are in the same vein as talking about no votes for genocide hardcore Palestinian supporters who sat out or people dating immigrants that had their partners deported. Interesting news stories that are nothing more than a distraction from the huge percentage of people that voted fully unconflicted and knew exactly what they wanted.
When you see those black and white photos of people hanging black people, or read stories about kids putting glass in the food and chairs of children going to an integrated school, so many of those people are still alive.
Trump was in his second year of college when the civil rights act passed and it was official policy black people were supposed to be treated like people. The civil rights act passing wasn't some official decree where the whole of the US respected that.
They have one example of a meeting moved. The other one is going to Canada, but most attendees are Canadian students (hmmm), the other one is cancelled because of funding cuts (that's not a fear of coming to the US),
As a scientist, a lot of these conferences are nothing but rackets. Organizers can make a lot of money from them if they can get enough attendees. I've been approached by multiple conference organizers and when you start to look it's clearly a joke (same with many journals).
I'd also wonder how many of these conferences were teetering to start with (look how many happened ever 3 years, a good sign they can't get critical mass).
> One of those is the International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA), which announced last month that it would relocate its 2026 meeting from New Jersey to St. Catharines, Canada, after a survey of its members suggested that many international researchers would not attend a US meeting.
> Organizers of the International Conference on Comparative Cognition have made a similar call. Its 33rd annual conference next year will take place outside the United States for the first time in the society’s history, in Montreal, Canada.
> The Northwest Cognition & Memory (NOWCAM) meeting relocated its meeting earlier this month from Western Washington University in Bellingham to Victoria, Canada.
(above is the one that's mostly Canadian students)
> The International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has cancelled its conference, originally planned for August 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, because cuts to federal funding meant it was “no longer financially viable”.
> The 2026 Cities on Volcanoes conference in Bend, Oregon, has been postponed to 2030 or 2032.
(I award the above the "most unexpected conference")
>The International X-ray Absorption Society cancelled its upcoming 19th conference in Chicago, Illinois, which was scheduled for July this year.
It feels like a few more examples than you mention, but still not enough to be more than anecdotal.
Yes agreed. So much ridiculous hyperbole in this thread that says way more about the political affiliation of the commenter, than it does about any real or imagined threat.
A Russian immigrant is caught smuggling biological material. She claims she didn't know she had to declare it, yet her phone had messages from colleagues saying "you need to declare it!".
I don't know too many countries who don't deport people who break the laws in that country.
The fact that HN got to see this article, is a sign that HN is getting to know things before the regular joe.
This is a Nature article, and this is something that has happened in the past 4 months. I know this is the converation I have heard around other academics.
Ergo, you're a Trump supporter, or worse. There is a real threat for people traveling to the US. And there is a growing threat to academics as well. I know two academics who are considering returning to Europe, after only just having acquired US citizenship. The ship is sinking, and calling it fake news (ridiculous hyperbole) isn't going to stop it.
What would help me get an accurate picture is how many conferences are typically held per month in the US and how has that number changed but instead we get fluff like:
"Some meetings have been put on hold" - which meetings?
"Several academic and scientific conferences in the United States have been postponed, cancelled or moved elsewhere" - Which conferences, what % of the total? more specifics?
"Organizers of these meetings say that tougher rules around visas and border control — alongside other policies introduced by US President Donald Trump’s administration — are discouraging international scholars from attending events on US soil. In response, they are moving the conferences to countries such as Canada, in a bid to boost attendance." - Which organizers?
EDIT2: there are some specific anecdotal examples towards the bottom of the paywalled article. This is still not meeting what I would consider accurate non-opinionated reporting.
Would you mind explaining where in the article the author gives an opinion, as opposed to stating uncontested facts that would be newsworthy to scientists?
Or would you mind sharing a snippet that expressed any political belief of the authors?
I could not find either
As for your specific questions, they are answered even in the paywalled version. Just keep reading past the first sentence
So no acknowledgement of the fact that your questions are answered even before the paywall? The conferences (and organizers thereof) listed also include International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA), the International Conference on Comparative Cognition, and then the article goes on to add
"The International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has cancelled its conference, originally planned for August 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, because cuts to federal funding meant it was “no longer financially viable”. The 2026 Cities on Volcanoes conference in Bend, Oregon, has been postponed to 2030 or 2032. The International X-ray Absorption Society cancelled its upcoming 19th conference in Chicago, Illinois, which was scheduled for July this year. “
Your argument that there is an agenda is not compelling.
Yes there are a couple of examples closer to the bottom. I admit to getting stuck in the fluff.
FWIW e.g. the IACBT conference was cancelled more than 2 months ago. 2026 Cities on Volcanoes (COV13) was cancelled almost 3 months ago. Having that information would also have been helpful.
EDIT: I misread the cancellation date of the COV event, it was last month and not 3 months ago. I still want to know and it wasn't mentioned.
I spent quite a bit of time trying to look for more data to see if something makes me change my mind. I looked at how many conferences are happening in the US. I looked at the agenda to see how many foreign speakers participated. I tried to use AI to help me spot trends.
So far I'm still ok with my initial judgement that the story serves an agenda and is not real news. Or if it's news then it's low quality/poor journalistic excuse for news. Real news should give the facts, it should give the relevant background, it should do so in a way that attempts to be as unbiased as possible, not push a view point, and it should provide enough information that intelligent readers can make up their minds based on evidence. The opposite of news is coming in with an agenda or a thesis and then cherry picking things to support your viewpoint while not providing any information that can serve to falsify your viewpoint.
Maybe if I saw the article in its entirety I'd change my mind, but I doubt it. It seems the journal has an editorial position/agenda here and is seeking to drive that forward. The journal has run many "news" articles on these topics which this article prominently links to:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00859-w "‘Anxiety is palpable’: detention of researchers at US border spurs travel worries" (also worth noting that afaik those "detentions" didn't happen, people were refused entry)
This also doesn't mean that the assertion is false. I don't have enough data to say one way or the other. It is possible that many people are worried to travel to the US. Maybe they're Nature readers. So it is possible that many conferences are cancelled and moved and that is significant. But this is still a political opinion piece and not a news story.
> From the article would you say the author is a supporter of US Republicans and Trump or not?
Having a stance is not disqualifying, or else there wouldn't be anyone left to do journalism. "Agenda" has uselessly become code for "I don't like what I'm reading."
Analysis has always been a part of journalism, that's not a new or subtle point, nothing is new about this, I don't understand where this sentiment would come from other than being offended by the words you're seeing.
Everyone has some sort of stance. There's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is masquerading as "news" while pushing your world view. Creating a narrative and manipulating the reader's emotion is not reporting news. If you have a position as a journalist the honest thing is also to disclose that position.
News should be objective or as objective as possible. This is what happened. Report on that. This article could have been rewritten along those lines/principles:
- Report/lead with what actually happened. (these conferences/these dates/information about the conferences/their decisions)
- You can interview the organizers and quote them.
- Ideally you give a broader context (e.g. yearly we have 10k meetings/conferences and these 4 have been cancelled) even if it doesn't support your narrative because that's what an educated reader needs to have to be able to form their own opionions.
An analysis is not "news". If you're analyzing some trends then make clear that's what you're doing. An opinion is also not news.
NOWCAM 2025 meeting was held in Victoria, BC, Canada, from May 8–10 on the UVic campus. I can't even find a reference to it being moved. I mean maybe it was.
Most scientists are rational people. If they obey US immigration rules, they SHOULD never have a problem. There have recently been a few horrifying stories where this wasn't the case, but those are the exception and not the rule.
> There have recently been a few horrifying stories where this wasn't the case, but those are the exception and not the rule.
You made a political statement here that might not be flamebait but is just as careless of reality as flamebait: not only because it ignores the number of people affected in each story (in the worst case, 50 people who literally followed the legal immigration process and still got "deported" to prisons in a different country than the one they came from [1]), but because your idea of "a few" is not mutually exclusive to someone else's idea of "too many". Your "SHOULD never have a problem" is a motte to the `most likely won't have a problem` bailey.
> A rational person would totally be fine with a non-zero chance of being sent to an El Salvadorean torture camp for the rest of their lives with no due process even when directly ordered by the Supreme Court of the United States... the chance of it happening to you is probably pretty low (though of course we actually don't have a good way to know since people are being whisked away without even chances to contact their lawyers)!
It's crazy how common the meme of "aloofness signals intelligence" has become among the folks at the top of the bell curve.
The thing is, while the chances of any one individual having trouble are relatively low (unless they're trans, in which case they may simply not have the papers that the US is now demanding), the chances of them having this sort of trouble (arbitrary detention etc) in a normal country is far, far lower.
Also, these things are organised in advance, often years in advance. Honestly, who knows what it'll look like a couple years down the line.
I think the point was that, if there is a problem, you don't currently have a guarantee of even a minimal due process, as a foreigner at the US border.
What you should be asking is; what would happen if I illegally immigrated to some country other than the US, where they have no guarantee of due process?
I’m confused by what point you’re trying to make because it isn’t relevant to the article.
It is possible to address illegal immigration in a manner that doesn’t deter those visiting who will very likely return. Unfortunately whether it is the result of agency-wide policy changes or a few rogue officers, there’s certainly some new anxiety up for those wanting to travel here.
What exactly is deterring visitors, other than their dislike for the immigration enforcement policy of the new US administration? From what I've been seeing, legal immigration and tourism are being strongly encouraged.
The fact that legal immigrants have been detained, prevented from attending the birth of their children or from holding their newborn, because they engaged in 1st Amendment protected speech?
Or that when people's visas are unilaterally cancelled for no reason and then they show up at the border for entry, they may be held in solitary confinement for 9 days and given several mutually-exclusive (and all factually incorrect) rationale's for the cancellation while being prevented from contacting their family or lawyers?
> So basically, when we passed the Border Control they separated us and asked me to come with them to a room where they were going to ask me a couple of questions. After that they said my visa has been cancelled and I can’t get in the US this time. I got to another room where I had an interview and they took my fingerprints and photos of my face. And then they brought me “downstairs” until I [could] get my flight back to Germany. “Downstairs” was the cell where I was in solitary confinement for nine days. It took me some days to understand that it wasn’t that easy to get my ticket back, as there was no cooperation in helping me or letting me call someone who could get the ticket for me. You don’t have access to your phone or the internet in that cell.
I am very curious: have you just not heard of these instances? Or you have and you think they are not serious deterrents to legitimate travel to the US?
Mahmoud Khalil has a green card (meaning he is a permanent resident) and has been in ICE detention since March 8th. How can you pretend this is about violating immigration law?
The simplest explanation is that they perceive “violating immigration law” and “saying something publicly that the current administration disapproves of” as being the same thing and are completely comfortable with that.
> If they obey US immigration rules, they SHOULD never have a problem.
Sure, they SHOULD never have a problem. But, increasingly under Trump, they MIGHT have a problem despite this, especially if they are not white and/or come from a country that Trump is currently feuding with, and/or have publicly spoken out against Trump, Netanyahu, or their allies. One shouldn't base any serious decision on how things SHOULD be.
Years ago, I would have found this deeply dismaying. Today, I still see it as a negative development, but far less so, because my regard for the sciences has declined with the growing ideological capture of many disciplines. It’s become typical for political narratives to take center stage at scientific conferences. For example:
Yes, nothing to do with the absurd costs of arranging such events in the US, let's not beat on a different drum rather than try to bring down total costs.
It's already half way around the world for most and it's absurd to the rest of the world to pay $200 for a meal which can be beaten by most of the developed world...
But no, clearly tsa border control or political wind of the week...
There seems to be more fear mongering than reality here. Why would a scientist coming to the US for a conference be picked up and sent to El Salvador (or some such)? Do they really believe these things are happening to everyone? Are they spending too much time on Reddit instead of doing research?
I think a more common legit fear is paying for flights, accommodation, conference etc then getting turned back (maybe after a short detention) because of some social media post in your past or your name was on some misidentified "woke" science.
There were a few other stories that made the news like a British citizen that was prevented entry to Canada and then arrested trying to return to the US (who wanted to work illegally in Canada but admittedly treated very badly by the Americans).
"Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to the administration change are false. CBP’s search numbers are consistent with increases since 2021, and less than 0.01% of travelers have their devices searched. These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security."
"Non-U.S. citizen air passenger arrivals to the United States from foreign countries totaled:
4.541 million in March 2025, down 9.7 percent compared to March 2024.
This represents 87.3 percent of pre-pandemic March 2019 volume."
It's true that there is real confusion and fear. I have coworkers (I work for a large US company with offices all over the world) that share worries. This includes people with green cards, other working visas, and foreign visitors. There's plenty of travel and zero issues. People are worried is true.
In Canada there we also have a lot of people with strong feelings/emotional response to Trump's 51st state nonsense and tariffs. There is a real feeling of betrayal. There are practically zero issues with Canadians traveling to the US.
"In March, Canadian residents returned from 2.7 million trips to the United States, representing a 24.0% decrease from March 2024 and accounting for 63.9% of all trips taken by Canadian residents in March 2025.
Meanwhile, US residents took 1.2 million trips to Canada in March, down 6.6% from March 2024 and representing 81.3% of all non-resident trips to Canada in March 2025. "
Basically the worries are real, fueled to a large extent by these sorts of articles, and in my opinion politically motivated (and I don't like Trump either) but the likelihood of running into problems is small and unclear if larger than it ever was.
> Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to the administration change are false. CBP’s search numbers are consistent with increases since 2021, and less than 0.01% of travelers have their devices searched. These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security.
I'm sure the CBP would never dare to lie about such things in a way that potentially puts their egomaniacal boss in a more favorable light than he deserves.
In these sorts of situations you need to consider what is the more likely reality based on whatever limited data you have.
A few things to consider:
- Organizations take a while to change. Is it more likely that the CBP is operating more or less as it has been or that it had some dramatic changes?
- Searching phones takes time and effort. To scale up this in a significant way while still supporting similar amount of traffic would require more people? extended waiting times?
- Do you know people who travel to the US? Have they had their electronic devices searched? Have we seen a surge of stories about electronic devices being searched? The numbers they claim are less than ~450 a month (0.01% * 4.5M). Do we have evidence to suggest the scale is significantly different?
- The CBP could simply have said nothing. What would be their reason for explicitly addressing this question? If it's a lie wouldn't they be concerned e.g. with needing to deal with this down the line? Do you think Trump reads these reports and rewards some person in the CBP for this? Feels very unlikely.
- CBP is a huge org. 65k people or so. If there was some major change or lie then presumably it'd leak somehow?
You seem to be ignoring the very deliberate anti immigrant/foreigner shift in the political landscape, as well as deliberate intimidation tactics to silence opposition on certain topics. Sure in a vacuum it doesn’t make sense for a big organization to turn on a dime no but when the current admin is deliberately engaging in intimidation tactics against immigrants and visa holders having the CBP be more aggressive in enforcement makes perfect sense.
If people are put off by the media reporting Trump's anti foreigner rhetoric and actions is that the media's fault? This week for example "Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status" and 50% tariffs on the EU because why not.
I don’t think such articles are responsible for the drop. As a Canadian, i wouldn’t visit the US even if i though i was perfectly safe there. I simply don’t wish to contribute even a single dollar towards our enemy.
> i wouldn’t visit the US even if i though i was perfectly safe
That's certainly your right and I get where you are coming from but
> our enemy.
Calling the US your "enemy" is a pretty strong stance, especially considering how deeply tied our countries are economically and culturally.
Don't want to visit? That's fine, but let's not pretend for a second that every American supports all the things you oppose. Only a plurality, not a majority, of Americans even voted for Trump and more than 75% of us still consider you an ally.
But you might want to lay off the media and tone down the rhetoric and drama a bit. Shit like that is why things are the way they are now.
It is incredible seeing people like you defend the administration when there's new executive orders signed every day that push your country further into the stone age. We're witnessing North Korea-level brainwashing at a never before seen scale and it's all out in the open for the entire world to see.
Its not fear mongering to acknowledge that this administration is anti-science, or at least less pro-science than previous administrations. Hundreds of grants are frozen due to the Harvard shenanigans - its not just Harvard, as many grants flow through there on their way to other universities.
Are the chances of getting deported high? No of course not, but America is certainly not rolling out the red carpet for international scientists right now.
The left has a serious misinformation issue nobody is tackling. Just yesterday I was in a coffee shop and the guy next to me was saying Ukraine had to beg Starlink for service, when in reality Starlink gave them 100 million in free service.
The immigration crackdown is exclusively for illegal immigrants, in particular illegal immigrants who have been charged with crimes. Unless your conference is for illegal MS13 gang members you have nothing to worry about.
This completely ignores the non-gang members who were detained and not allowed to travel back to their home country (Canada, Germany). Of course that makes quite the world news headline so it's only natural for people to not want to travel to the US anymore.
Then there's the other issue where the PUSA continues to demonize allied countries. Clearly something is wrong. So why bother travelling to the US again?
I have yet to see a story about someone who was detained and not allowed to return to their home country of Canada or Germany who wasn't also either accused of a legitimate crime or otherwise violate the terms of their visa in a clear and obvious fashion. Even in those cases though, you are usually sent back to your home country as the punishment.
It seems reasonable that border control will someday make a mistake, detain someone, and then let them go, but this is rare enough that there aren't any recent instances of it, and it's not an ongoing problem.
You can say that's only one guy but if you are attending a conference do you really want to deal with that stuff? I wouldn't especially want the border force checking my phone for wrongthink about the dear leader.
The "hateful and conspiratorial" content was him threatening the president and terroristic conspiracy. People get arrested in the US all the time for a lot less than what he apparently said, this isn't unique to the Trump admin
> Another AFP source said that US authorities accused the French researcher of “hateful and conspiratorial messages”. He was reportedly also informed of an FBI investigation, but told that “charges were dropped” before being expelled.
You conveniently omitted the part where it says it was an accusation that was dropped. And no, exercising free speech rights, in private messages of all places, is not a crime. Especially when "hateful and conspiratorial messages" is just codeword for criticism.
Well he doesn't have a right to free speech, he's not American. Technically France does afford their citizens the right to free speech either, so he's SOL on every front.
My understanding is the refused entry is effectively the punishment. You wouldn't try him here, generally they try to have foreign nationals charged with the US crime in their home country, and it probably wasn't likely to happen.
Lastly a friend of mine in college was arrested by the FBI for a joke on social media during the Biden admin. They arguably take online behavior more seriously than in person
Yes, after giving them hundreds of millions in free services, he wanted to start getting paid. Not only is this entirely reasonable, but it was generous of him to give them a year of service with no payment or even promise of one.
https://archive.ph/iYdBT
True, not much data yet, but a cery real day to day factor for conference organizers. We have had two Canadians skip a US conference last month due to the dramatical worse general climate. Zoom instead. This is NOT just about immigration and passport control. It is the new ugly American zeitgeist that changes enthusiasm.
We will probably be skipping the US for two international conferences I have helped organize. Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax are all great alternatives for larger meetings from 2027 ti 20??.
The 2nd, and supposed to be final, term of the current US President is scheduled to end on Jan 20th, 2029.
I am hopeful that my fellow Americans will elect a responsible, intelligent, virtuous leader in 2028 to be sworn into office on that day.
I know I'm asking a LOT. However that's one of, if not the most, important jobs in the world. We all deserve to have someone at least that qualified there.
The trust is already gone. He was voted in twice and there was enough support for the party as a whole that none of the other branches of government can contain him.
Plus he said that he intended to make the changes such as his supporters would never need to vote again. Things have already been dismantled in such ways that it will be impossible to build them back as they were.
Not to doom and gloom you out of hoping for the best but the Rubicon is rapidly fading into the distance.
I must have completely missed those speeches. Looked it up,
Looks like we’re out of the short term loops and well into the decadal effects with this man.As a European, I’d like to add that the impulse response on the collective memory will be multi-generational.
I think a fair reading of Trump would be that he was saying he'd have things fixed in four years, rather than staying on as a dictator.
I disagree. A fair reading is that he intends to have abolished the rules preventing him from just being a dictator.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-trump-has-said-about-pursu...
That's how we're already interpreting it, that he will "fix" things, i.e. cause irreparable damage. There was no suggestion that he would stay on after his term, only that the damage would be so deep that the switch couldn't simply be flicked in the opposite direction.
It is not just Trump. It is whole conservative project that is behind him. He truly represents the republican party and works towards its goals.
This is it. It's not uncommon to see people on this very forum defending many of his policies, so the hope that the population has simply been duped and everything will right itself in a few years is a hard one to hold. One begins to question so much of America and see how much we had actually been turning a blind eye to since the end of the war.
I kid you not but some of the Silicon Valley elites believe themselves to be philosopher kings and wish to lord over the rest of us in some bizarre techno-monarchy system.
You might enjoy the book "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (interview: In Conversation With Yanis Varoufakis - on YouTube).
Weren't they planning to make their own techno-monarchic sovereign state? I remember reading up about one venture that actually received funding from your usual VC suspects.
Even the folks in Wall Street weren't this dystopian, come on.
Yes, it has to get much much worse before it can get better. Another half-competent democratic presidency now would only result in an even worse republican one next.
I'm not sure that's true. It would just take the democrats to run an intelligent, middle of the road, non senile candidate.
So was Harris unintelligent, extreme or senile? Why can the Republicans run a candidate who is evidently dumb, extremist and senile all at the same time, but the Democratic alternative has to be perfect?
You're delusional if you think the reason Trump has support is somehow because of Biden.
He has support because he's a populist leader that's going to tell you the country is failing and we need to burn it all down and, of course, it's brown people's fault. And that type of populist messaging really resonates with stupid, poor white people. Which is a growing fraction of the US as people get poorer overall.
There's no "middle of the road" between neoliberals and outright fascists. The democrats need to shed their (literal) old skin and become a real left-wing party, with aggressive anti-corporate messaging.
That this gets downvoted shows that people have still not learned a single thing. You're spot on, it's tragic that so very few people understand this, based on how incredibly little I see it voiced online. In fact, you're the first I've seen voice it in ages.
E.g. if Harris (another, at best, incredibly mediocre candidate) would've won, the post-Harris Rep presidency would've been even worse than the current one. Until there's a competent non-Rep president, every single subsequent Rep government will be worse, until there will be no more fairish elections - and likely we're already there. Someone like AOC - not policywise, people don't vote on policy, it doesn't matter. Attitude-wise. It's abundantly clear the DNC hasn't learned (or more likely, doesn't want to learn), so the next president will be another Hillary/Biden/Harris candidate who will either lose or make the next Rep win even more decisive.
I think maybe it gets downvoted because it comes across as victim blaming and has echoes of abusive reasoning. The left must change what they want because otherwise the right will throw a hissy fit and start opening concentration camps?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. It could be helpful to point to actual policy failings of Harris rather than handwaving about mediocrity.
When Harris actually completed to be presidential candidate she came in fifth. She was on stage a couple of times saying 200 million Americans died of covid - you have to be fairly thick to not realize that isn't so - she'd misread 200,000. They had to keep her away from interviews to stop similar stupid leaking out.
I don't recall this ever happening and, if it did, it was not a big enough deal for anyone to care about it. Certainly not a single person I know who didn't vote for Harris said this was the reasoning.
The reality is she was much more intelligent, better spoken, and higher qualified than Trump. That's not the reason she lost, and anyone proclaiming otherwise is stupid. Yes, stupid.
Misreading a number seems incredibly insignificant to the number of outright idiotic things Mr Trump says on a daily basis. Why the disparity in expectation/response?
> Misreading a number
Simple misreading is not the issue.
The misread number was almost two thirds of the entire population. That's the sort of thing I'd expect someone to catch as they're saying it because of how absurd it is.
So misreading it and not immediately catching it is the issue? It seems incredibly human. And you really feel this is worse than the dumb things Mr Trump is on record as saying?
Trump believes people are born with a set number of heartbeats [1], hence why he doesn't exercise. To save them for later.
Is that something you'd expect POTUS to catch because of "how absurd it is" or not?
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/15/politics/donald-trump-exe...
I understand why one might take my comment that way, but I'm advocating for the exact opposite: democrats should start acting as a real left-wing party, with aggressive messaging on oligarchy, healtcare, the depravity of the right, you name it.
The democrats, as they exist now, are almost "controlled opposition". There's much to wager that if they succeeded Trump II, they wouldn't undo 10% of the damage he's done. I fully believe Harris could have done a correct job at maintaining the status quo, but that's not what the people want or need.
The democrats should stop showing weakness and trying to build bridges with fascists, and instead speak 24/7 about how vile and stupid this entire circus is. Then they should start advocating for big changes that will hype Americans: free healthcare, extra taxes on billionaires, etc.
That seems like a much more reasonable position, thanks for taking the time to clarify. All I can say is what a unspeakably massive pity it is that there hasn't sooner been a reform to the electoral system that would have allowed for a less reactive governance.
Indeed. I don't know how much comfort it could bring you, but know that almost the totality of western democracies are slowly succumbing to right-wing populism, not just the US. While flawed, I believe the current electoral system is only a minor part of a much deeper issue, that being the prevalence of money in our democratic processes.
The people largely have been duped by populist messaging.
If you notice the people who defend Trump or his policies don't even really believe them. Half the time the defense is, "well he's not really going to do that" (Trump is a liar). Or, "that's not actually happening" (deporting citizens or permanent residents).
While these defenses are completely delusional, it at least highlights that most Trump supporters consider him untrustworthy. They support Trump because they're living in an alternate reality where everything is great and nothing bad has happened yet. Everything is always just around the corner, but they kick the can down the road in their head.
> It's not uncommon to see people on this very forum defending many of his policies
From what I've seen on the wider internet, the support for Trump is mostly a personality cult. The policies are getting support because they are his policies. They are on the Good Side, and the woke leftists are on the Bad Side. If Trump changes his views, most of his voter base will change with him.
The big question is: what's going to happen when Trump isn't in power anymore? Will he be able to motivate his voter base into a JD Vance presidency? Don Jr.? He's not getting any younger either - what if he dies?
With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.
> From what I've seen on the wider internet, the support for Trump is mostly a personality cult.
I agree with you but the point I'm trying to get across is that a disturbing amount of seemingly right minded people actually support him now on a policy level. Maybe they always did and feel comfortable to say it out loud now? I don't know.
But the deportations, skipping due process, defunding science, excluding foreign students, dismantling aid programs, cutting ties with Europe and Canada, stripping trans people of their rights, pulling support from Ukraine, not following the Paris Climate Accords, etc. etc. It's all stuff I've seen people here genuinely argue for.
> Maybe they always did and feel comfortable to say it out loud now? I don't know.
They always supported it. Lee Atwater put it best:
Atwater was a political consultant for the Republicans, he was an adviser to Reagan and H. W. Bush, and chairman of the RNC. Not some nobody with an opinion that doesn't reflect core conservative strategy. He laid it out for us right there. They pushed the racism down and then they abstracted it to make it more palatable to people. But racism was still always the animus. It was his "Southern Strategy" which courted disaffected Southern whites which formed the basis of the modern Republican party. One of the reasons that today's Republicans claiming the mantle of Lincoln is so absurd.That was how conservatives thought until about 2008. Then all of a sudden someone (Obama) came along that really opened the flood gates when it came to big conservative racist feelings. You'd still have groups like the Tea Party who would frame their views as fiscal, but then someone else (Trump) started saying the quiet part out loud, when he ran with the whole "birther" movement, an explicitly and overtly racist idea.
This set up a real ideological battle in 2015-2016. You had the neocons represented in Jeb Bush, who were happy to keep the quiet part quiet. But the foil was Trump, who came down his golden escalator shouting the quiet part: "Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers and we need to build a wall to keep them out". That message resonated deeply with Republican voters. Jeb, Rubio, and Cruz ultimately lost in 2016 because they weren't willing to say the quiet part, and after Obama, Republicans really wanted to hear it.
Since then, it's been a constant drum beat of conservatives attempting to undo all of the social progress of the last 50 years.
Now, this is not to say that everyone who supports Trump does so for the quiet part. But, MAGA is an explicit quiet part movement, so for those who don't, you have to figure out your exit ramp. The 2021 insurrection was a good and obvious one, but if you're right minded and still on board today, you better figure out your exit soon, because whatever fiscal policy you think you're voting for, you're not going to get it; this road leads to apartheid, genocide, and no where good.
A lot of people have declared the US republican party to be on its last legs, but it keeps stumbling onward.
It is not just that. He works on support of the whole ecosystem - from heritage foundation through tech leaders to fox news. The ecosystem will keep existing and will find a new preacher. The same people who use their talking points now will keep voting for the same set of policies. Just about only exception are tariffs in their current implementation - those are genuinely the Trump thing. But everything else is Trump executing long known conservative goals that are accepted by conservative voters.
> With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.
Trump represents traditional conservatives. With exception of tariffs, he is doing exactly what they wanted for years. Likewise, republican moderates never disagreed or opposed Trump policies, they just wanted someone more presentable for it.
There's a big difference between claiming to want something, and actually wanting it. The primary goals of most politicians are staying in power and self-enrichment, which in practice means doing whatever corporate America wants and handing out tax cuts (Republican) or subsidies (Democrats) to the rich. All the other stuff they claim to care about? That's literally only done to get more votes, most of them really could not care less about it.
Outlawing abortion, mass deportation of immigrants, killing foreign imports? Great to claim on election rallies to motivate your voter base, but it was never meant to be achieved. It's far more efficient to milk a "the Democrats want to murder babies" tag line for a few decades than to actually ban abortion and have to deal with the fallout when their voters see women they know dying because they can't get the healthcare they need. Claiming to do something about immigration is more efficient than actually doing it and losing all support from the companies relying on immigrant labor. Claiming to be tough on China is far better than losing votes due to tariffs making all prices skyrocket.
Traditionally the Republicans wanted to get in power, do nothing, and blame the Democrats for their failures. Trump screwed this up by actually doing the stuff he claimed he was going to do, and it's either going to end in an electoral bloodbath for the Republicans or a fascist theocratic dictatorship.
Many elected leaders on both sides have made significant campaign promises without trying to keep them. Even Obama once talked about not renewing the Patriot Act… Yet it keeps getting renewed… (One could simply do nothing and let it expire!)
In a darkly humorous sense, Trump embodies one civic ideal better than others before…
They could start with a bill that requires any politically charged bill title to be renamed to something boring, yet truthful and still relatively concise instead.
It's really difficult to 'vote against patriot...' it's a lot less difficult to not vote for the 'spy on Americans, everyone is a potential terrorist' act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
Though there are some general ideas within that wide-reaching legislation that deserve a review and carefully constructed process, rather than a slip-shod 'fix it fix it fix it' now knee jerk law.
> They could start with a bill that requires any politically charged bill title to be renamed to something boring, yet truthful and still relatively concise instead.
Well, even if it wasn’t Constitutiionally impossible for Congress to bind itself in the future this way, it would be impossible to enforce such a subjective rule. (And e en if you could enforce such a rule on formal names, it wouldn't stop informal names with emotional appeal from being popularly used, regardless of the formal name.)
I generally agree with your analysis but it ignores the switch that happens to every failing democracy: when populism ceases to be a tool and becomes the actual goal.
It's difficult to imagine how those tariffs benefit the oligarchs behind Trump and the GOP. They also seem very much ready to actually ban abortion federally this time, and carry out massive deportations. No matter how destructive to the country and their image these policies could be.
And here's pure speculation on my part: when you listen to interviews of the current administration it's like they don't even try to make what they do look good, or defend themselves. They are acting with the same shamelessness you would see in Russia, meaning they probably don't fear the next election day that much.
As for the democrats, they're basically controlled opposition at this point. The geriatric establishment only cares about retaining enough donor money, and will absolutely not put up a fight against the republicans.
The boot lickers, self-interested cynics and useful idiots currently in the Republican party are indeed what's sustaining Trump. They could end his ambitions in a week if they collectively worked to, or at least if a sizeable minority of them did so, but so far, they'd much rather focus on their own benefit or personal partisan idiocies than realize that they're helping establish normalizations of deviant governing (such as it is) that will have repercussions for decades, and could later badly bite off a big bleeding chunk of their collective asses. It's stupid and self-serving nearly through and through among the deplorable pile of garbage that is most of the modern MAGA-GOP.
None of this is to defend the democrats much either. They have had their heads up their asses politically in so many crucial moments that they did a lot to facilitate the voting in of this bullying orange buffoon, and currently, they're just barely raising the bar from a bare minimum of effort in trying to fight some of this president's more destructive policies.
Then there are the top-level Tech CEOs and how they're so grossly bending over and presenting their asses to the new administration. With Musk at least there's an element of authenticity to it since he's been espousing the views he currently shows off for quite a long time, but with people like Bezos and Zuckerberg, and others, the cynical and fundamentally cowardly about-face is particularly grotesque to watch.
I just wish the “democrat” wing of the uni-party had the self-awareness to realize why that happened.
Reality simply is that the only thing that got Trump elected twice is the abuse against the American people that has been ignored by the ruling class across both parties, which is back to its old ways of destroying the indigenous to plunder wealth and import brown people to work for them to support their decadent lifestyles.
Have you been following along? They're deporting the brown people and to hell with the economy.
I'm not sure what abuses you're talking about but this is a country where black people were being lynched within living memory. There's long been a fascist undercurrent in the United States and it's finally bubbling to the top. There is still widespread support for what is happening after everything we've seen and there are even supposedly educated and well-off people in this very thread defending it.
Blaming it on the left is a total cop out at this point.
At risk of speaking too much for someone else: They are not blaming the left, they're blaming the democrat party -- and are far from assigning them total blame imo.
At the risk of getting lost in the bushes before GP themselves can respond, I'm not sure that's a reasonable defence. First of all it's a two party system, so the left and the party of the left are essentially interchangeable. They said that "the only reason" he won is because of this "abuse" from both parties. Indeed there's no suggestion that the democrats are taking all or most of the blame there, but my response was only on the basis that they were being blamed at all, which they were. I'm not sure there's anything that justifies the behaviour we're seeing, to me it seems unreasonable to expect one party to change their ways from relatively moderate politics because the other side, so to speak, will otherwise threaten to dismantle the democratic functioning of the state.
The Democrat party is indeed incompetent, but GP's reasoning is part of why we've ended up with Trump again. The Democrats and Republicans are not the same, and if drastic change is needed, I know which party will be easier to change. As if inventing independent parties solves any problems. Don't pick sides; do the right thing, and the people who agree with you will be on your side.
It doesn't really matter though. If there's going to be a potential flipflop between nuttery and normality every four years, you can only really book things in the future for a couple of years after the start of a "normal" phase. And even that is assuming there aren't held-over issues that need to be legislated away by the new guy.
At that point, why even bother with the hassle and uncertainty?
This is part of why France lost status for large events and organisations in the early-mid 20th Century until now. Quite large political swings at regular intervals and fairly ready-to-protest population = not ideal for basing stability. And it doesn't matter that France was far more stable than most countries, it was simply much less stable than America, the UK and regrettably, Germany. Frances solution seems to be not to really compete for international industry or science, but to focus on French culture and language to fit their tourism strategy.
Even if the next president is sane, it will take a long time to change the culture. Once border control agents get more power (or the feeling that they can use their power more arbitrarily), they will want to keep it. Also, the legal framework is not going to go back in time, either.
It would take time to re-establish trust.
Several languages have idioms like these: "Trust arrives on foot, and leaves on a galloping horse"
Gain respect by drops, lose it by the buckets.
The genie is out of the bottle, the die is cast, etc. We’re not going back to what was before.
I’d only put 60/40 odds on the 2028 election not being temporarily suspended due to a state of emergency.
60/40 feels very pessimistic to me (meaning I think the election is more than 60% likely to occur on Nov 7, 2028 and the results heeded more or less as usual).
If you think 60/40 is the right odds, you have some opportunities available - to make fake dollars, at least: https://manifold.markets/AndrewG/will-donald-trump-attempt-t...
I bet you could find more than a few people here to take the other side of 60/40 odds in a $100 bet.
This approach seems overly mechanistic to me. You can have an election, and yet the results of said election can be completely predetermined like they have been in russia for the past 20 years or so. The US toyed with gerrymandering and disenfranchisement even before it officially embraced the current flavour of fascism. So the soil is fertile enough to take the next logic step towards a full dictatorship.
We already had a coup attempt in 2020.
Do you think the current VP has the integrity of VP Pence?
*2021
I would say you are both correct. The coup began in 2020 with the widespread lies about the election and smaller attempts at using violence to affect the outcome. E.g. where armed men appeared outside voting booths. Or when the Biden-Harris bus was forcefully stopped in Texas: https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2024/a-trump-tr...
Then the clear culmination happened on Jan 6, 2021, that is certainly correct as well.
It isn't going to be easy to transfer the cult of personality from Stalin to Beria. :-) If they consolidated the police state by then they could transfer that, not so much the cult of personality.
You dont have a cult. You have an ecosystem that created an alternative reality.
Its structural, not individual.
This idea that its a strange aberration of faith - Trump isn't the problem, hes just evidence that the efforts to counter watergate are working.
Its the Bannons, Stones and Murdochs of the world that create the media world for someone like Trump to exist.
The cult — maybe. But if you are bringing a comparison with the Soviet system — the autocracy itself remained for 40 more years, only to be promptly reinstated through Putin.
In a different comment so people can vote on this idea independently: I am not a Trump supporter, but I have many Trump-supporting people I interact with on a level that I don’t think they’re lying to me.
Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning. This is not a “I wouldn’t vote for a felon/rapist/whatever” type of red line that falls apart when you question it - they are universally against it. I sincerely think screwing with the election terms or dates to prolong Trump’s term is likely to cause immediate and shocking support evaporation. Enough to embolden Congress to do stuff, and he won’t have enough control over any armed agency to do anything to Congress.
I think that a Trump who is trying to avoid prosecution for $crimes is much more likely to throw his weight behind a GOP candidate in early 2028. Vance or whoever. That’s his best chance to stay out of jail (for prosecutions political or legitimate, doesn’t matter). After a few solid months of propping up another GOP candidate, Trump’s base will be even less rabid about him specifically. He’s going to be old news in late 2028.
If Trump doesn’t support another candidate in 2028, then I’d start to worry. I just don’t see it happening - the game theory very obviously says he must support a not-him candidate by early 2028, and doing that will make it even harder to pull off shenanigans.
It's hard to believe that trump will run in 2028 at the age of 82. assuming he's alive then (not implying assassination but just rather natural causes)
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> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning. This is not a “I wouldn’t vote for a felon/rapist/whatever” type of red line that falls apart when you question it - they are universally against it.
What were their thoughts and reactions after Jan 6? Clearly it was not a red line for them, but just curious if you discussed it with them right after.
If your hope is 2028, then you are effectively abdicating responsibility for your future to chance, at best.
When 2028 rolls around, the 4 years of straight up corruption, illegality, and power concentration will mean you wont have the tools to enforce your rules.
You are at your strongest, least tired, least weakened now. Today.
There is no tomorrow.
Americans have never lived most of their lives in a banana republic, so its understandable that they act as if there is a continuation of things.
There isn't.
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning.
Yeah because it didn't happen (yet). Standard Trump supporter maneuver. If you went back to 2019 and asked them if they'd support someone trying to overthrow the result of a presidential election, you'd get the same visceral negative reaction.
Once it happens, they find reasons why it's okay.
Yep same thing with getting buddy buddy with Putin or saying let's start a violent war to annex part of an EU member state.
A lot of Trump supporters, when questioned in a general context, are very against a LOT of the things Trump has done or is doing.
Then Trump does them, and when questioned about that, they shrug it off.
let's not forget he also doesn't do a lot of things he says that are highly problematic, like invading greenland.
thats not excusing trump supporters but also you can maybe understand why there is a predilection to just hope it goes away (because often it does)
He treats ideas like cattle, not pets. Throws out a lot of seeds and sees if they take root. It creates a lot of havoc because his detractor's analysts have to write a researched article about every seed. Meanwhile he's always got seeds growing.
That's not the thing I'm talking about though. I'm talking about when he actually does stuff.
Like, I don't understand your point here, I said stuff Trump has done, not stuff he said he's gonna do.
...yet
pretty sure trump has forgotten all about greenalnd and i would bet money it doesn't come up for the balance of his term. the man has the memory of a goldfish
Trump doesn't need a memory. He's being told what to do by Miller, Vought, and the other Heritage/2025 crazies.
They were very, very angry about the Greeland/EU mineral deal, which is why Trump immediately slapped a huge tariff on EU imports.
But Trump only cares about Trump. As long as he's getting attention, being on TV, scamming people, and cheating at golf, he's perfectly happy. He has no long term goals beyond that.
Trump is in terrible physical health, and his cognitive decline will only accelerate. The odds of him making it to 2028 aren't good.
The Republicans have until the mid-terms to either fix the next election or install a no-compromise terror state.
Terrorising the population with ICE, suspending due process, and removing habeas corpus all suggest the plan is the latter. As is the absence of realistic reporting and criticism from a (mostly) captured MSM.
Sooner or later confrontations with ICE will turn violent, and then it gets very dark indeed.
Its nto a captured MSM, its a broken information market. The MSM on the center and left work normally. On the right, theres straight up market capture and collusion with the party.
This is why you can't get a working conversation in america, because the exchange of ideas and information is broken.
Unfortunately this future seems unavoidable.
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term.
I don’t want to argue against your lived experience, but somebody is buying all those hats and yard signs.
Yeah - I think there’s a very small core of people who genuinely think Trump will win a third term, and a slightly larger core of people who want him to. Then a much larger set of people who are engaging in some very unwise trolling.
I just think it’s telling that all the rabid Trump supporters I know aren’t there. Zero of them want to see him on the ballot a fourth time or otherwise pull shenanigans.
Your account is reassuring to me, yes.
At this point they don't even know who he'll be running against.
But put a name there, and I guarantee you that they will immediately flip and claim that they have to support Trump, because the alternative is going to be literal communism or whatever.
Surely if shenanigans around changing eligibility to vote and maybe a bit of tampering with vote machines (won't be detected if there's no-one around with the authority to validate voting), then it won't matter if Trump has many supporters or not.
I would expect him and his handlers to look to other authoritarian regimes to see how to safely have democratic votes without any chance of losing power.
As soon as the mothership beams down the right marching orders, their brains will turn off and they'll fall in line.
It's happened with every other thing he's done.
They don't support it until he does it, and then when he does it, they'll be ready to die on that hill.
He isn't the candidate people who actually hold on to any principles voted for, because he very explicitly has none, and he expects his supporters to not have any either. The only thing that matters is winning.
This is an old pattern going back a good decade at least in conservative circles.
Everybody ingests at least some of their worldview and opinions from external voices. That's a reality of humans trying to navigate a complicated messy world. But it was really shocking seeing family members hold reasonable view "A", until the local talk radio station sprays out "A bad, B good", and then bam, instant complete retroactive reversal like they never thought "A".
It started with the deregulation of radio and telecom in the 90s, and accelerated right around the time of the OJ chase.
I worked on a farm in middle and high school at the time. Every blue collar dude, farmers, truckers, tradesmen all listened to Rush at lunchtime.
That's not a conservative problem, that's an anyone problem. Most of the liberal zeitgeist has done a 180 on globalism and tariffs this year, as a very prominent example.
The problem isn't that a political party is acting as hive mind, the problem is that the core pillar of conservatism they practice is 'I will use the law as a weapon against you, but I will not ever be bound by it'.
Which is no way to run a society, any I cannot have any respect for its disciples.
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term
This will change in the lead up to 2028. This is a pattern we've observed over and over again with Trump supporters, they draw a line, and once it's crossed they adjust to the new standard without fail. Trump now enjoys more popular support than ever before.
> That’s his best chance to stay out of jail
Absolutely zero chance he goes to jail. Not just because he's a former president and a billionaire, but also because it's a political impossibility. Even assuming Trump can't make a third term happen, and that the Democrats aren't indefinitely disaffected, holding Trump accountable is something that Democrats have proven themselves consistently unable to accomplish, nor do they want to, because it's a losing political agenda.
> He’s going to be old news in late 2028.
That's what they said in 2022.
> a hypothetical Trump 2028 term
Would it be a new term if elections are suspended, or would it just be his second term continued?
Even straight-up hereditary dictatorships like North Korea have elections these days.
I would expect some kind of brief "emergency" suspension followed by rewriting the rules and then a glorious re-election of our Great Leader.
I think that's genuinely interesting anecdata (even if Trumpists have changed their mind before), but ultimately the executive decides whether they're going to follow the constitution, not the people that originally voted for them and Congress has been utterly spineless when it comes to other things that play badly with the base like trashing the economy.
And on the original topic, whether Trump ultimately decides to enjoy being kingmaker for the next presumptive nominee (someone's got to be pitching him an Apprentice style TV show...) in order to enjoy a happy retirement is moot when the presumptive nominee for Republican candidacy is going to be someone with similar policy and behaviour extremes. In fact, in some respects the prospects for things like collaborative scientific research if someone who espouses Trumpism but isn't Trump are probably even worse due to them being less incompetent and less straightforward to flatter/bribe into declaring that actually $organization or $country isn't terrible wokes or dangerous criminals after all and they in fact have a very strong relationship. Vance seems to believe some of his schtick. Sure, the successor probably won't be favourites to win a free and fair election in which they're saddled with Trump's mistakes and lack his charisma or cult, but if you're doing medium term planning you can't count on that faction being out of power forever
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term.
They said the same thing on Jan 6, 2021. Trump supporters had a very negative visceral reaction to that day.
But on Jan 7, 2021 the propaganda machine started up again and minds began changing one by one. Today, the very people who were running for their lives on Jan 6 are in support of officially teaching in schools that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats -- the very lie that cause the violence of the day, that caused so many to say "I do not support this". Four years later they voted for it again.
So when I hear tales of a Trump voter who is against something Trump has done, I just remember that they voted for him again after he caused an insurrection against the United States in an attempt to illegally overthrow a free and fair election.
If a voter can find their way to excusing that, they will find their way to excusing a third term. Here's how: "Yeah it's not ideal, but what am I supposed to do? Vote for a Democrat? They would be worse. We are choosing the lesser of two evils." Works every time.
Run the 9/11 playbook again and those morons will fall in line immediately.
I remember their visceral negative reaction when anybody brought Project 2025 in discussions. Now, of course, Project 2025 is used as the actual blueprint and nearly fully implemented, and they are seemingly OK with it.
So no, these people are not to be trusted, there can be no negotiations, and no further reconciliation until they change their minds. Being "conservative" and "right-wing" is one thing. Being pro-Trump after February 2025 (and arguably January 2021) is nearly a crime.
Model risk — events of such magnitude may affect the probability of existence of Manifold, betting markets in general, and even the US dollar (in USSR-Russia transition, roubles were made worthless three times in a row).
Unless you are an actuarial expert with decades of experience in hedging geopolitical risks, you cannot meaningfully trade such events.
There will definitely be elections, even Putin has elections. The question is whether those elections will be fair.
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Can you elaborate? What do you mean?
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It's looking like a rather large assumption that Democrats manage to rebuild trust with the public. You would think 2024 would be enough of a crisis for Democrats to get their shit in order. And yet here we are with the same fucking dinosaur generation running the party.
This is a red herring. There is no winning for any party that isnt the Republican party, because there is no actual mechanism for non right wing voices to be heard on the right wing information ecosystem.
The issues is that Dems must bring their A game, to compete against a clown squad that can and will fabricate issues that havent happened, and force the dems to debate on it.
This is also a thought experiment, not a real issue, because Americans do not have that long a time horizon.
The strongest, most unified, and capable you will be is now. By the time elections come around, you will be hounded, disorganized, isolated and unable to coordinate.
Democrats don't have an A game. They're too busy deplatforming themselves and running away from the right.
> running away from the right.
Huh? Harris campaigned with Dick Cheney. She removed torture from her platform to do so. She promised to keep arming Israel. She promised to be more harsh on immigration than Trump. She warbled about having "the most lethal military" at the DNC.
This was all tacitly endorsed by the party. So, how did you get the impression Democrats running from the right?
Too late. The 2028 Olympic Games will be held in Los Angeles. It will be a historical one, since those two legendary of the 80s.
I wonder how many foreign athletes will be barred from entry to that?
don't get your hopes up - I fully plan on moving to Canada and sending my children to college there even if we elect a "better" president in the future
the fact that roughly half of of the electorate is fine with how things are as well as virtually all of the republicans in the senate and the house are too "scared" to do anything (complete BS as this is the very definition of their job) is really an embarrassment of civilization and humanity - apes are more evolved than we are
Regardless of people’s politics, Americans have not done that for at least 100 years now. What would make you think that would change now that basically all of the western world has followed our lead, largely because the American corporate authoritarian ruling class has imposed it on the rest of the western world over the last century?
> I am hopeful that my fellow Americans will elect a responsible, intelligent, virtuous leader in 2028 to be sworn into office on that day.
The US elected Biden after Trump's disastrous first term, and immediately followed up with Trump's totalitarian self-destructive second term.
When the other option is a woman (a non white one at that), what choice do people have?
Way to absolve the absolute joke that is the Democratic Party of any blame...
It's the truth. Kamala was well-spoken and overly qualified. She had answers to cost of living and healthcare. Meanwhile, Trump just said "you're poor because of brown people!!1!" And... that messaging won.
The reality is Kamala is a black woman, and Trump has been attributing everything evil in the world to people who are not white. Are we going to play stupid and pretend that has nothing to do with it? Or, are we going to at least try to be honest with ourselves about the current state of American politics?
There's no denying that the white racist constituency is a major part of the Trump coalition, but it's not all there is to it; remember, Latino men went in almost 50% for Trump, and a surprising number of non-white immigrants in general voted for him.
Hence the emphasis on Harris being a woman, not just non white.
The reality is people like feeling superior to others, whether it be lighter skin looking down on others, or men looking down on women. And even those below not wanting their own to make gains (such as other women).
My immigrant non white grandmother told me she wouldn’t vote for Harris because she’s a woman. This is a woman who basically did what men told her to do her whole life, and I suspect she doesn’t like the idea that maybe she could or should have fought for more for herself (or her daughters).
Way to absolve the joke that is the American voter of any blame…for voting for a person who committed treason, and said he would pardon those who committed treason. Which he did.
Sorry neighbours, but it's not about Trump. Trump is one man. The Republican party is effectively captured by that one mans 77,302,580 supporters.
Changing leaders isn't enough to fix it. You all broke it, and until you re-establish norms for democracy, reinforce the checks and balances, and start holding criminals who hold office accountable, it's not going to get better.
I wish you luck, you will need it :/
IMO the US needs proportional representation, not a 2 party system. But I'm Dutch, so I'm biased as we have exactly that.
Hard agree. The first-past-the-post single representative election system that is the foundation of the two party system in the US is breaking the country. It encourages politics where the current winner has no reason nor expectation of compromising on anything; now is their time and they are justified in breaking everything the previous winners did. It encourages politicians to act like babies, not grownups.
What I (as a non-US citizen living outside the US) never understood about the US political system is
1. Apparently none sees the (to me obvious) downsides of a two-party system where there is only black and white with cold-war logic of being either with us of against us, no grey zones and willingness for compromise.
and
2. monetary interests are so close to the political system by construction: candidates need to raise a lot of money during their campaigns which they get from companies, private persons and which is tied to their person. How can you not assume that all those people who get into office (senator, president, even judges as I learned recently) with money they got from someone is not in a conflict of interest right from the start? To me it seems there cannot be any independence.
Your second point explains the first. There is a one-party corporate-captured system with two wings. One pushes the country rightwards, the other pretends to oppose it, but never makes structural changes that would push the country back towards higher taxes on the rich and higher public spending, even when it has the means and the opportunity.
Behind this is the biggest propaganda and PR machine in history, with mass media, social media, lobbyists, think tanks and policy institutes, client journalists, astroturfing operations, and individual politicians all generating compliant prepackaged talking points that either support the corporate line or distract opposition with noise.
The downsides are obvious to any of us Americans with two brain cells to rub together (a minority).
The problem is those who benefit from it are also those who would have to do away with it. So they won't.
It's not that simple. People who vote dem or rep understand the two party system is bad and has a lot of consequences. That's not at all a minority opinion.
The problem is that people are realistic enough to also realize they can't just magically, out of nowhere, break the two party system. The "vote third party!!" people are useful idiots, and we all know it.
The fall of the two party system must be thorough and deliberate. We cannot start at a presidential election, much less like two months before the election, which is always when the "vote third party!" people crawl out of the woodwork.
They don't actually give a single flying fuck about third party. Otherwise, they would vote third party locally and then on a state level so they can build up their reputation for the presidency. And, they would at least decide on which third party to support. But they're too busy fighting over each other to decide that. So they're delusional enough to think their .5% polling candidate out of 5 other .5% polling candidates can overthrow the dems and reps.
It has to be coordinated. Two party system has been build up for a very long time. We need legislation on PACs, on voting, on the electoral college, and we need the cultural shift.
> The "vote third party!!" people are useful idiots, and we all know it.
Those people are the only decent voters in America. The others are complicit in a holocaust.
Again, this is reductionist.
You think I don't want a third party to win? Of course I do. But I'm not stupid, and I recognize that just going out and randomly voting for a third party is just a vote for the status-quo. This is part of the reason (just part, don't worry) that Trump won.
Until you, and others, can name me one specific third party and then also make your community and local representation at least 50% of the same third party, then I don't care. I don't want to hear it, nobody wants to hear it, you sound stupid, keep your mouth shut.
We have to do the work if we want results. Yeah, that means you too.
The thing that we can do is emphasize electoral reform (of the kind that enables viable third parties: runoff voting etc) as the major item in primaries. Basically no Democrat should win the primary unless this is a major item in their platform.
Note that, unlike many other reform suggestions, this one is actually viable because Congress can mandate it nation-wide, like it does today with single-member districts. All it takes is majority vote in both chambers (and yes, they should throw the filibuster in the Senate out to pass this if that's what it takes).
They're already printing out "Trump 2028" MAGA hats, don't get your hopes up too much. Now that they've permeated every level of power with their cronies, making them relinquish power will be much harder. Prepare for the worst.
If such a candidate presents himself then s/he would win. You have pretty much nailed the reason why Trump won. Everyone saw him as the second least competent presidential candidate. Bad leadership is a real problem and it has created a vacuum which Trump has roared in to exploit.
But there's a more fundamental problem, where neither party has offered suitable presidential candidates in the last 3 elections. Your system needs a bit of a reset. The Democrats have to return to their roots, and the Republicans have to get over the Cult of Trump. But i'm hopeful in time these two problems will resolve themselves in time and not mutually reinforce each other. Trumps Republican Party has a hard expiration date, and the Democrats will eventually have to listen to their voters if they want to win elections.
> neither party has offered suitable presidential candidates in the last 3 elections
Were we witnessing the same elections? Because I saw one side of the ballot as suitable 3/3 times, and the other side… not event close. Were they perfect, no, but the difference in quality has been baffling 3/3 times.
The actual reality is that many people have a belief system that is wildly different than their fellow countrymen. And whew, what a set of beliefs to act upon and force upon the world.
Saying they weren't perfect is still elevating Harris considerably above what many people saw her as in my opinion. The people who want police reform or support the defund police movement aren't enthusiastic about electing a hard-ass prosecutor. People who have no investment portfolios don't care about the stock market doing alright. People who care about social services don't like someone who is supported by and courting rightwing personalities. And progressives don't want "nothing would fundamentally change" after watching little substantial changes or reforms over the last 2+ decades while many people are barely hanging on by their fingertips.
Someone making $100K+ in a prosperous urban area might not see those things as too big of a problem. But someone making the median US wage or less while home prices continue to rise and police departments extort locals and basic education standards fall while secondary education prices rise have a big problem both for themselves and their children. I am not surprised people weren't enthusiastic voters, because many saw it as lose-lose. When people are offered either a slow death or a fast death, many will refuse to choose at all.
You cannot get people to vote on the "least bad" option, I thought this much at least has been made clear in the last decade. The enthusiasm will be so low that you cannot get enough turnout to beat the hard-line fans of the other side.
Please present good candidates with a progressive program and an inspirational personal charisma and people will vote for them over the fascist. Does anyone have a sliver of a doubt that an Obama would beat Trump with a leg tied behind his back?
This is not true, anymore, and we have the data to show it. The structrural issues with the information and news market in America (and most western democracies) has created a systemic issue, which has changed what makes a "good" or "efficient" candidate.
One team has to put out someone like Obama, and the other team can put up someone like Trump who can promise the moon is made of green cheese, and be lauded as a truth teller.
Working on facts, having them verified, building policy is not a competitive advantage, versus being able to pick a narrative and create facts that your voters want to hear.
What's there to stop left-wing populists? Bernie Sanders is both more popular and less unpopular than Trump. Apparently he can (i) have principles, (ii) have a numbers-based program of concrete measures and (iii) be an effective communicator, all at the same time.
Instead we field unlikeable Clinton, borderline senile Biden, replace him at the 11th hour with unremarkable and un-primaried Harris... Then we wonder how even a dumbfuck like Trump can beat them.
Someone who doesn’t even agree reality is reality won. A system that is able to prop up an alternate reality, won.
I like Bernie, I think he has the right attitude and voice to fight this kind of media battle.
The debate on Bernie vs Clinton is fundamentally reorganizing deck chairs on the titanic. Any Democrat candidate is playing with their hands tied behind their back, even when they facts, policy, research, effort, and genuine ability on their side.
Fixing the dem primary process - very much yes. Recognize that the playing field itself is prejudiced.
> What's there to stop left-wing populists?
They're not divisive enough. Not nearly enough racism.
Populism works because you need to create an enemy within that will cause your following, the majority, to feel as though they are persecuted. As though they are victims.
This was pretty easy to do with white conservatives, the majority, because you can just tell them brown people are stealing their money and causing crime and drugs or whatever. Oh, and also woke, because women on TV. It's a lot harder to do with the left.
I mean, who do you point to? The bourgeoisie, typically, but uh oh - they own everything. They fund your campaign, and your news. So... who is going to spread your populist messaging? That's, like, the most important part of populism. That's why Radio started WWII.
Also, in the US we have a culture of rampant individualism. We don't hate the bourgeoisie here because we all have a delusion that we're just temporary poor, not systemically. One day we will be millionaires, so we can't target them! That's us! All made up of course, all propaganda, but ultimately still a huge challenge someone like Sanders needs to overcome.
This is exactly why the democrats are in crisis, they refuse to look at themselves in a mirror. Harris was completely unsuitable she was soundly rejected for her personality and politics. She gave no compelling argument for why voters should choose her beyond the fact that she was not Trump. She was also badly let down by the Democrat party who rushed her on as an 11th hour replacement, and the Biden administration which gave her no opportunity to come to the public's attention over 4 years.
Biden.... He was more or less a decent person, but sadly he was mentally unfit for the job. Especially for the last 2 years the world witnessed the painful cognitive decline of an elderly gentleman. Nor did they appreciate the gaslighting by the administration, and media, telling them that Biden was fine when he obviously was not.
Hilary..... I can't remember what was wrong with her, maybe it was a complete lack of charisma, i dont know. Either way she was a mediocre choice at best.
Even without Trump the people who voted for him are still there, still have the same opinions, still want the same things, and can still vote for them. All it takes is for a candidate to credibly offer those things, and if that candidate is competent and disciplined..
Both parties had suitable candidates. People need to stop blaming everyone except people who push conservative agenda Trump win on.
We can blame them too, but Trump would absolutely never have been a suitable candidate, regardless of who was in his ear. The man is allergic to truth (see Sharpiegate for a particularly poignant example)
He could serve a third term and probably will attempt to do so, the two term limit could be wiped out with the stroke of a pen and Trump has a record for doing a lot of unprecedented things.
Why are so many so focused on Trump? If the current VP becomes the new P, will it be any better? What about the people behind it all, the ones financing and organizing the whole thing for which Trump is only the public figurehead whose function is to distract and get all the attention?
I mean, the current VP seems to be a complete non-entity, and vanishingly unlikely to be elected.
I think he'd be very likely to be elected if Trump runs as VP on the same ticket and they both publicly state that it would be a 3rd Trump term in all but name.
It's not even a new gambit. Putin did exactly this back in 2008 after doing two terms as president, swapping with his then-prime minister Medvedev for 4 years. Medvedev was also a nobody before becoming the prime minister, and there was absolutely no way he'd be elected if people didn't treat him as a figurehead for 4 more years of Putin's rule.
There is something to be said for, to date, nobody on the right wing in the US managing to even partially recapture Trump's particularly inexplicable brand of charisma. Everybody who has tried has just flamed out (e.g. DeSantis cratering like Wile E. Coyote just looked down).
I pin my hopes on that failure continuing.
I think it might take more than a stroke of a pen -- it seems like the easiest legal way would be to bribe the House to elect Trump as Speaker, bribe a pair of Republicans to run and win in 2028 and then in 2029 have each of them resign, promoting Trump back in to office.
The bribing might be costly but people are more than willing to buy Trump's merch.
Just get SCOTUS to rule that the 22nd Amendment only applies to consecutive terms because argle bargle reasons that supersede the language of the amendment.
Some Canadian companies have just straight up banned business travel to the US.
Some X companies did Y
so what?
Why are you substituting words with random alphabet characters? Are you able to read the original post? Are you unable to grasp how it adds context and data point to the discussion?
I think the anecdata in this case is worthless without at least naming one concrete example of 'some companies'.
My wifes company banned travel to the US. It is a few thousand people in British Columbia. She was planning to go to the Microsoft Build conference in Seattle and was told she could not go.
The name is irrelevant.
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> Something did something
This is a news website you know? It would be pretty uninteresting if nothing ever happened.
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It will take time for these effect to manifest. Conferences are organized quite far in advance, so most conferences this year and part of next year would likely not be able to change locations anyway.
But because they are planned in advance they might be even more careful then. They won't just take the status today into account, but also their fears of how much worse it could get.
As an American, it's starting to feel (almost) unfair to treat us as a single group when praising or damning.
More than ever, it feels like America comprises two very different peoples.
I can appreciate that but as an Indian, the thought of subjecting myself and my devices to search for “problematic” material to attend a scientific conference is not something I am willing to do. To me, the USA is the USA.
Also, while there are a lot of people unhappy with your state, I wouldnt say the same for your citizens.
Ottawa has plenty of event spaces, poor direct airport routes though. I wouldn’t count out Calgary and Edmonton either.
Montreal and Vancouver are nice.
I'm a Canadian who moved to the SF bay area after graduating. A lot of my smartest friends who came with me at the same time are actively taking steps to move back due to the political environment.
The scientific community inherently has their eyes wide open to seeing reality as it is, and the assessment that the US is a hostile place to the reality-based community is a no-brainer.
I was born in the Midwest, have lived my entire adult life in SF, and recently was relieved to get my permanent residency in Canada - moving to Vancouver, BC soon. My co-founder (who is Canadian but has lived in California for 25 years) and I know we won’t be able to attract world-class talent to a country that is trying to go back in time to pre-Enlightenment era.
I was travelling to the US a few times during previous administration and each time somebody from the team was taken into little dark room for questioning, I was not travelling to the US much before so I was of opinion the way how US border treats travellers was weird to say the least, at least compared to other countries I was travelling to. Sometimes it was worse depending on particular border agent. Interestingly I travelled recently during new administration and did not notice much of a change.
May I ask, was it for work, which country were you traveling from, what nationality do you and your colleagues have?
I may have to travel to the US this year with my family, for familial reasons, and it makes me more nervous than usual I must admit.
I am just trying to gauge if there are some criteria for pulling people in closed rooms.
We were travelling for business from EU. My feeling was that those of us who were travelling most frequently were pulled, but apart from slight inconvenience it ended OK. We started placing bets who will it be this time :) I always had paperwork ready, letter from business I was visiting, hotel booking, phone number to business rep who would confirm my credentials, but I was never asked to produce them. Though, I don't know about travelling with family, I am not much of a touristy guy..
Attending US conferences was always more a hassle than most other places.
The 'interrogation' before even boarding the flight was just ridiculous. And the process repeated after landing. Jeez.
I have friends and colleagues based in South America, when conferences are held in the USA, they never can attend, or want to. When they're held in Europe, they just appear with little hassle, it's quit perplexing to me how hard the USA makes it for them.
It's been this way forever, according to them, they're never going to even bother now.
It’s fascinating that people still see these things as new or unique to our current administration. This has been an issue for decades that were often ignored or minimized because it only affected smaller more marginalized groups of people. For example conferences involving HIV/AIDS had to contend with these issues for decades due to the blanket ban on HIV+ individuals from entering the country, even for a scientific conference. Often the conferences would continue leading to schisms in the communities and competing conferences that would ultimately disagree on fundamental principles in science and policy.
It seems new and unique, given that conferences (and scientists) are leaving?
You know how if you pile lots of flammable things in the corner of your garage and it's fine for years, and then a toddler strolls through with a book of matches, then suddenly you get a new and unique fire?
The conferences and scientists leaving are the results of decades of policy undermining education and human rights, coupled with the rise of the alt-right, normalization of racism and misogyny, with a soupçon of neo-nazism that allowed a populist regime to rise to power. All of that was the pile of flammable things. The extrajudicial deportations, conferences and scientists leaving, and tourism crashing are the first tendrils of smoke rising in the corner. It's not too late for America to fix it.
The system in the US is capable of running on nothing but hope because of the availability of lending and investment. "Unfortunately" that means the average person won't receive an impossible to ignore signal that something is going bad until bankers and investors lose hope. By that point, something would have had to have happened that can't be fixed in the short term by a reversal or a sudden period of sobriety.
For a concrete example, the stock market is going up and down every time the tariff threats change tone, but the layoffs that the tariffs will make inevitable won't be done until companies run out of financiers who can be convinced the setbacks are only temporary.
I think the point is, people are leaving because it seems new to them, while it in fact is not.
I’m not saying I agree, just clarifying the point of the previous comment.
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Do you have some statistics?
Because there really does seem to be a change in immigration enforcement lately and multiple universities have issued guidance accordingly.
The shipping people off for indefinite imprisonment in El Salvador without due process or appeal is new. I realise the people they've shipped are not conference delegates but it's still a bit off putting.
> leading to schisms in the communities and competing conferences that would ultimately disagree on fundamental principles in science and policy.
Ignoring the original topic and the rest of the comment, this part sounds like actually a useful thing?
If the different groups don't converge, that suggests that at least one of the consensuses is being driven by something other than verifiable facts (groupthink? conflicts of interest? politics?). Which I'd think is a useful thing to bring to the surface like that.
It’s a question of degree
Has anyone done the legwork to demonstrate the degree? The linked article is lists around 6 conferences. Which is not a huge number, in the grand scheme of things, given how anti-Trump the US academy seems to be. More than 5, less than 10 and I assume conferences move around fairly regularly.
It is annoyingly typical that they managed to interview a "historian who studies international conferences" yet fail to contextualise how large 6 conferences is in the scheme of things. Thanks to the Magic of the Internet [0] I can see that hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century which isn't that informative (averages to >333/year over 3 centuries I suppose).
[0] https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8008585/jessica-rein... & https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/52195/1/BJH2300063_R.pdf
It's far too early to say. You can't move a conference to a different country on a short notice. You can only hold it with whatever audience you can get, postpone it, or cancel it. For larger events, it's already too late to move events scheduled for 2026, and possibly even for 2027. Maybe there will be some data in a couple of years, but until then, anecdotes and informed guesses are the best you can have.
It's harder of a choice the closer the event date is, but sometime it's just the most responsible thing to do. You won't see many people coming to your event if it's now in a war zone for an extreme example.
It’s not the choice that is hard, it’s the logistics of changing such. Huge event on such a short notice. It’s simply not possible, so you can cancel if you feel your guests would not be safe, yeah. But who would agree to that? It could very well bankrupt the conference.
Conferences are organized months if not years in advance.
The fact that 6 of them found this a big enough issue to move their conferences out of the U.S. is a huge deal.
The real impact will be felt 2-3 years from now.
Indeed, in my own field we are talking deadlines for hosting bids at least a year in advance and an announcement about ten months before the conference is held. Organising a conference with possibly thousands of attendees is a massive undertaking and you can see the link below as to what one of these calls to host looks like.
https://sigdat.org/calls/bids2025
Here's another example [0]: "Hacker Conference HOPE Says U.S. Immigration Crackdown Caused Massive Crash in Ticket Sales". A quote: "“We are roughly 50 percent behind last year’s sales, based on being 3 months away from the event,” Greg Newby, one of HOPE’s organizers, told 404 Media in an email." No reason to think this conference is especially different from others like it.
[0] https://www.404media.co/hacker-conference-hope-says-fewer-pe... OR https://archive.is/QWmxO
An article from Nature, which is targetted at scientists, is the sign you are looking for. The fact that you are getting on HN, is indicating that you get to know of this before other people.
I can say that this is definitely an issue in converastions for me.
Full throated and enthusiastic ethno-fascism is new.
Africaaners are enthusiastically welcomed and coming in droves, everyone else, quite the opposite.
Should tell you everything you need to know.
this is on a much larger scale and supported by ~40% of the USA who think Trump can do no wrong, and agree with his racism and unconstitutional imprisonment of brown people who are here to just visit or get an education. Basically now if you're not white, you are a suspect if you are coming/going internationally. I'm pretty sure some heroic person will eventually whistleblow a tape recording/email/memo that cites this as the new operating norm for the current regime.
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This is bound to happen for a lot of other events besides scientific conferences. I know of a guy that wouldn't go to a retrogaming convention for fears of being detained at the border.
Its not just like you get refused entry and get sent on a return flight, there is risk of incarceration, rummaging through your digital life etc. It could be very disruptive and negative.
There is also the risk of being sent to completely unrelated continents based on eugenic preconceptions.
This, I was "randomly selected" way too often to risk it nowadays.
This!
The risk of being turned away at the border always existed.
Yes it’s drastically increased now, but that’s a quantitative change which will have a quantitative effect.
What we are seeing now is a qualitative change in traveling behavior and that’s reflecting the qualitative change in the severity of punishment that may occur if there is a problem while trying to enter.
You are also asked if you have ever been denied entry into a country when travelling abroad. Even if nothing else happens and you do just get flown straight back, it can make future travels harder.
There's a risk of life imprisonment in a concentration camp in a third country.
Yes, I run tech conferences and international attendance is dropping rapidly this year (we're shifting to aggressive local marketing, but it's still sad.)
Won’t be attending local conferences anymore.
My colleagues outside the US say that a big part of why they are bailing on the US is the public response.
They see France protest over their own internal retirement politics. They don’t see the US public protest over global destabilization through our politics.
It isn’t just Trump. The American people are completely failing to read the room.
So I am done supporting my fellow Americans as much as possible too. Enjoy your conference randos, but fuck me food and shelter and healthcare seem a bit more essential.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that in the US things are stacked against people who would want to protest or engage in any kind of activism.
Take a day off work to go to a rally or peaceful protest? “At will” employment means you can be fired the next day, no reason given. You got fired? Virtually all workers in the US get their health insurance through their employer, so now you and your family just lost access to medical care. It’s a really rough job market in many sectors, so it could take a few months to get a job. But since you got fired without cause, you can at least try to claim some unemployment benefits. In California, that maxes out at something like $450 a week.
Meanwhile in France if they want to fire you they have to give like 3 months notice (or pay you out for that time). Healthcare is socialized so no worries there. And if you still can’t find a job in a few months IIRC there’s fairly reasonable social benefits available.
> One thing you need to keep in mind is that in the US things are stacked against people who would want to protest or engage in any kind of activism.
This is the kind of exceptionalism that got you into this mess. You don't think things are stacked against the populations in countries like Turkey and Serbia?
Yes of course France is very different in terms of the freedom of the population, but why is that? Because they demanded it!
You don’t have to convince me that this is a bad thing for America. Yes it’s exactly how turkey and russia and other failed/failing democracies got to where they are.
This is not things being stacked against you.
Activism IS expensive, its what people default to when other options have failed.
So much for „land of the free, home of the brave“
That’s why other countries have social security. It provides freedom and courage.
What you need to keep in mind is once enough frogs are boiling things get worse fast.
No logical breakdown from an armchair is going stop parents with hungry kids.
This is the failing to read the room part I mentioned. Our biology is composed of biology not philosophy. It is self selecting. It’s biological imperative is select self.
Ok good you got some sort of Excel sheet breakdown. That’s just words.
This is what I’m talking about; American public is so dissociated due to economics that straight up ignores externalities. 8 billion people are the externality and it’s going to be hard for 300 million to ignore them and live in their narcissistic bubble much longer. Third world countries have rebuilt and don’t see the specialness in Murica or the point in sewing their shirts if they’re going to be so low affect.
Americans have to change not because of some philosophical position but because of physical reality not really caring about the excuses of 300 million; only half of which is cogent, and half of that actually intelligent. It’s not looking good, Bob.
I went to a protest. I was anxious about being photographed and added to some biometric database to be used for who knows what purposes. My wife and I had a serious discussion about whether to go, the possible risks, the possibility of violence, but I ultimately convinced her to go as our civic responsibility. I left our phones at home as a precaution so as to avoid being geolocated to the site.
What I found upon arriving was an unserious mob of hippies laughing and taking selfies to post on social media. I'd made signs supporting the rule of law. The signs of the other participants were an unfocused smattering of various political goals from "tax the rich" to banning Teslas. They included what I thought was an excessive about of profanity and crude insults. I think these are unserious people and what they're doing is performative and utterly pointless.
I do not see any viable action for individual citizens to take. Everyone out there clamoring for people to do something is just pushing their own political agenda. We had an election, one side won, that's how things go, ok. What's happened since however is a clear violation of the US Constitution in more ways than one can count, but it seems there is basically no one aware of or concerned about this. I feel like I'm at a football game where one side just took out a gun and shot the referee and while he lies on the floor bleeding to death both sides are still arguing over whether there was a foul or not.
There are various activist movements, groups, interests, communities.
You have to find your people. It can take a while. Change takes time, big social movements were decades into the making in the fringe before they reached the mainstream consciousness.
I don't know what it will take to make the fascist regime fear for their safety, and their supporters fear for their existence in society for having elected an autocrat intent on eliminating the existence of vulnerable groups. And I don't see a path to restoring social freedoms in red states with Christian nationalist radical majorities passing laws declaring Jesus as king and banning websites with LGBTQ content from minors.
are you ready to die for the principles of your country? if not, then there is no point. things are bad, but they have been way worse in the past (remember, we had legislators getting caned on the floor of congress, citizens locked up en masse without trial, everyone's bank accounts confiscated and held for weeks, biological experiments run on minorities, and underage citizens assassinated by drones). in the face of the injustices that the administration is going to commit, you should have ready for yourself the answer to two questions:
1. given a sober, nonpartisan review of past history, how far is too far for this administration?
2. what are you willing to do to stop it, how much are you willing to sacrifice.
i suspect that nothing the administration has done to date really clears the first bar. be prepared for the day it will, save your energy till then.
The person you're replying to has a vastly over inflated view of the risk of holding a sign, and when it felt too cringe they quit to slag off the other protestors. I would not expect much.
post is more for other readers, not the gp.
> I do not see any viable action for individual citizens to take.
Get involved with your preferred local political party. Push for policy preferences that won't drive turnout for the opposing party and won't give that party a chance to nominate a clown and then still win.
Seems like politics produced the mess that the U.S. is now in, so I doubt that politics will be the solution. What's required is for the general population to realise that they do still have the actual power and remind their "leaders" of that fact.
Honestly it sounds like you just want to give yourself an excuse to stop engaging. This reads like "I ate a salad once and I didn't like it, so I'm done with vegetables entirely, it's hopeless". Then the rest is you complaining that other people are unserious?
Going to protests is usually not much fun. There are all kinds of people there that you might not feel much in common with. People will make signs that focus on things you don't care about. This is normal! Protests can also easily burn a person out, so people try to have fun if they can because it's important to sustain pressure. The fact that someone dresses up, has a joke on their sign, meets a friend and smiles, or takes a selfie is not an indictment of the person or their protest.
Resist the urge to wallow in contempt for those people, particularly when you haven't done anything that has been effective.
You're mad at the wrong people.
I Admire your courage for sharing.
The only thing you can do is convince people, I think. Most folks are trying to stay in their bubble.
To me it sounds like you overestimated the danger.
Yes. Clearly. I spend most of my time outside the US, I thought I was coming back to Germany 1933, but it seems it’s more Rome 476.
> What I found upon arriving was an unserious mob of hippies laughing and taking selfies to post on social media. I'd made signs supporting the rule of law. The signs of the other participants were an unfocused smattering of various political goals from "tax the rich" to banning Teslas. They included what I thought was an excessive about of profanity and crude insults. I think these are unserious people and what they're doing is performative and utterly pointless.
You don't think this is completely by design? Social media is probably the most powerful cultural force that every existed, by an order of magnitude. Just flood instagram with quirky posts about protesting with your favourite Marvel superhero franchise quips, and The Algorithm will take care of injecting it into the brains of five hundred million people before lunchtime.
Americans are doing stuff. I call my reps and their vms are full. I go to their offices and there are lots of other people there. There's been protests at state capitals, Bernie & AOC have been giving speeches and zoom meetings about organizing and canvasing. Lawyers are suing and judges are trying to use the system despite the supreme court gone mad. It's tough to get a big group photo, but people are doing stuff. I'm as angry and jaded as anybody, but I dislike this defeated "nobody is doing enough so fuck it" thing I keep seeing. It's laying the groundwork a self fulfilling prophecy.
> Americans are doing stuff.
Certainly some people must be doing something but it's notable that your response is the exception in a sea of people sharing the reasons why they've decided to do nothing.
I'm thankful for others trying to do things, and I'm sorry for anyone already so defeated they're not only resigned to doing nothing they're bragging about it online.
It’s hard to protest. There’s no single movement, it’s just a bunch of different people. Stuff needs to get a lot worse.
It's important to understand that this has always been the case at any point in history where widespread protests affected change. And that people have won demands in situations with much worse oppression.
The reality is that it's not that hard. It requires learning new things and getting out of your comfort zone, lowering your expectations a bit and not expecting to do one thing and be done. This is how protest movements have always been.
Find something that aligns with one of your values and show up. Learn about more actions, join a chat group or calendar, and find what you can go to. Do not expect there to be one massive action that everyone shows up to first time. Do not burn yourself out.
Humans are social. Just showing up on the street reminds people that things aren't OK and there is something to protest about. Over time this builds people's consciousness and more people practice taking collective action.
All of this. I'm pretty strongly introverted, but I've been pushing myself outside of my usual patterns to show up to protests over the last few months. Most weekends I have at least one to go to. It does help to be around other people who are as concerned as I am.
I don’t mean protest.
I mean consume less media. Stuff.
Take burden off workers in the sweatshops and learn to sew a shirt. How many new shirts does a person need a year? 2-3? That’s like what, a cold December?
Be a human not a battery in a Matrix pod propping up ad companies and Hollywood.
We live in a Newspeak bubble; it’s freedom to stare at screen.
Local culture in the US is hyper-normalized around money making metrics.
Boomers did all the drugs and lived. They convinced GenX and Millennials to Netflix chill, order grubhub and watch AI content
It’s so bizarre
Edit: this is what gets attention not blocking roads https://finance.yahoo.com/news/target-badly-misses-on-earnin...
> Take burden off workers in the sweatshops and learn to sew a shirt.
Presumably they're working there because it's the least-bad option? If so, removing it so they have to go with the next-least-bad option might not be much of a help.
Yeah the usual uncreative answer “copy paste the Newspeak”
This answer is a euphemism for “don’t rock my boat.” Because if they ain’t sewing your shirts, you are. Your freedom from such is due to blowing Vietnam (and elsewhere) to a crater, fostering existing conditions. Not exactly informed consent.
The rest of the world doesn’t buy this analysis. They lived being oppressed by US military. They see Americans as the Taliban, not a great white hope Americans have been propagandized to see themselves as.
Ah yes, smashing capitalism by restoring the bourgeois ethic of thrift /s.
Ah yes, a sanctimonious tech bro reducing everything to a Twitter size sound bite.
We know; you’re scared of change because you have seen your lived experience and know you cannot grow a potato.
But you’re just a meat suit and your personal story and literacy aren’t anyone else’s concern. And that’s under the political norm. You prefer no guarantee of healthcare. The risk someone else will obsolete your research. Oo so titillating.
Fine, have it your way. Let us continue under American norms where I can give zero fucks your meat suit exists.
Fortunately for me I have generational wealth thanks to the building and auto booms in the US, and EE degrees, hands on building useful machines and technology. SWEs exist so long as open compute platforms exist and there’s no guarantee governments around the world will forever allow that.
Should you find yourself shut out of employment opportunities, thoughts n prayers.
>They don’t see the US public protest over global destabilization through our politics.
Then they're not looking.
Yes your brief firm comment surely establishes truth.
They see weekend warriors focused on their paychecks.
They don’t see coast to coast collective pushback for long term stability. Sure, America is big and pockets of tribal thought.
And so it’s unreliable. A hodge podge of asocial cults flip flopping around the rules every 2-4 years because of its distributed, async social nature, does not make a reliable ally.
Still not reading the room.
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I am really curious how the US is expecting to host the Olympics and the World Cup in the next few years.
Change their rules, enough to mostly work for 99.9% of would-be attendees, for the duration of the event.
And who knows how much personal travel? Me and my partner are just setting off on an indefinite working trip around the world. Starting in SE Asia to try to save a bit of cash, but we have no longer-term plans yet.
We've long dreamed about spending 3 months in the USA. Driving across Montana. Living in NYC. Just being there, absorbing it all. (We've both been a bunch of times and love it.)
We're both white Australians. Middle-aged. Low risk. But there's no way I'm travelling to the USA now. Why would I bother? If I need some North America I'll go see Canada. Or we'll just visit Europe.
In 2015 a PhD scholar attending a security conference was sent back citing national security concerns. This was absurd as she was an Indian, studying in Montreal and has no past involvement in any untoward thing.
In 2017, a friend doing his PhD in artifical intelligence in Germany was made to undergo a thorough interview at the border to determine if he is a threat on account of his work. Again, this was absurd to say the least.
In this March, my SO (French) chose to not attend a tier 1 conference in AI where she was going to present her work. She, having the brains for both of us, was prescient enough to cancel her trip in Feb-March, a bit before the current border policies came into full force and europeans were detained.
I have never gone, nor will I ever go to the United States. Not for scientific purposes or leisure. For over a decade I have been voicing concerns about hosting conferences in a country which is inaccessible or hostile to a vast section of the scientific community. I am glad to see this shift.
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This kind of false equivalence only brings the quality of conversation down and also waters down the gravity of what's really happening. I just never expected anyone would go so low as to equate people being turned away at the border or worse, be detained, questioned, and a pile of other abuses, with a pigeon detained for carrying what was suspected to be a spy message.
No, it's not the same everywhere. No, it's not because some countries are too dumb to be criminally abusive. And no, this is not just an inevitable outcome from "being too capable at detecting real threats".
If you go so far out of your way to water down and defend the indefensible you make it close to impossible to find any charitable interpretation, instead of moral complicity or trolling.
I am going to the Defcon CTF Finals at the Defcon conference this year. Coming from Europe, I know of multiple people who will participate remotely because of the political climate. I would have to lie if I said that I didn't think about skipping the USA either. In the cybersecurity space especially things have always been difficult.
This, Harvard, WHO, NIH, and NSF changes create that sucking sound you hear, a brain drain, and people deciding not to go to the US or to leave. Such myopic stupidity in the White House weakening America's power and reputation.
It's on purpose, at least according to some observers (Slobodian, Stiglitz). The clique behind Trump and Project 2025 want small (special) economic zones with as little interference as possible. Basically laying the ground work for exploitation, 19th century style. That requires dismantling the federal state. They don't care about the other consequences, because they don't have to bear them.
They’re fairly explicit about the idea that the last 100-200 years need to be undone. By that they don’t mean the technical progress. They mean human equality. The idea that there might be a connection between those two things is lost on them.
Sounds like feudalism
When he started talking about a golden age I knew he was going to drive it straight into the ground.
The New Amish: a society based on the ideals, behaviours, and technologies gleaned from severely rose-tinted memories of the 1950s.
Plus cryptocurrency.
Golden showers.
Golden age for broligarchs
For a career, the USA is as attractive as it ever was. For tourism and conferences perhaps a bit less so.
I mean.. it's still the USA.. bad government or not
Unless you happen to be female. Or gay. Or trans. Or non-white. Or poor.
But , yes! America is as good as ever for white men!
Isn't there a history of security researchers and open source programmers being detained or threatened when visiting the US? So the same thing is being done to the US's domestic researchers as well now?
I ve heard about these problems for many years. In particular, many indian phd students were reluctant to travel to European conferences for fear that there might be complications when returning back to America. The unreliable current administration must have turbocharged these fears
Perfectly reasonable. Nobody wants to get arrested by border agents on an ego trip.
I wish more computer security conferences go to Canada (Montreal if possible) which is cheaper (for me). We do have Recon but that's it.
The one science not rejected by the current US administration is Ballistics. The problem is that China can probably do it better than America. (I do realize that Nature does not have a specialty topic journal on ballistics and weapons.)
CIO of $20B/year ARR company: “I was going to send my kid to the US for college. Now? Never in a million years. I’m not even going to go to the US!”
Well done everyone. Well done.
For those without a choice, no threat of punishment/deportation will deter them.
For those with a choice? Arguably the people a country would want to visit/do business with/etc?
The choice is clear: the US is hostile and to be avoided.
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Law abiding people always have something to fear when due process is being thrown out the window. If the government can just assert criminality without having to prove it then they can mete out punishment to any law abiding people.
> Trump derangement syndrome.
The only people deranged about Trump are the people supporting him.
Got a single specific example of law-abiding citizens or visa holders having their due process thrown out the window?
Kilmar Abrego Garcia?
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2025/04/21/german-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/05/02/citize...
> Both claimed they were touring California but later admitted they intended to work
yeah...
Those two German teenagers, Charlotte Pohl and Maria Lepère, were denied entry because they broke immigration law and visa terms by misrepresenting work intentions.
I won't spend time researching the second article. One was enough waste of time.
One link, or both even, could be wrong as this was a quick search. Are you willing to admit when you're wrong about something?
You could've done it yourself but you didn't so I did a quick search for you. You're not open enough. I also don't spend hours upon hours on this.
How can you make that argument when you were proved to be wrong publicly?
The fear-mongering is completely irrational. It's simply not true.
So you want me to be perfect with 0 mistakes, while you don't have to be? Why are you on this site if you don't extend good faith? How can I be completely irrational when you don't even bother to read all of what I posted?
Admittedly, it was a quick google search as I'm not an expert on this topic. I just know that I've heard many instances of it.
Why didn't you do the search yourself? You could've saved me the trouble.
Assuming that you are American, you live in a country where they can go through your phone when you are at the border and detain you for weeks if needed [1]. That's an issue.
I'm open to admit that I was wrong on the first article. You were open enough to read it.
You're not open enough to read the second link.
That seems to be the factual account of what is actually happening here. Everything else is opinion.
Feel free to post evidence that no US citizen has been screwed over by ICE or CBP without due process.
[1] https://www.aclutx.org/en/news/can-border-agents-search-your...
The thing is since we're just throwing people to El Salvadorian prison with no trials, we can't actually believe anything this admin is saying.
Of course Trumpies will tell you it's completely justified. That's, of course, impossible to know. If we wanted to know if it's justified we might, oh I don't know, hold a trial? Eh?
But we're not doing that, presumably because the powers to be understand they probably aren't always justified, so a trial would put their entire operation at risk.
Ozturk.
It perfectly legal for anyone—*ANYONE*—to disagree with US government policy, even if they’re a foreign person present in the US on a visa.
That you are being so disingenuous about this means you are probably an open fascist.
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> One of those is the International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA), which announced last month that it would relocate its 2026 meeting from New Jersey to St. Catharines, Canada, after a survey of its members suggested that many international researchers would not attend a US meeting.
> Organizers of the International Conference on Comparative Cognition have made a similar call. Its 33rd annual conference next year will take place outside the United States for the first time in the society’s history, in Montreal, Canada.
> The Northwest Cognition & Memory (NOWCAM) meeting relocated its meeting earlier this month from Western Washington University in Bellingham to Victoria, Canada.
> The International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has cancelled its conference, originally planned for August 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, because cuts to federal funding meant it was “no longer financially viable”.
> The 2026 Cities on Volcanoes conference in Bend, Oregon, has been postponed to 2030 or 2032.
> The International X-ray Absorption Society cancelled its upcoming 19th conference in Chicago, Illinois
Your comment should be taken down for being a crock. This is further evidence that Trump's very existence causes some people to blindly worship him.
I love that the International Society for Research on Aggression conference was going to be in New Jersey.
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> The laws haven't changed.
But the interpretation of how to enforce them certainly has changed with this administration, that much is undeniable? I don’t remember prior admins kicking out all foreign Harvard students or sending masked plainclothes ice agents to arrest US citizens protesting outside detention facilities?
This isn’t just my opinion - this administration is actively defying a 9-0 Supreme Court decision finding it acted unlawfully, and ordering Noem to return around Mr Garcia no later than April 7th. To say that because “the laws haven’t changed” that it’s all a media invention is crazy to me.
Mayorkas got impeached and ignored court orders also. Although an impeachment is seen as purely political now so perhaps it carries no weight. No one on here was fretting about Mayorkas ignoring courts though or ignoring immigration laws on the books. I think that's an interesting point about all this is just speaking like a bureaucrat or laundering an agenda through sympathetic courts makes it more legitimate than how Trump communicates with the public. In reality they both ignored courts.
That's comparing apples to lemonade. Mayorkas impeachment centered on alleged systemic refusal to comply with immigration laws (ie, basically policy disputes), that the Senate did not agree with. To my knowledge he never refused a court order or defied a court order.
Kristi Noem was ordered 9-0 by the supreme court to return a man who lower courts found was unlawfully deported to a foreign supermax prison, and has told anyone who asks that she has no intent to every comply with the ruling to return him because she does not recognize the authority of the court here. This goes well beyond the partisan political maneuvering of Mayorkas impeachment.
These are not equivalent cases at all, and this administration's behavior is a marketed departure from the state department's enforcement of the laws before. You could separately argue it's a warranted departure, but I cannot see how arguing it's business as usual and just made to look bad by the media follows.
Regarding Mayorkas there's this: https://homeland.house.gov/2023/06/20/what-they-are-saying-h... which mentions ignoring court orders.
I am not arguing what Trump or Biden/Mayorkas did is business-as-usual. No, I think Trump messed up and he personally seems to disregard the limits of the executive branch. But, according to AI, 8 million people were encountered crossing the border under the last term so let's say at least 8 million people made the journey making it one of the largest human migrations in world history. What I am arguing is that there are people, maybe as many as half the country, who are in favor of it happening and that concerns about immigrant rights to seek asylum and due process are actually an attempt to launder an open borders agenda through legal procedures. Meaning, I think when you get to 8 million arrivals, the concerns about ensuring due process for asylum claims we can kind of tell are bogus that maybe this wasn't just an uncontrollable event and you either committed negligence or... favored it happening and worked to ensure more of it.
What happened to Garcia seems like an administrative error, sure. But it also seems like splitting hairs because he was probably going to be deported regardless so comparing the situation to a fascist dictatorship to me is disingenuous. Is it an error? yes. Were his rights denied? Yes, in a technical sense. Are we now a lawless dictatorship? No, and where was anyone saying this for other presidencies? I actually just think people are upset that the migration they favored is being reversed.
The article reiterates allegations house republicans made that the Senate did not affirm. I am unable to find the specific court orders he was in violation with, just this repeated assertion. Again, you can argue against the policy of Mayorkas, but neither the courts nor the legislature ultimately seem to have found him in violation of the law.
And all I was arguing with was that this was not business as usual and the media is not making something out of nothing. This is a big change in policy.
What happened to Garcia is really not splitting hairs and I really encourage you to look into the case more thoroughly. He was under a court order _not_ to be deported because he had credibly made the case to the courts that he was in danger from the very gangs the government later accused him of being a member of. The executive branch is unambiguously ignoring the Supreme Court currently. This is the most salient and unambigious example I am aware of, but there are many additional cases and actions of the government in the same direction. I can only conclude the court system is not working as an equal branch and a check on the executive right now based on the statements and actions of the adminstration.
I am not arguing the policy, I'm arguing that the checks and balances of the US government are being ignored in pursuit of the policy. The bill of rights, especially around due process, is being interpreted to not apply to foreigners. And that is alarming if you wanted to visit the US and believed those checks and balances would be in force.
People have been saying the executive branch has been needed too much power since Bush jr. No president since then has meaningfully rolled back executive power, and they deserve some criticism for it. But the increased criticism of Trump's second term is not for nothing. I believe ignoring the courts is actually acting like a dictator, even for a policy (cracking down at the border) that the polls I've seen show majority of Americans support. How you execute a policy matters.
I mean many laws especially regarding the border were simply abandoned under the previous admin. It was basically an open border. So yes we've returned to the norm. That's not a bad thing. If anything it makes people visiting the US safer.
> It was basically an open border.
Open border nowadays means “I don’t know what the word open means.”
If I grant you that, then at the very least we both agree _something_ has changed then and it isn’t just the media.
But I don’t think it’s just that- what do you have to say about Noem v Garcia then, where the Supreme Court ruled this administration was not following the law?
> It was basically an open border.
Can you explain this perspective? I consider an open boarder to be something similar to what we have between states. I can go to New Jersey, and back again to New York, and no one asks any questions, no one checks my papers, I don't need a visa or a reason to be in NJ, and I don't need to declare anything I bought in NJ to NY customs.
By contrast, the US boarder under Biden was enforced with millions of deportations, expulsions, and legal processing. While it's true more migrants were allowed in under parole and asylum programs, and some Trump-era restrictions were lifted, the US-Mexico boarder did not resemble the open NY-NJ boarder.
So given the the checkpoints, border patrol agents, deportations, surveillance systems, legal entry requirements, physical barriers, detention facilities, visa controls, asylum processing, and international boarder agreements, I can't see how it was "basically open".
A friend's relative was detained at the border and had their phone searched on political grounds. There are multiple videos of people being whisked away by masked police and government. Not to mention all the other screws that have been turned on academia that I've heard in countless stories from people in my circle.
The media is not doing us any good, but the fear is not imagined.
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>The media is not doing us any good, but the fear is not imagined.
Statistically nothing has changed. Source: I and many acquaintances I know have crossed the border multiple times. It's completely the media.
> Source: I and many acquaintances I know have crossed the border multiple times.
Well that's not a source.
> There is no risk for people visiting the US and not doing criminal behavior.
There has been extensive coverage of the US detaining people without charge under the new regime's immigration policies. The fourth amendment has been effectively suspended for foreigners. They are literally putting people in jail forever simply because they don't like them.
> There has been extensive coverage of the US detaining people without charge under the new regime's immigration policies.
Can you cite any examples? Mahmoud Khalil (who you referenced in another comment) was not charged with a crime, but he isn’t being held in perpetuity:
> There is no criminal charge against Khalil. Instead, the government's argument depends on a section of the Cold War–era Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which provides that aliens in the U.S. may be deported if the secretary of state believes their presence will have serious negative consequences for U.S. foreign policy. […] On April 1, 2025, New Jersey federal district judge Michael Farbiarz stated his court has jurisdiction over Khalil's case, and issued a stay on Khalil's deportation while it considers a separate case challenging the constitutionality of his arrest and detention. On April 11, 2025, Louisiana immigration judge Jamee E. Comans ruled that Khalil is deportable, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio's assertion that his continued presence poses "adverse foreign policy consequence". The judge said she had no authority to question that determination.
> The fourth amendment has been effectively suspended for foreigners.
This is not true.
> They are literally putting people in jail forever simply because they don't like them.
This is not true.
I'm sorry but this simply is not true. What you bring up is an example of the media misinformation I talked about.
How many examples do you need? Mahmoud Khalil remains jailed in perpetuity without charge. In any reasonable world that should be enough. We can keep going.
(Just to head this off: I know you're going to say he's a criminal. That's how the scam works. But if the government could show he's a criminal they'd charge him with a crime. They don't want to, they just want to jail him, LITERALLY because they don't like what he was saying.)
By media misinformation you mean media publishing names of people who this happened to along with ignored complaints from judges?
> The laws haven't changed.
It’s really amazing how ignorant people can be despite the evidence. No laws needed to change for the risk of abuse by the border authority to go up. Tell me about your opinions on civil asset forfeiture.
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?
Half of politics can be explained by framing it around the idea that for a sizable chunk of the population the last 50 years have inflicted a wound to status. The civil rights era changes, demographic changes, and the consequences of the Triffin dilemma leave a large group of people with the living memory that they had more status in the past than they do now.
The natural urge to find a cause results in externalizing blame, elites being one targeted group. It makes sense that lashing out at them is an attempt to heal the status wound, even though the chance that this succeeds is zero.
Mate, not everything in the world is some 4D chess conspiracy. I think it's more likely they just don't want to get send to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador tbh.
If I'm reading the user right, and I'm not positive I am, they're more framing the people who support the administration's (reprehensible) agenda as being on a revenge kick for losing a small amount of their original privileged status.
I think it's a fine argument to make, and I'd even agree -- it's just put really obliquely.
You read it correctly. In an attempt to appear less partisan, I made the writing too oblique. My apologies.
A revised version would read:
Over the past half-century, shaped by civil-rights gains, demographic shifts, and the dollar’s reserve-currency burdens, one once-dominant segment of the population has felt its social standing erode. Its members still remember when the political, social, and economic order tilted decisively in their favor.
Politics now orbits the "status wound" this group carries. To soothe it, they cast blame outward, at elites, newcomers, or any symbol of the new order. Each target offers momentary relief, but none can restore what was lost.
These status-injured people don't realize that status isn't a zero sum game. You can give people who have previously been discriminated against civil rights and it doesn't take status away from the previous in-group.
Edit: I misinterpreted the parent comment, apologies.
He's not referring to the scientists. He's referring to a large subset of supporters of the present administration, stereotypically lower middle class white men. They have seen other groups (women, black people, Hispanics, gay people, etc) gaining rights over the last half century or so, while they are no better off and often worse off.
This group also has a grievance against scientists, whom they see as complicit because of their campaign against climate change, among other things.
The present administration is heavily weighted towards supporting the backlash from this group. This weighs heavily on scientists, and is seen as a win for the former group.
The parent is saying the status wound is being experienced by those doing the firing and detaining.
Another way to state this is that those in power today are out for revenge because they feel as though the past ~50 years has been punishing to them. So they are lashing out against those who’ve gained in that period of time. Science and intellectualism in general is one of those gains.
> In an attempt to appear less partisan
This doesn't really work when you're trafficking in "explanations" about how Group A thinks invented by Group B for the purpose of delegitimizing Group A's disagreements with them.
Status wounds are legitimate.
Though just to be very clear here, at every step of the way this group has voted for and voraciously supported the very same elites that have been pushing hardest on the accelerator pedal for some of their problems. The Dollar's status as a reserve currency was not itself a burden. The problem was caused by the Republican Party's continually trumpeted fake "fiscal responsibility" whereby the surplus was still centralized (monetary inflation), but the proceeds were handed to Wall Street to bid up asset bubbles instead of being spent on policies that would have helped Main Street.
Counterpoint:
You’re displaying a form of racism by portraying this as about “lost status” rather than the decreasing material well-being of the public and the collapse of technocratic systems benefitting people in a regime of inflated credentials.
Your theory doesn’t explain, eg, why Trump is more popular than a typical Republican with minorities. Nor does it explain Obama voters who switched to Trump.
While you dressed up the language, you’re still just calling others “istaphobes” to avoid contending with real class issues — and making an ad hominem argument rather than contending with their legitimate disagreement.
Obama voters who switched to Trump are not a portion worth talking about. They are in the same vein as talking about no votes for genocide hardcore Palestinian supporters who sat out or people dating immigrants that had their partners deported. Interesting news stories that are nothing more than a distraction from the huge percentage of people that voted fully unconflicted and knew exactly what they wanted.
When you see those black and white photos of people hanging black people, or read stories about kids putting glass in the food and chairs of children going to an integrated school, so many of those people are still alive.
Trump was in his second year of college when the civil rights act passed and it was official policy black people were supposed to be treated like people. The civil rights act passing wasn't some official decree where the whole of the US respected that.
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Did anyone read the article?
They have one example of a meeting moved. The other one is going to Canada, but most attendees are Canadian students (hmmm), the other one is cancelled because of funding cuts (that's not a fear of coming to the US),
As a scientist, a lot of these conferences are nothing but rackets. Organizers can make a lot of money from them if they can get enough attendees. I've been approached by multiple conference organizers and when you start to look it's clearly a joke (same with many journals).
I'd also wonder how many of these conferences were teetering to start with (look how many happened ever 3 years, a good sign they can't get critical mass).
Just saw this today: “US citizen detained by immigration officials who dismissed his Real ID as fake”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/24/us-citizen-d...
> One of those is the International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA), which announced last month that it would relocate its 2026 meeting from New Jersey to St. Catharines, Canada, after a survey of its members suggested that many international researchers would not attend a US meeting.
> Organizers of the International Conference on Comparative Cognition have made a similar call. Its 33rd annual conference next year will take place outside the United States for the first time in the society’s history, in Montreal, Canada.
> The Northwest Cognition & Memory (NOWCAM) meeting relocated its meeting earlier this month from Western Washington University in Bellingham to Victoria, Canada.
(above is the one that's mostly Canadian students)
> The International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has cancelled its conference, originally planned for August 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, because cuts to federal funding meant it was “no longer financially viable”.
> The 2026 Cities on Volcanoes conference in Bend, Oregon, has been postponed to 2030 or 2032.
(I award the above the "most unexpected conference")
>The International X-ray Absorption Society cancelled its upcoming 19th conference in Chicago, Illinois, which was scheduled for July this year.
It feels like a few more examples than you mention, but still not enough to be more than anecdotal.
Yes agreed. So much ridiculous hyperbole in this thread that says way more about the political affiliation of the commenter, than it does about any real or imagined threat.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/science/petrova-scientist...
For her it's life and death, but perhaps you'd prefer to classify it as ridiculous hyperbole as well.
A Russian immigrant is caught smuggling biological material. She claims she didn't know she had to declare it, yet her phone had messages from colleagues saying "you need to declare it!".
I don't know too many countries who don't deport people who break the laws in that country.
The fact that HN got to see this article, is a sign that HN is getting to know things before the regular joe.
This is a Nature article, and this is something that has happened in the past 4 months. I know this is the converation I have heard around other academics.
Ergo, you're a Trump supporter, or worse. There is a real threat for people traveling to the US. And there is a growing threat to academics as well. I know two academics who are considering returning to Europe, after only just having acquired US citizenship. The ship is sinking, and calling it fake news (ridiculous hyperbole) isn't going to stop it.
Your response is just more of the same ridiculous hyperbole I was describing in my original comment.
Can't read the whole thing because paywall.
I thought nature was about publishing research. This reads like a political opinion piece but is published as "news"?
The author has other similar articles like these about the "US brain drain":
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01540-y
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01489-y
What would help me get an accurate picture is how many conferences are typically held per month in the US and how has that number changed but instead we get fluff like:
"Some meetings have been put on hold" - which meetings?
"Several academic and scientific conferences in the United States have been postponed, cancelled or moved elsewhere" - Which conferences, what % of the total? more specifics?
"Organizers of these meetings say that tougher rules around visas and border control — alongside other policies introduced by US President Donald Trump’s administration — are discouraging international scholars from attending events on US soil. In response, they are moving the conferences to countries such as Canada, in a bid to boost attendance." - Which organizers?
EDIT: I found this resource which would be interesting to examine for trends: https://conferenceindex.org/conferences/science
EDIT2: there are some specific anecdotal examples towards the bottom of the paywalled article. This is still not meeting what I would consider accurate non-opinionated reporting.
> I thought nature was about publishing research. This reads like a political opinion piece but is published as "news"?
Nature does both: scientific news and scientific literature.
> Which conferences, what % of the total? more specifics?
This is probably the paywall getting you, because many specific conferences are listed.
What about specific percentages?
No specific percentages
> At the moment, there are no data available on how widespread the issue is
(Not surprising, remember it’s only May!)
Also, at the end of the article they mention some other conferences that seem unconcerned
Would you mind explaining where in the article the author gives an opinion, as opposed to stating uncontested facts that would be newsworthy to scientists?
Or would you mind sharing a snippet that expressed any political belief of the authors?
I could not find either
As for your specific questions, they are answered even in the paywalled version. Just keep reading past the first sentence
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So no acknowledgement of the fact that your questions are answered even before the paywall? The conferences (and organizers thereof) listed also include International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA), the International Conference on Comparative Cognition, and then the article goes on to add
"The International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has cancelled its conference, originally planned for August 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, because cuts to federal funding meant it was “no longer financially viable”. The 2026 Cities on Volcanoes conference in Bend, Oregon, has been postponed to 2030 or 2032. The International X-ray Absorption Society cancelled its upcoming 19th conference in Chicago, Illinois, which was scheduled for July this year. “
Your argument that there is an agenda is not compelling.
Yes there are a couple of examples closer to the bottom. I admit to getting stuck in the fluff.
FWIW e.g. the IACBT conference was cancelled more than 2 months ago. 2026 Cities on Volcanoes (COV13) was cancelled almost 3 months ago. Having that information would also have been helpful.
EDIT: I misread the cancellation date of the COV event, it was last month and not 3 months ago. I still want to know and it wasn't mentioned.
Helpful how? Stopping you from having a knee jerk political reaction to news of real events?
So you don't think that whether something happened 3 months ago or yesterday is relevant?
No. How about you - did finding out it didn't happen 3 months ago change your kneejerk reaction in some way?
It did change my reaction a bit.
I spent quite a bit of time trying to look for more data to see if something makes me change my mind. I looked at how many conferences are happening in the US. I looked at the agenda to see how many foreign speakers participated. I tried to use AI to help me spot trends.
So far I'm still ok with my initial judgement that the story serves an agenda and is not real news. Or if it's news then it's low quality/poor journalistic excuse for news. Real news should give the facts, it should give the relevant background, it should do so in a way that attempts to be as unbiased as possible, not push a view point, and it should provide enough information that intelligent readers can make up their minds based on evidence. The opposite of news is coming in with an agenda or a thesis and then cherry picking things to support your viewpoint while not providing any information that can serve to falsify your viewpoint.
Maybe if I saw the article in its entirety I'd change my mind, but I doubt it. It seems the journal has an editorial position/agenda here and is seeking to drive that forward. The journal has run many "news" articles on these topics which this article prominently links to:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01295-6 "Will US science survive Trump 2.0?"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00859-w "‘Anxiety is palpable’: detention of researchers at US border spurs travel worries" (also worth noting that afaik those "detentions" didn't happen, people were refused entry)
This also doesn't mean that the assertion is false. I don't have enough data to say one way or the other. It is possible that many people are worried to travel to the US. Maybe they're Nature readers. So it is possible that many conferences are cancelled and moved and that is significant. But this is still a political opinion piece and not a news story.
> From the article would you say the author is a supporter of US Republicans and Trump or not?
Having a stance is not disqualifying, or else there wouldn't be anyone left to do journalism. "Agenda" has uselessly become code for "I don't like what I'm reading."
Analysis has always been a part of journalism, that's not a new or subtle point, nothing is new about this, I don't understand where this sentiment would come from other than being offended by the words you're seeing.
It's pushing my buttons obviously.
Everyone has some sort of stance. There's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is masquerading as "news" while pushing your world view. Creating a narrative and manipulating the reader's emotion is not reporting news. If you have a position as a journalist the honest thing is also to disclose that position.
News should be objective or as objective as possible. This is what happened. Report on that. This article could have been rewritten along those lines/principles:
- Report/lead with what actually happened. (these conferences/these dates/information about the conferences/their decisions)
- You can interview the organizers and quote them.
- Ideally you give a broader context (e.g. yearly we have 10k meetings/conferences and these 4 have been cancelled) even if it doesn't support your narrative because that's what an educated reader needs to have to be able to form their own opionions.
An analysis is not "news". If you're analyzing some trends then make clear that's what you're doing. An opinion is also not news.
> An analysis is not "news".
The analysis refers to things that just happened in May. 'New' things that happened in May.
The IACBT conference was cancelled 2 months ago.
The Volcanoes conference was cancelled in April.
NOWCAM 2025 meeting was held in Victoria, BC, Canada, from May 8–10 on the UVic campus. I can't even find a reference to it being moved. I mean maybe it was.
So clearly not "new things that happened in May".
This article seems like political flamebait.
Most scientists are rational people. If they obey US immigration rules, they SHOULD never have a problem. There have recently been a few horrifying stories where this wasn't the case, but those are the exception and not the rule.
> There have recently been a few horrifying stories where this wasn't the case, but those are the exception and not the rule.
You made a political statement here that might not be flamebait but is just as careless of reality as flamebait: not only because it ignores the number of people affected in each story (in the worst case, 50 people who literally followed the legal immigration process and still got "deported" to prisons in a different country than the one they came from [1]), but because your idea of "a few" is not mutually exclusive to someone else's idea of "too many". Your "SHOULD never have a problem" is a motte to the `most likely won't have a problem` bailey.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/50-venezuelans-imprisoned-el-salva...
> A rational person would totally be fine with a non-zero chance of being sent to an El Salvadorean torture camp for the rest of their lives with no due process even when directly ordered by the Supreme Court of the United States... the chance of it happening to you is probably pretty low (though of course we actually don't have a good way to know since people are being whisked away without even chances to contact their lawyers)!
It's crazy how common the meme of "aloofness signals intelligence" has become among the folks at the top of the bell curve.
Folks who believe themselves to be at the top of the bell curve.
Ah sorry, maybe unclear. I meant "top" on the y-axis. The most average-est of thinkers!
I can tell you my European colleagues have reservations about attending collaboration meetings in the US
The thing is, while the chances of any one individual having trouble are relatively low (unless they're trans, in which case they may simply not have the papers that the US is now demanding), the chances of them having this sort of trouble (arbitrary detention etc) in a normal country is far, far lower.
Also, these things are organised in advance, often years in advance. Honestly, who knows what it'll look like a couple years down the line.
How much can you assure them there will be minimal due process if there is a problem?
I think they'd want to be assured that there would be maximal due process.
I think the point was that, if there is a problem, you don't currently have a guarantee of even a minimal due process, as a foreigner at the US border.
What you should be asking is; what would happen if I illegally immigrated to some country other than the US, where they have no guarantee of due process?
Since when is visiting a conference illegally immigrating?
Typically folks who attend conferences fly over, stay the week, maybe even stay for another week as a vacation, then head back.
If anything, this is in the territory of acquiring a temporary visa.
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I’m confused by what point you’re trying to make because it isn’t relevant to the article.
It is possible to address illegal immigration in a manner that doesn’t deter those visiting who will very likely return. Unfortunately whether it is the result of agency-wide policy changes or a few rogue officers, there’s certainly some new anxiety up for those wanting to travel here.
What exactly is deterring visitors, other than their dislike for the immigration enforcement policy of the new US administration? From what I've been seeing, legal immigration and tourism are being strongly encouraged.
The fact that at least 50 or so legal immigrants have been deported to an El Salvadorean torture camp, likely for the rest of their lives?
https://www.cato.org/blog/50-venezuelans-imprisoned-el-salva...
The fact that legal immigrants have been detained, prevented from attending the birth of their children or from holding their newborn, because they engaged in 1st Amendment protected speech?
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/ice-refuses-to-allow-mah...
Or that when people's visas are unilaterally cancelled for no reason and then they show up at the border for entry, they may be held in solitary confinement for 9 days and given several mutually-exclusive (and all factually incorrect) rationale's for the cancellation while being prevented from contacting their family or lawyers?
https://www.the-berliner.com/politics/berlin-jessica-brosche...
> So basically, when we passed the Border Control they separated us and asked me to come with them to a room where they were going to ask me a couple of questions. After that they said my visa has been cancelled and I can’t get in the US this time. I got to another room where I had an interview and they took my fingerprints and photos of my face. And then they brought me “downstairs” until I [could] get my flight back to Germany. “Downstairs” was the cell where I was in solitary confinement for nine days. It took me some days to understand that it wasn’t that easy to get my ticket back, as there was no cooperation in helping me or letting me call someone who could get the ticket for me. You don’t have access to your phone or the internet in that cell.
I am very curious: have you just not heard of these instances? Or you have and you think they are not serious deterrents to legitimate travel to the US?
Mahmoud Khalil has a green card (meaning he is a permanent resident) and has been in ICE detention since March 8th. How can you pretend this is about violating immigration law?
The simplest explanation is that they perceive “violating immigration law” and “saying something publicly that the current administration disapproves of” as being the same thing and are completely comfortable with that.
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So you honestly think a scientist who is also an open supporter of freedom and self-determination for Palestine has nothing to worry about?
Or are you just being disingenuous because you have a lot riding on belief that nothing bad can or will happen to anyone you care about?
>Most scientists are rational people.
I suspect not.
> If they obey US immigration rules, they SHOULD never have a problem.
Sure, they SHOULD never have a problem. But, increasingly under Trump, they MIGHT have a problem despite this, especially if they are not white and/or come from a country that Trump is currently feuding with, and/or have publicly spoken out against Trump, Netanyahu, or their allies. One shouldn't base any serious decision on how things SHOULD be.
Years ago, I would have found this deeply dismaying. Today, I still see it as a negative development, but far less so, because my regard for the sciences has declined with the growing ideological capture of many disciplines. It’s become typical for political narratives to take center stage at scientific conferences. For example:
e.g. https://healthjournalism.internews.org/article/decolonizing-...
Yes, nothing to do with the absurd costs of arranging such events in the US, let's not beat on a different drum rather than try to bring down total costs.
It's already half way around the world for most and it's absurd to the rest of the world to pay $200 for a meal which can be beaten by most of the developed world...
But no, clearly tsa border control or political wind of the week...
There seems to be more fear mongering than reality here. Why would a scientist coming to the US for a conference be picked up and sent to El Salvador (or some such)? Do they really believe these things are happening to everyone? Are they spending too much time on Reddit instead of doing research?
This makes no sense to me whatsoever.
I think a more common legit fear is paying for flights, accommodation, conference etc then getting turned back (maybe after a short detention) because of some social media post in your past or your name was on some misidentified "woke" science.
The story of this one French guy being turned back at the border (out of millions of travellers) is what people see:
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-f...
There were a few other stories that made the news like a British citizen that was prevented entry to Canada and then arrested trying to return to the US (who wanted to work illegally in Canada but admittedly treated very badly by the Americans).
- https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-rele...
"Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to the administration change are false. CBP’s search numbers are consistent with increases since 2021, and less than 0.01% of travelers have their devices searched. These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security."
- https://www.trade.gov/feature-article/march-2025-air-passeng...
"Non-U.S. citizen air passenger arrivals to the United States from foreign countries totaled:
It's true that there is real confusion and fear. I have coworkers (I work for a large US company with offices all over the world) that share worries. This includes people with green cards, other working visas, and foreign visitors. There's plenty of travel and zero issues. People are worried is true.In Canada there we also have a lot of people with strong feelings/emotional response to Trump's 51st state nonsense and tariffs. There is a real feeling of betrayal. There are practically zero issues with Canadians traveling to the US.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/250522/dq250...
"In March, Canadian residents returned from 2.7 million trips to the United States, representing a 24.0% decrease from March 2024 and accounting for 63.9% of all trips taken by Canadian residents in March 2025.
Meanwhile, US residents took 1.2 million trips to Canada in March, down 6.6% from March 2024 and representing 81.3% of all non-resident trips to Canada in March 2025. "
Basically the worries are real, fueled to a large extent by these sorts of articles, and in my opinion politically motivated (and I don't like Trump either) but the likelihood of running into problems is small and unclear if larger than it ever was.
> Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to the administration change are false. CBP’s search numbers are consistent with increases since 2021, and less than 0.01% of travelers have their devices searched. These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security.
I'm sure the CBP would never dare to lie about such things in a way that potentially puts their egomaniacal boss in a more favorable light than he deserves.
In these sorts of situations you need to consider what is the more likely reality based on whatever limited data you have.
A few things to consider:
- Organizations take a while to change. Is it more likely that the CBP is operating more or less as it has been or that it had some dramatic changes?
- Searching phones takes time and effort. To scale up this in a significant way while still supporting similar amount of traffic would require more people? extended waiting times?
- Do you know people who travel to the US? Have they had their electronic devices searched? Have we seen a surge of stories about electronic devices being searched? The numbers they claim are less than ~450 a month (0.01% * 4.5M). Do we have evidence to suggest the scale is significantly different?
- The CBP could simply have said nothing. What would be their reason for explicitly addressing this question? If it's a lie wouldn't they be concerned e.g. with needing to deal with this down the line? Do you think Trump reads these reports and rewards some person in the CBP for this? Feels very unlikely.
- CBP is a huge org. 65k people or so. If there was some major change or lie then presumably it'd leak somehow?
You seem to be ignoring the very deliberate anti immigrant/foreigner shift in the political landscape, as well as deliberate intimidation tactics to silence opposition on certain topics. Sure in a vacuum it doesn’t make sense for a big organization to turn on a dime no but when the current admin is deliberately engaging in intimidation tactics against immigrants and visa holders having the CBP be more aggressive in enforcement makes perfect sense.
And you don’t need high numbers to produce a chilling effect you just target the right people and let others see: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/hasan-piker-t...
> but the likelihood of running into problems is small and unclear if larger than it ever was.
very true based on my own observation. Source: I and many acquaintances I've know have crossed the border multiple times. It's completely the media.
If people are put off by the media reporting Trump's anti foreigner rhetoric and actions is that the media's fault? This week for example "Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status" and 50% tariffs on the EU because why not.
I don’t think such articles are responsible for the drop. As a Canadian, i wouldn’t visit the US even if i though i was perfectly safe there. I simply don’t wish to contribute even a single dollar towards our enemy.
> i wouldn’t visit the US even if i though i was perfectly safe
That's certainly your right and I get where you are coming from but
> our enemy.
Calling the US your "enemy" is a pretty strong stance, especially considering how deeply tied our countries are economically and culturally.
Don't want to visit? That's fine, but let's not pretend for a second that every American supports all the things you oppose. Only a plurality, not a majority, of Americans even voted for Trump and more than 75% of us still consider you an ally.
But you might want to lay off the media and tone down the rhetoric and drama a bit. Shit like that is why things are the way they are now.
>>Non-U.S. citizen air passenger arrivals to the United States from foreign countries totaled: 4.541 million in March 2025
And these educated scientists are afraid.
I had to scroll to far too find sanity in this thread.
I suspect the opposition party is literally just fear-bombing social media with what ifs and AI slop to further divide folks.
But if some conferences or even colleges full of people susceptible to that kind of misinformation begin to fail, I'm all for it.
It is incredible seeing people like you defend the administration when there's new executive orders signed every day that push your country further into the stone age. We're witnessing North Korea-level brainwashing at a never before seen scale and it's all out in the open for the entire world to see.
Its not fear mongering to acknowledge that this administration is anti-science, or at least less pro-science than previous administrations. Hundreds of grants are frozen due to the Harvard shenanigans - its not just Harvard, as many grants flow through there on their way to other universities.
Are the chances of getting deported high? No of course not, but America is certainly not rolling out the red carpet for international scientists right now.
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/which-countries-have-issued...
Yes the rest of the world is wrong and Trump has the truth.
The left has a serious misinformation issue nobody is tackling. Just yesterday I was in a coffee shop and the guy next to me was saying Ukraine had to beg Starlink for service, when in reality Starlink gave them 100 million in free service.
The immigration crackdown is exclusively for illegal immigrants, in particular illegal immigrants who have been charged with crimes. Unless your conference is for illegal MS13 gang members you have nothing to worry about.
This completely ignores the non-gang members who were detained and not allowed to travel back to their home country (Canada, Germany). Of course that makes quite the world news headline so it's only natural for people to not want to travel to the US anymore.
Then there's the other issue where the PUSA continues to demonize allied countries. Clearly something is wrong. So why bother travelling to the US again?
I have yet to see a story about someone who was detained and not allowed to return to their home country of Canada or Germany who wasn't also either accused of a legitimate crime or otherwise violate the terms of their visa in a clear and obvious fashion. Even in those cases though, you are usually sent back to your home country as the punishment.
It seems reasonable that border control will someday make a mistake, detain someone, and then let them go, but this is rare enough that there aren't any recent instances of it, and it's not an ongoing problem.
There was the "French scientist denied US entry after phone messages critical of Trump found" guy https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-f...
You can say that's only one guy but if you are attending a conference do you really want to deal with that stuff? I wouldn't especially want the border force checking my phone for wrongthink about the dear leader.
The "hateful and conspiratorial" content was him threatening the president and terroristic conspiracy. People get arrested in the US all the time for a lot less than what he apparently said, this isn't unique to the Trump admin
> Another AFP source said that US authorities accused the French researcher of “hateful and conspiratorial messages”. He was reportedly also informed of an FBI investigation, but told that “charges were dropped” before being expelled.
You conveniently omitted the part where it says it was an accusation that was dropped. And no, exercising free speech rights, in private messages of all places, is not a crime. Especially when "hateful and conspiratorial messages" is just codeword for criticism.
Well he doesn't have a right to free speech, he's not American. Technically France does afford their citizens the right to free speech either, so he's SOL on every front.
My understanding is the refused entry is effectively the punishment. You wouldn't try him here, generally they try to have foreign nationals charged with the US crime in their home country, and it probably wasn't likely to happen.
Lastly a friend of mine in college was arrested by the FBI for a joke on social media during the Biden admin. They arguably take online behavior more seriously than in person
Musk publicly and explicitly threatened to cut off Ukraine's starlink access during the opening months of the war
Yes, after giving them hundreds of millions in free services, he wanted to start getting paid. Not only is this entirely reasonable, but it was generous of him to give them a year of service with no payment or even promise of one.