Shalom, Columbia: The Ivy League institution is $30 million poorer after the Trump administration on Friday slashed additional grants to the university from the Department of Health and Human Services, Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson reports.

The cuts hit, among others, Jeanine D’Armiento, the chairwoman of the University Senate Executive Committee who has played a leading role in protecting students involved in the disruption of university life. D’Armiento urged former Columbia president Minouche Shafik to include them in crafting disciplinary rules, and at a university senate meeting held last year, she shut off the microphone of a colleague who said there were “groups who are supporting terrorists” on campus. Grants supporting her work account for roughly $2 million of the cuts.

“The administration is in the process of reviewing the totality of Columbia’s $5 billion in federal funding, and the fresh round of cuts comes on the heels of the administration’s decision to cancel $400 million in grants and contracts to the Ivy League school announced earlier this month,” writes Johnson.

READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Trump Administration Slashes Millions More in Grants to Columbia

Antiracism, meet STEM: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire. She’s argued that Einstein’s theory of general relativity is undermined by “white empiricism” and suggested that string theory “failed to succeed” because the field has too many white men. The Biden administration appointed her to a physics advisory panel housed within the Energy Department in 2024. If President Trump doesn’t remove her, she’ll stay on until 2027.

Some scientists think Trump should. They say “that an institution tasked with directing federal research should not be advised by a woman who, in one 2020 paper, wrote that ‘Black feminist theory intersectionality should change physics,'” our Aaron Sibarium reports.

Trump likely agrees: He’s “vowed to eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs within the federal government,” writes Sibarium. “And while Prescod-Weinstein is not a DEI official, she has espoused some of the most extreme positions associated with DEI.” Her inclusion on the Energy Department panel, then, provides “a potential target for the Trump administration as it seeks to stamp out DEI within the federal government.”

READ MORE: ‘Disqualifying’: Member of Top DOE Physics Panel Said ‘White Empiricism’ Undermines Theory of Relativity, Accused Israel of Genocide

A DEI lifeline: Trump’s aforementioned crusade against equity has put the DEI industry on the ropes. But it has a friend in the state of Illinois, where a little-known law requires private companies to finance DEI nonprofits and promote DEI in their communities.

The more they do so, the higher the state scores them on a “commitment to diversity” factor where they can earn “100 possible points based on their answers to seven DEI questions,” the Free Beacon‘s Andrew Kerr writes. Those questions require companies to disclose how much they spend financing the DEI industry, what percentage of their staff are women and minorities, and whether they have any agreements with female- or minority-owned businesses.

“Since going into full effect last year, Pritzker’s DEI Factor has had a major impact on the way Illinois does business,” writes Kerr. “Some 44 percent of state contracts awarded in fiscal year 2024 went to the companies that scored the highest on DEI factor, as opposed to their technical competency or price, according to a report published late last year by the Illinois Chief Procurement Office.”

READ MORE: Illinois Restricts Government Contracts to DEI Supporters, Propping Up Divisive Industry

Away from the Beacon:

• It’s a bad time to be a terrorist. First, Trump smoked an ISIS leader in Iraq, saying his “miserable life was terminated.” Then he launched a “decisive and powerful Military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen,” who also received the following message from Trump: “YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE SEEN BEFORE.” Hoorah.
• Margaret Brennan asked Marco Rubio if there’s “any evidence” linking Columbia Hamasnik Mahmoud Khalil to terrorism. Rubio didn’t hold back: “I mean, you should watch the news. These guys take over entire buildings. They vandalize colleges. They shut down colleges. … We don’t need these people in our country, we never should have allowed them in in the first place.”
• Democrats have officially hit rock bottom: A new NBC News poll found that their popularity is at an all-time low, with just 27 percent of registered voters saying they have positive views of the Democratic Party.

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A professor of physics and gender studies who has argued that “white empiricism” undermines Einstein’s theory of general relativity now sits on a top physics advisory panel within the Department of Energy, raising questions from fellow scientists about the panel’s integrity and providing a potential target for the Trump administration as it seeks to stamp out DEI within the federal government.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire who has suggested that string theory “failed to succeed” because the field has too many white men, was appointed to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) under the Biden administration in 2024. The panel advises the Energy Department on research and funding priorities for particle physics, giving it significant say over which projects receive federal support.

Prescod-Weinstein will remain on HEPAP until 2027 unless the Trump administration takes action to remove her. Her role at the Energy Department has rankled some scientists, who say that an institution tasked with directing federal research should not be advised by a woman who, in one 2020 paper, wrote that “Black feminist theory intersectionality should change physics.”

Prescod-Weinstein’s “scientific accomplishments seem modest and her racialist and sexist view of science, combined with her uniquely destructive activism, ought to be disqualifying,” said Sergiu Klainerman, a mathematician at Princeton University who studies the theory of general relativity. “It seems to me incredible that she has a voice on important decisions concerning the DOE physics division.”

Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, declined to comment on Prescod-Weinstein specifically but said it was important for HEPAP to remain apolitical. “It is essential for political leadership to appoint panel and board members for federal scientific enterprises who are fully committed to promoting excellence and selecting grants and personnel based on merit, and to remove those who are not,” Abbot told the Washington Free Beacon. Prescod-Weinstein did not respond to a request for comment.

President Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs within the federal government. And while Prescod-Weinstein is not a DEI official, she has espoused some of the most extreme positions associated with DEI.

She first raised eyebrows in 2020 when she argued that a culture of “white empiricism”—in which “only white people” are deemed capable of objectivity—”undermines a significant theory of twentieth-century physics: General Relativity.”

Einstein’s theory is rooted in the “idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other,” Prescod-Weinstein wrote in Signs, a gender studies journal published by the University of Chicago. “Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent … Given that Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle … have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression, we can dispense with any suggestion that the low number of Black women in science indicates any lack of validity on their part as observers.”

Later in the paper, Prescod-Weinstein blamed racism and sexism for the slow pace of scientific discovery in physics. “String theory has failed to succeed in expected ways,” she said, “because the community—which is almost entirely male and disproportionately white relative to other areas of physics—is too homogeneous.”

The argument attracted widespread ridicule from other scientists, including New York University’s Alan Sokal, the physicist who famously conned an academic journal into publishing a paper arguing that quantum gravity was socially constructed.

Prescod-Weinstein “fails to note the most obvious explanation” for string theory’s morass, Sokal wrote: “String theory has failed to succeed in expected ways because the problems being studied are extraordinarily difficult.”

The 2020 paper wouldn’t be the last time Prescod-Weinstein got out over her skis. Two years later, in a blog post written with three other scientists, she alleged that James Webb—the former head of NASA for whom the agency’s high-powered telescope is named—had overseen a purge of gay employees in the 1960s.

She continued making that claim even after it had been debunked in an 89-page report by NASA’s chief historian, Brian Odom. “[N]o available evidence directly links Webb to any actions or follow-up related to the firing of individuals for their sexual orientation,” the report said.

After Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Prescod-Weinstein, who describes herself as “#BlackandSTEM and all Jewish,” became a vocal apologist for the anti-Israel protests that roiled American campuses and frequently bled into anti-Semitism.

“I am enormously proud of the students who have sacrificed to fight back against a genocide,” she wrote in August. “Let the students protest, and don’t fucking snitch. Free Palestine!”

The post revealed an activist conception of Jewish identity that Prescod-Weinstein had discussed in a 2019 roundtable with the Forward.

“White Jews may not live at the center of the tent of whiteness, but they are still white,” she told the Jewish magazine. “When white Jews refuse to acknowledge that they benefit from and participate in white supremacy, they are wasting time that could otherwise be spent upending that white supremacy.”

The Energy Department declined to comment on Prescod-Weinstein’s remarks about race and gender, but said that she attended a HEPAP meeting in December where “she contributed to discussion of several topics, all of which were related to agenda items.”

One of those topics was the security measures at Fermilab, a national particle physics laboratory overseen by the DOE. During the meeting, which is available online, Prescod-Weinstein expressed concern that the high level of security could exacerbate “anti-Asian” and “anti-Arabic” racism.

“I worry a little bit about the intersection of those kinds of social and structural biases with these kinds of security issues that are put into place,” she said. “How is the committee thinking about ensuring that people’s Title VII rights are upheld?”

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The Trump administration on Friday slashed additional grants to Columbia University totaling approximately $30 million, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

The administration is in the process of reviewing the totality of Columbia’s $5 billion in federal funding, and the fresh round of cuts comes on the heels of the administration’s decision to cancel $400 million in grants and contracts to the Ivy League school announced earlier this month.

At the time, the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said the initial cuts constituted “the first round of action” and that additional cuts were expected to follow as the review continued.

The $30 million in grants came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which took action as a member of the task force, and the administration is reviewing further cuts across other agencies as well, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Among the Columbia faculty members impacted by Friday’s cuts is Jeanine D’Armiento, the chairwoman of the University Senate Executive Committee, who has played a leading role pushing back against the school’s modest efforts to discipline students involved in disruptive and frequently anti-Semitic protests. Grants supporting D’Armiento’s work account for approximately $2 million of the $30 million cut Friday, according to a person familiar with the situation.

As the de facto leader of the University Senate, which plays a key role in meting out discipline to students, D’Armiento has played a key role in the events that have roiled the Morningside Heights campus over the past year.

As hundreds of student activists occupied the school’s south lawn last spring, ultimately forcing the cancellation of in-person classes and the university’s graduation ceremony, D’Armiento told former Columbia president Minouche Shafik and one of her advisers, Dennis Anthony Mitchell, that Shafik must engage in “dialogue” with the students, “including them in even the planning and discussions around the rules that will ultimately govern them,” according to text messages obtained by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

“She is clearly and closely connected to the students who are leading the protest,” wrote Board of Trustees vice chairwoman Wanda Holland-Greene to co-chairwoman Claire Shipman. “She says that we are fighting an ideological battle (anti-war) with logic (threats of discipline). What I heard her say is that we need to either speak to their idealism or prepare for their continued and coordinated escalation.”

During a May 3, 2024, University Senate meeting, meanwhile, D’Armiento shut off the microphone of her colleague, Columbia professor Carol Ewing Garber, as Garber said there were “groups who are supporting terrorists” on campus.

“There is danger in that statement,” D’Armiento responded. “I am trying to take our community a level down and that word is not going to do it. Maybe I broke the rules … but I cannot allow that kind of thing in a time like this.”

The Trump administration on Thursday sent Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong a detailed letter addressing the cuts and outlining a series of steps that the university must take in order even to enter into discussions with the administration about the restoration of lost funds.

“This letter outlines immediate next steps that we regard as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government,” it read.

Those steps include the enforcement of existing disciplinary policies, the imposition of a mask ban that would allow the university to identify protesters, and the adoption of a plan to reform the school’s admissions process.

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Last week, while Trump hosted Ireland’s prime minister at the White House, the parish of St. John the Beloved, just across the river, held its annual Irish-Italian cookoff. The competition is closer than you think—one side is a cornucopia of potatoes, corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes (did I mention potatoes?) and the other side is a sea of red.

Speaking of seeing red, Harvey Klehr returns to the Weekend Beacon with an incisive review of Clay Risen’s Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.

The post Weekend Beacon 3/16/25 appeared first on .

The Red Scare—the era from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s during which fears of domestic communism became one of the major issues in American political life—has generated innumerable books and articles dedicated to documenting its alleged victims and searching for those ultimately responsible for the harm it inflicted and the ways in which it distorted American culture. During the 1960s and ’70s the dominant motif was that hysteria and fear had demonized American communists and their supporters, and contributed to framing such innocents as Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and Robert Oppenheimer for crimes they did not commit.

That campaign hit roadblocks with the release of FBI material under the Freedom of Information Act and the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to the availability of reams of data from once-secret American and Soviet archives. It turned out that many of those accused of being Soviet spies during the Red Scare (with the notable exception of Oppenheimer) had been ones—and that there were hundreds of other Americans, most of them members of the Communist Party of the United States, who had also spied and gotten away with it.

These revelations did not mitigate the many injustices that had occurred during the Red Scare—the sometimes absurd or frivolous charges that derailed individual lives, the overreach that caused states to deny fishing licenses to communists, or the use of anonymous informants to fire individuals for such “subversive” activities as entertaining black friends in their homes. People lost their jobs or faced ostracism and penalties for having unpopular opinions.

Writing a balanced account of the era did become much harder. While such conventional villains as Senator Joseph McCarthy, who gave his name to the era, turned out to have been right about the big issue—there had been extensive communist infiltration of the American government—he had been wrong about many of those he accused. The other archvillain of the era, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, had missed some major spies and crossed the line into illegality with warrantless wiretaps and burglaries, but had ferreted out a serious national security threat.

Clay Risen, a reporter for the New York Times, attempts to thread the needle in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. He does provide numerous examples of government overreach and injustice but only partly succeeds in detailing why the campaign took place or the culpability of the Communist Party and its allies in why it went so viral.

Risen covers virtually all the episodes that transfixed America during this era, from HUAC hearings on Hollywood to the Henry Wallace presidential campaign of 1948, from the Smith Act trials of leaders of the CPUSA, to the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, from the Chambers-Hiss confrontation to the government campaign against labor boss Harry Bridges. He delves into the China Lobby, recounts the Rosenberg case and its aftermath, the controversy over “naming names” before congressional committees, the farcical pageants that reenacted supposed communist takeovers of American towns, investigations of teachers, and McCarthy’s rise and fall. He concludes with an examination of how external events and President Eisenhower’s careful campaign led to McCarthy’s overreach and the Supreme Court cases that drove a stake in the government’s war on domestic communism.

While Risen makes an effort to incorporate the revelations of the past quarter-century that have so discomfited proponents of the argument that all of the hoopla about Soviet spies was concocted by troglodytes anxious to discredit the New Deal, he also minimizes their significance. While “almost all [communists] were loyal Americans,” he writes, “a small fraction did spy for the Soviet Union.” Thus, while the “threat of Soviet espionage was minor, it was not an invention of the administration’s enemies.” Paradoxically, he admits it included “some of the New Deal’s best and brightest,” among them Alger Hiss and Larry Duggan, high-ranking officials in the State Department, but glosses over the abundant evidence that Harry Dexter White, the number two man in the Treasury Department, was a Soviet source, and does not mention dozens of the government officials implicated by Elizabeth Bentley, regretting that her testimony about “the humdrum flow of stolen information that she had ferried out of Washington [was turned] into a firehose of secrets fatal to the health of the republic.” Most American communists were not spies, but virtually all the spies were communists.

Contra Risen, the American security apparatus at the end of World War II did not go “looking for new threats to counter.” Several investigations in 1944-1945 had turned up evidence of Soviet espionage, including the Amerasia case and the involvement of Arthur Adams and Clarence Hiskey in stealing atomic bomb secrets. Beginning in 1947, the Venona intercepts began yielding clues indicating that some 350 Americans had worked for Soviet intelligence during the war. A significant number were government officials and virtually all were communists. Only 125 to 150 were ever identified by American counterintelligence (after the 1989 opening of archives that number increased), but the flow of information they turned over included material on radar, sonar, proximity fuses, jet propulsion, and, most significantly, the atomic bomb. Internal discussions of American diplomatic negotiating tactics, arms production, and a host of other topics went from sources in virtually every government department to Moscow. Minor it was not.

While Risen underplays how revelations and concern about the extent of Soviet espionage contributed to the Red Scare, he does note how many liberals felt betrayed by American communists who suddenly shifted their foreign policy stances after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Risen argues that “the 1930s left was a near-seamless spectrum, running from center-of-the-road liberals to hard-core communists, united behind FDR.” But the CPUSA only fully supported FDR during one of his four campaigns for president, opposing him twice (1932, 1940) and coyly approving of him once (1936). While Earl Browder proclaimed that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” in 1937, the CPUSA abandoned the slogan at the order of the Communist International in 1938. At no time in its history did it ever deviate from blind obedience to Soviet foreign policy aims.

By the late 1940s, with Soviet testing of an atomic bomb—the fruits of espionage—the blockade of Berlin, a communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and Mao Zedong’s victory in the Chinese civil war, most Americans had had enough and concluded that any cooperation with domestic communists who apologized for and justified Soviet authoritarianism was no longer tenable. Liberal organizations, most notably the labor movement, had had enough of duplicitous communists in their ranks whose cooperation always depended on whether it furthered Soviet foreign policy.

Communists pretended to be adherents of democracy but by insisting that the USSR was a true democracy, while the United States was lapsing into fascism, they discredited themselves. Because they often concealed their party membership, they confirmed the suspicion of many Americans that they could not be trusted. The party leadership had cooperated with Soviet intelligence agencies and abetted efforts to infiltrate non-communist organizations.

Risen, to his credit, agrees that in 1948 Henry Wallace was surrounded by secret members of the CPUSA, who pushed his presidential candidacy to positions favoring Soviet foreign policy. But he then suggests that the anti-communism of such leaders of Americans for Democratic Action as Walter Reuther, Arthur Schlesinger, and Eleanor Roosevelt “helped poison the well of public sentiment against the policy of the left generally,” when it actually targeted those unwilling to call a communist a communist.

Risen exculpates Harry Bridges from charges he was a communist, but never mentions that documents from Russian archives confirm he was a perjurer who was not only a secret communist, but also a member of the party’s Central Committee.

Risen makes a valid point when he argues that prosecution of the party leadership for violating the Smith Act and conspiring to “teach and advocate the overthrow” of the U.S. government was a weak case, but, as he later admits, the Supreme Court reversed itself within several years and the worst excesses of the Red Scare petered out. There were, however, real demons targeting America; the leadership of the CPUSA was a tool of the Soviet Union and an ally of Soviet intelligence.

Democratic societies can go overboard when they undertake crusades against real or perceived enemies. Demagogues can and will latch onto causes and some of the guard rails against unwise and extreme solutions can break. Given the dangers democratic societies faced from international communism, the response to domestic communists sometimes was excessive, but it was also understandable, and it was corrected.

Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
by Clay Risen
Scribner, 480 pp., $31

Harvey Klehr is the author of numerous books and articles on communism and Soviet espionage.

The post When America Was Really Red appeared first on .

Dems in disarray: It’s been true since Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in November, but alas, the party united in opposition to… Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Infuriated Democratic senators, representatives, governors, and grifters online influencers joined forces to denounce their feckless leader, calling Schumer a “GOP sleeper agent” who made a “dirty deal” with the “fascist” Republicans after he announced his support for a continuing resolution to keep the government running.

It was a remarkable display of party unity—between the House and Senate, 11 of 260 Democrats, a whopping 96 percent, voted against the funding measure. Alas, Schumer got the 10 votes he needed from Senate Democrats to out-muscle the opposition.

READ MORE: Get the Chuck Outta Here: Democrats Are Finally United (Against Themselves)

Hamas released a statement Friday saying it is willing to release Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage. As with most things Hamas says, it was bullshit.

The statement, our Adam Kredo reports, did not provide details on what Hamas requested in return, but the New York Times reports that the group demanded a resumption of aid to Gaza and the release of more terrorists from Israeli jails.

Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu accused Hamas of “manipulation and psychological warfare.” The White House expressed similar sentiments, blasting Hamas for rejecting a “bridge” proposal to extend the ceasefire another month.

“Hamas was told in no uncertain terms that this ‘bridge’ would have to be implemented soon—and that dual U.S.-Israel citizen Edan Alexander would have to be released immediately,” the statement read. “Unfortunately, Hamas has chosen to respond by publicly claiming flexibility while privately making demands that are entirely impractical without a permanent ceasefire.”

“Hamas is making a very bad bet that time is on its side. It is not. Hamas is well aware of the deadline, and should know that we will respond accordingly if that deadline passes.” Shalom Hamas means hello and goodbye—you can choose.

READ MORE: ‘Psychological Warfare’: Hamas Says It’s Willing To Release Last Living American Hostage While Rebuffing Hostage Deals

Love it or leave it: Indian national Ranjani Srinivasan was a doctoral student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture and here in the country on a student visa. While at Columbia, she endorsed Hamas’s “anticolonial liberation movement in Palestine.”

Srinivasan self-deported on Tuesday, about a week after Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked her visa. She did so using the Trump administration’s revamped “CBP Home” app. Under the Biden administration, the app, formerly known as “CBP One,” allowed incoming migrants to streamline their entry into the United States. Now, it provides illegal immigrants with a streamlined process to deport themselves.

“Srinivasan is not the first immigrant to self-deport this month,” writes the Free Beacon‘s Jessica Costescu. “Diego de la Vega, an illegal immigrant who served as deputy communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) fled the United States for Colombia, the Free Beacon reported. He had arrived from Ecuador at age seven and overstayed his visitor’s visa.”

READ MORE: Pro-Hamas Columbia Student Self-Deports Using Trump Admin’s Revamped CBP App After Rubio Revokes Visa

Away from the Beacon:

• Mark Kelly traded in his electric Tesla for a gas-guzzling Chevy Tahoe, saying he refuses to drive a car designed and built by an “asshole.” Way to stick it to Greta Thunberg, Mark.
• House Democrats gathered in Virginia this week for their annual issues conference. They didn’t talk about climate change, and people are mad.
• Eight House Democrats in Michigan voted for a resolution that urged the state’s athletic association to ban biological boys from girls’ sports. Left-wing activist groups labeled them bigots. Ladies and gentlemen, the party of tolerance.

The post Dems Unite Against Schumer, Hamas Plays Hostage Games, and Columbia Radical Self-Deports appeared first on .

Bidding for beachfront property in Gaza is on hold, at least until Russia stops blocking Donald Trump’s ceasefire proposal, but Israel remains at the center of America’s culture wars. The Trump administration is making important progress on defending American Jews, but enemies of the Jewish state and the Jewish people are still on the loose.

Zionism has attracted plenty of critics throughout U.S. history. Some were motivated by anti-Semitism; many American Jews feared that Zionism would strengthen anti-Semitic arguments that Jews didn’t belong in the United States. After Israeli independence, so-called realists did not see the benefit in allying with a friendly, militarily powerful, nuclear armed, and politically stable democracy in a turbulent region that was vital for the global economy.

The darkest elements of this group burst into view after Hamas and its allies attacked Israel. Since October 7, some of our most prestigious universities effectively ceded control of their campuses to anti-Semitic goons who harassed and intimidated Jewish students. In some cases, university employees acted shamefully too.

This is far outside the American mainstream, which has been pro-Zionist for centuries. Many of the early Puritans and their descendants, like John Adams, wanted a Jewish state in ancient Israel. In 1891, prominent businessmen like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and the speaker of the House of Representatives all signed the pro-Zionist Blackstone Memorial. In the 20th century, prominent Americans from “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft to Eleanor Roosevelt to Martin Luther King Jr. supported Israel.

The Trump administration is doing its part, restoring sanity to our campuses. It cut $400 million from Columbia University for failing to protect its Jewish students. The Department of Education is investigating similar violations of the Civil Right Acts in 60 universities. And the Department of Homeland Security recently detained former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil for leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Trump said Khalil’s was “the first arrest of many to come. … We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country.”

The universities are starting to take notice. Harvard fired an employee who tore down a poster of Israeli hostages, and Yale Law put on leave one of its scholars. Yesterday, Columbia announced punishments for some of the students who occupied a campus building last year.

At the same time, the administration narrowly missed giving a prized job to one of the loudest critics of this campaign. Daniel Davis, who works for one of libertarian billionaire Charles Koch’s think tanks, blasted Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) in December for saying, “Universities that tolerate antisemitism will have their federal funds cut off.” Davis rejoined, “We all know the truth, that you want to suppress any demonstrations directed against the policies of the Netanyahu gov [sic].”

Normally, administrations do not allow people who oppose the president’s agenda to assemble the president’s daily intelligence briefing—especially if they believe, as Davis does, that administration policies like relocating Gaza’s population are “ethnic cleansing.” He nevertheless was in line for that role until the news leaked.

Other administration appointees have troubling views. Some claim that Leo Frank, the victim of one of the most hideous anti-Semitic attacks in American history, was a rapist and a murderer. Others said after October 7 that “Palestine is fighting for a just cause.”

Trump disagrees. As he said on Wednesday, “Israel has been under siege, as you can see, and they had to fight back. October 7th was a terrible thing. … we’re working hard with Israel.”

Not for the first time, people who claim to support Trump or even speak for him have turned out to oppose his actual views. This happened last year when the Heritage Foundation’s news and commentary outlet released a poll ostensibly showing that Republican voters wanted to cut off Ukraine. The same day, Trump wrote, “As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!”

Heritage also claimed that Republicans opposed aiding Israel and spending to counter Chinese belligerence. That makes sense in some respects, since opponents of Israel tend to also yawn at the prospect of a China-dominated world. Many of them see that the link between the United States and Israel is one of the greatest barriers between them and their dreams of global retreat, and they want to break it.

This history makes Heritage’s report this week, which calls for gradually ceasing American aid for Israel, curious. Heritage is casting this as a pro-Israel move, but Israel’s ambassador reportedly dropped out of the launch event when he found out what was in the report. Some of Israel’s friends think the aid should be phased out, but that is largely to protect the relationship from the Democrats. Gallup recently found that Democratic sympathy for Israel dropped precipitously since October 7, but contra Heritage, 75 percent of Republicans sympathize with the Jewish state.

Philosemites and friends of Israel bring out the best in America, and their enemies hate the things that make America lovely. What better way to Make America Great Again than to embrace one of its best traditions.

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A Columbia University doctoral student who expressed support for the “anticolonial liberation movement in Palestine” used the Trump administration’s revamped “CBP Home” app to self-deport to Canada about a week after Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked her student visa, the Department of Homeland Security announced Friday.

Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national and doctoral candidate in Urban Planning at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation was “involved in activities supporting Hammas [sic], a terrorist organization,” according to the DHS announcement. The department shared footage from Tuesday of Srinivasan using the “CBP Home” app, the Trump administration’s newly transformed version of the Biden-era “CBP One” app that aims to streamline the self-deportation of illegal immigrants.

It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America.

When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country.

I’m glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers… pic.twitter.com/jR2uVVKGCM

— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) March 14, 2025

“We will continue to look for people that we would never have allowed into this country on student visas had we known they were going to do what they’ve done, but now that they’ve done it, we’re gonna get rid of them,” Rubio told reporters Friday morning from the G7 Summit in Canada. “When they said they were coming here to be students, they didn’t say they were coming here to occupy university buildings and vandalize them and tear them apart and hold campuses hostage. If they had told us that, we would never have given them a student visa.”

“In the days to come, you should expect more visas will be revoked as we identify people that we should never have allowed in because they lied to us,” Rubio added. “Every time we have a chance to revoke them, we will, because it’s not in the national interest of the United States for them to be here,” he added.

About two months after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, Srinivasan signed a letter alongside other “Scholars of the Constructed Environment,” titled “Palestinian Liberation Is Our Collective Liberation.” The letter declared solidarity with the “anticolonial liberation movement in Palestine” and accused the U.S. and Israeli governments of perpetrating a “cycle of settler colonial violence.”

Srinivasan’s interests include the “historical geographies of capitalism and caste,” while her research focuses include “colonial rule” and “global capitalist restructuring,” according to her university webpage. The recipient of the prestigious Fulbright scholarship earned her master’s degree in “critical conservation” at Harvard University. Prior to beginning her Ph.D. program at Columbia, Srinivasan worked as a project associate at a D.C.-based environmental nonprofit where she “campaigned for critical landscapes and frontier communities at-risk from climate change.”

While at Columbia, Srinivasan was employed as a teaching assistant, according to a university directory. Last fall, she taught a course at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

In a Thursday night statement, Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong wrote that she was “heartbroken” that DHS agents, who presented the school with judicial warrants, had conducted searches in two student rooms.

“I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in two University residences tonight,” Armstrong wrote. “No one was arrested or detained. No items were removed, and no further action was taken.”

DHS also announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested another student, Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the West Bank, for overstaying her expired F-1 student visa, which had been terminated on Jan. 26, 2022, for lack of attendance. She was also arrested in April 2024 “for her involvement in pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University in New York City,” according to DHS. Columbia denied that Kordia was ever enrolled at the university.

On Saturday, ICE apprehended Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student activist and foreign national, after the State Department revoked his visa and green card over his pro-Hamas campus organizing. Two days later, Judge Jesse Furman paused Khalil’s deportation proceedings as the federal court considers a petition challenging his arrest. On Wednesday, Furman—an Obama appointee—instructed attorneys for both parties to submit a joint letter on Friday outlining further plans for arguments in the case.

Furman is a prolific Democratic donor, contributing over $20,000 to Democrats, including President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee. He also once threw out a terrorism lawsuit against the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Meanwhile, one of Khalil’s attorneys, Ramzi Kassem, has defended al Qaeda terrorists including Ahmed al-Darbi, an al Qaeda member convicted in 2017 for the bombing of a French oil tanker, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Kassem also defended multiple Guantanamo Bay detainees, including a “close associate” of Osama bin Laden. He went on to serve as an immigration policy adviser to former president Joe Biden on the White House’s Domestic Policy Council.

Srinivasan is not the first immigrant to self-deport this month. Diego de la Vega, an illegal immigrant who served as deputy communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), fled the United States for Colombia, the Free Beacon reported on March 7. He had arrived from Ecuador at age seven and overstayed his visitor’s visa.

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Daniel Davis, the onetime pick to serve as deputy director of national intelligence who was yanked from consideration this week over his anti-Israel views, likened himself to Christ on the cross as he tacitly blamed Jews for detonating his nomination.

“Shortly before His death, Jesus was on trial before Pontius Pilate. All sorts of agitators were accusing Him of many things, some true, others not,” Davis, a senior fellow at the isolationist Defense Priorities think tank, wrote Thursday on X, shortly after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard removed him from consideration to be her deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration.

“But Jesus said nothing in his own defense, as recorded in Matthew 27.”

“What He suffered, and the unjust things He endured, are orders of magnitude higher than anything to which I may have been subject,” Davis continued. “If He can do that under such arduous conditions, then as a follower of Jesus Christ, so too should I, especially under far lesser circumstances. This is all I will have to say on any recent events related to me in the news.”

Davis was slated to assume the high-level role until Jewish Insider highlighted his history of advocating against the U.S.-Israel relationship and downplaying the threat posed by Iran. From there, his policy views prompted widespread opposition from prominent Trump administration allies, including Mark Levin, who referred to Davis as a “bizarre” nominee.

During his time at Defense Priorities—a think tank bankrolled by the influential isolationist Koch family—Davis repeatedly opposed military intervention to stop Tehran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. This put him starkly at odds with President Donald Trump, who has affirmed in recent weeks that U.S. military action is on the table to stop Iran’s march towards an atomic bomb.

Davis has also been a vocal critic of Israel, questioning America’s military support to the country in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree.

“On a practical level, we give away enormous leverage and credibility globally to hold *anyone* accountable for acts of w[a]nton violence, [because] we not merely turn a blind eye to it, we cheer it on and supply the means to do more,” Davis said in a Jan. 12 posting on X. “On a moral level this is a stain on our character as a nation, as a culture, that will not soon go away.”

He suggested Israel was pursuing a policy of “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza and compared the war-torn strip to a “prison.” In other X postings, Davis said Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “playing the U.S. like a cheap fiddle.”

On Iran, Davis has referred to the hardline regime as a “marginal regional power” and criticized Trump for considering a military strike on the country.

“I don’t know who Trump has hired for his advisor, who’s giving him such absurd advice, but hitting the nuclear facilities of Iran is far more dangerous and difficult than what he believes,” Davis said in Oct. 2024. “The ramifications could be terrible for us and for Israel.”

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Aidan Parisi, the son of a longtime State Department official who emerged last spring as a Columbia University encampment leader and is best known for owning an “emotional support rabbit,” was among the students Columbia expelled for storming Hamilton Hall, he announced Thursday night.

Parisi, a graduate student in Columbia’s School of Social Work, wrote on X that he was among the student activists expelled nearly a year after they stormed and occupied Hamilton Hall. Last spring, Parisi, the son of longtime State Department official Elizabeth Daugharty, emerged as a constant presence in the illegal encampment that plagued campus for weeks in April. He was also suspended shortly after his involvement in a pro-Hamas event, “Palestinian Resistance 101,” held on campus in March 2024, which featured a number of terror-tied speakers who explicitly called for violence against Jews.

“An expulsion for Palestine is an honor, a sacrifice that pales in comparison to those of the Palestinian people,” Parisi wrote Thursday. 

An expulsion for Palestine is an honor, a sacrifice that pales in comparison to those of the Palestinian people

— ايدن (@allegedlyaidan) March 13, 2025

“Been getting asked what I need [sic] re my expulsion from columbia, but I’m okay. Palestinians living under occupation and genocide need us. Immigrants facing deportation need us,” he added Friday morning. “In the face of fascism, the only response is community.”

Columbia announced Thursday evening that it punished students who stormed Hamilton Hall with multi-year suspensions, expulsions, and temporary degree revocations. The university declined to say how many were sanctioned, but Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the Ivy League school’s most notorious anti-Semitic student group—claimed 22 students across Columbia and its sister school, Barnard College, were disciplined, including nine expulsions.

Grant Miner, the president of Columbia’s graduate student union who was arrested for storming Hamilton Hall, was also expelled Thursday. The self-described “medievalist” is the son of veteran California lobbyist and former Arnold Schwarzenegger aide Paul Miner, who owns a $1.8 million Sacramento home, the Washington Free Beacon reported. In October 2023, just two days after Hamas’s terror attack on the Jewish state, the younger Miner was photographed at a New York City rally holding a sign that read, “Resistance against occupation is a human right.”

Last spring, Parisi had pledged to “resist” what he called “institutional repression” at Columbia and praised the “intifada.” He also has a long history of anti-American and anti-Israel activism, having posted a photo of the two nations’ flags burning on July 4, 2020. “No love for any colonizer flag,” he wrote in his caption.

It’s unclear what role Parisi played in organizing the “Resistance 101” event, but when Columbia suspended him over his involvement, he refused to leave his university apartment, saying that doing so would require him to find “housing that would accept his emotional support rabbit.”

That event, which CUAD hosted and the Free Beacon attended virtually, featured speakers who explicitly endorsed terrorism against Jews.

One speaker, Charlotte Kates, a leader of the Israeli-designated terror group and U.S.-designated terror financier Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack for showing “the potential of a future for Palestine liberated from Zionism.” Kates’s husband, Khaled Barakat, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) activist, also lauded the terror group’s airplane hijackings as “one of the most important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.” Shortly after the event, Columbia student radicals launched the anti-Israel encampment and eventually stormed Hamilton Hall.

In October, the United States sanctioned Samidoun and Barakat for providing support to the PFLP, a terrorist organization that participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.

Parisi also contributed to the mayhem that engulfed campus, serving as a leader of the unauthorized encampment zone and a participant in the overtake of a campus building, for which he was arrested on April 30.

While the encampment was ongoing, Parisi scrawled messages across the eviction notices the university had issued to the radicals. “COLUMBIA WILL BURN,” one read. “I AINT READING ALL THAT FREE PALESTINE,” read another.

Day 13 at the Columbia encampment—students have been given a 2pm deadline to vacate.

This is the response from a suspended student, Aidan Parisi

‘COLUMBIA WILL BURN”@FreeBeacon pic.twitter.com/Odbjr4l1yQ

— Jessica Costescu (@JessicaCostescu) April 29, 2024

Parisi, meanwhile, was spotted Tuesday at a violent anti-Israel protest in New York City against the detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student activist and foreign national whom the Trump administration moved to deport over his pro-Hamas campus organizing. Police arrested several agitators after they refused to clear the roadway in front of City Hall.

In February, Parisi and two other Columbia encampment leaders sued the university, alleging that its disciplinary actions against them caused “severe emotional and psychological harm.” One of their attorneys, James Carlson, stormed Hamilton Hall last spring and clashed with a facilities worker.

Interim president Katrina Armstrong’s residence was vandalized overnight with red and black spray paint spelling “FREE THEM ALL.” At the end of the caption was an upside-down triangle—a symbol that Hamas uses to denote Israeli targets.

BREAKING: The President’s House at Columbia University was vandalized last night with fake blood and a message of “Free them all.” pic.twitter.com/K755bjuZEH

— Stu (@thestustustudio) March 14, 2025

“The Columbia President’s mansion has been redecorated,” CUAD posted to Instagram Friday morning. “The people will not stand for Columbia University’s shameless complicity in genocide! The University’s repression has only bred more resistance, and Columbia has lit a flame it can’t control.”

“Katrina Armstrong you will not be allowed peace as you [sic] NYPD officers and ICE agents on your own students for opposing the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the student group added.

CUAD is also organizing a campus protest Friday afternoon, vowing to “mass disrupt” Columbia and “all genocidal institutions.”

“IT IS OUR DUTY TO DISRUPT. IT IS OUR DUTY TO ESCALATE FOR OUR PEOPLE,” the group posted on Instagram Thursday night. “This repression won’t end unless we fight back NOW.”

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