Jonathan P. Baird

The current round of student protest brings back memories. I started at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in the fall of 1968. One of my early college memories is demonstrating against then-Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon. Nixon had falsely claimed he had a secret plan to end the much-hated, racist and imperialist Vietnam War. With my Trinity chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, we conducted an evening march through downtown Hartford to the rally. There was no violence that night.

In the spring of 1968, before I arrived at Trinity, 168 students occupied the Trinity administration buildings to force consideration of a scholarship program for Black students. This happened in the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination. College trustees agreed to the student demands. The situation resolved peacefully.

In May 1970, there was a national student strike after the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State University. Many colleges, Trinity included, cancelled classes. I remember watching the Kent State news with many shocked classmates. Students were livid. For over a week, normal classes were largely suspended and replaced by workshops on the Vietnam War, imperialism, racism and poverty.

Many of the workshops were held on the green near Trinity’s Long Walk. There was no encampment but the students were not met by riot police and there were no charges of criminal trespass. As a private college, Trinity could have responded that way but the administration’s response was peaceful, even gentle. Of course there were counter-examples like Columbia and Jackson State but I think in the campus world, violent responses were more the exception than the norm.

While Trinity was only one small private college, it is hard not to compare the college and university response, then and now. Now colleges and universities opt quickly for more aggressive policing and stiffer penalties. Across the country, college presidents invite riot police onto campuses to break up encampments. The police often come in riot gear, behave brutally, zip-tie students and arrest them.

We saw this happen in New Hampshire with the treatment of Annelise Orleck, a 65 year old history professor who has taught at Dartmouth for many years. Professor Orleck was at a peaceful protest for Palestinians in Gaza on the Dartmouth Green. She was knocked to the ground and arrested. She described elderly women professors being struck in their ribs by truncheons. 90 people were arrested at Dartmouth for criminal trespass and resisting arrest.

Reporting from the Concord Monitor has shown that a punitive response was planned in advance by college administrators at Dartmouth and UNH. It was coordinated with Gov. Sununu. Their game plan was to present the protest as organized by violent antisemitic outside agitators.

The truth could not have been more different, both in New Hampshire and elsewhere. Violence came entirely from the police. To quote Sandy Tolan from Slate:

“With few exceptions, the encampments have been overwhelmingly peaceful, well-organized microsocieties with posted community rules, medical and food tents, yoga and meditation, kite making workshops, teach-ins and Shabbat Services and Passover seders. These students and supporting faculty form a multi-racial interfaith community. They are united by their outrage at the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli bombs supplied by U.S. taxpayers. They share a vision for freedom and justice for Palestine.”

There has been an effort to vilify protesters and to present constitutionally protected activity as crimes. This went on during the Vietnam War protest too but in comparing the two times, now it is worse. Crackdowns happen faster in 2024. Since 2017, nearly 300 anti-protest bills have been introduced in state legislatures, with 41 passing.

Five states have enacted laws that impose harsh penalties for individuals who block traffic or even sidewalks. Nine other states have such legislation pending. Some states have added laws that grant immunity to drivers who strike protesters. More than 2950 people have been arrested at pro-Palestinian protests on at least 61 college campuses in recent weeks.

How did it come about that a nation that talks so much about loving liberty has evolved to have such a reduced notion of the First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly? At the appearance of a protest at a public university, riot police must be called in immediately to squash dissent. It is like the fantasy of dangerous student radicals must be created to justify the repression.

Dissenting college students were a convenient foil for Nixon and now they serve that purpose for MAGA Republicans and Trump who indulges in unhinged rants about “radical left lunatics”. Trump called the police sweep at Columbia University “a beautiful thing to see”.

His demonizing student protesters and his verbal support for violence offers a window into how a second Trump administration would treat dissent. Trump has already talked about invoking the Insurrection Act if he regains power. There can be little doubt he would use the military against protesters. That would be crossing a line never crossed before.

While it is true the First Amendment allows for “time, place, and manner” restrictions , progressives and liberals should be worrying about something far worse. The use of repressive state tools against progressives and liberals is very likely if Trump regains power. Revenge against his enemies has been a constant theme. On his social media, Trump has written:

“Republicans are already thinking about what we are going to do to Biden and the communists when it’s our time.”

In assessing why student protest has been repressed so aggressively this spring, I would attribute primary blame to MAGA Republicans and Trump. The hateful and fascist-type rhetoric coming from that world promotes police state reaction. While Biden’s response has been weak and his support for academic freedom has been inadequate, Team Trump could not be doing more to chill First Amendment rights.

When it comes to the rights of free speech and assembly, the United States has been moving backwards. The harsh response to student protest is a bad sign. As was true of student protesters during the Vietnam war, today’s student protesters are acting as the conscience of the nation.

Last week I saw a letter to the editor in the Concord Monitor about Republicans. The letter said we are inundated with misinformation and name-calling. The writer explained that Republicans believe in God, America, families, safe streets, and an effective justice system. He left off puppies and rainbows.

Unfortunately, we now live in split-screen realities. The Republican Party I experience is a cult subservient to the whims of Donald Trump, an adjudicated sexual assaulter, who is currently on trial for 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Those records were about hush money payments he made to adult film star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence about their one-night-stand.

Trump was extremely worried that publicity about the affair with Stormy (and another affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal) could have sunk his 2016 presidential run. The stories might have surfaced in the aftermath of the Access Hollywood “grab them by the genitals” tape. The effect could have been a knockout blow and it might have changed the ultimate outcome of the 2016 race.

One irony that has been insufficiently appreciated is Trump screaming “Stop the Steal” about the 2020 race against Biden while his action to catch and kill the Stormy and McDougal stories were the real steal. The 2020 race, as shown by over 60 court decisions, was a fair election. At a critical time, Americans were deprived of relevant information that shed light on the character of the 2016 Republican nominee. Whatever the jury decides, this was most certainly election interference.

In 2016, I was not a fan of Hillary Clinton. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary but it must be acknowledged she was the candidate who was cheated in the general election. The Democrats haven’t screamed about that but maybe they should have. The slogan “Stop the Steal” has more relevance for 2016 than 2020.

Contrary to the Monitor letter writer, I would argue that what now defines the Republican Party, at least the dominant MAGA wing, is identification with the January 6 insurrection. Trump has persisted with his election denialism, still maintaining the fiction he won that election. He says, if elected, he intends to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists.

Trump refuses to commit to accepting the 2024 election result. All the Republican candidates auditioning for Vice-President engage in the humiliating ritual of mimicking Trump on not committing to democracy and abiding by election results. They hope slavish devotion to the would-be dictator will give them the inside track to the vice-presidency.

I would have said opposing democracy is the worst thing about the MAGA Republicans until I heard a little reported story that appeared in the Washington Post on May 9. At a Mar-a-Lago meeting with fossil fuel executives from Exxon, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum, Trump promised to gut environmental regulations if the oil and gas industry raised $1 billion for his 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump promised to increase oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, remove hurdles to drilling in the Alaskan Arctic and reverse new rules designed to cut car pollution. He also promised to scuttle a Biden administration decision in January to pause new natural gas export permits which have been denounced as “climate bombs”. He promises “Drill baby drill” from day one if he is elected.

As described by Christina Polizzi from Climate Power, Trump was “putting the future of the planet up for sale”. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “Trump is willing to literally destroy the planet for $1 billion”.

Talk about a Faustian bargain. Trump thinks climate change is “a hoax” but it is hard to wrap your head around the perversity of his advocacy. To restate the obvious, human beings depend on a habitable planet. There is an overwhelming consensus among scientists about the climate emergency and the need for immediate environmental protection. It is far worse than most people realize but somehow it is not taken seriously.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offers the gold standard assessment of the state of the planet. In its most recent 2023 report, it detailed the devastating consequences of rising greenhouse gas emissions around the world. We see it in rising sea levels, more extreme weather events and rapidly disappearing sea ice. We also see it in heat waves, wildfires, ocean warming and coral bleaching, biodiversity loss, droughts, flooding and permafrost melting.

The world, the United States included, cannot afford a business-as-usual approach to climate. The unwillingness to eliminate fossil fuels as quickly as is feasible creates more dire climate scenarios that will plague our collective future.

The tragic reality is that Trump is not a Republican outlier. His anti-science views are mirrored in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 which eviscerates climate programs and increases reliance on fossil fuels.

Whether or not Trump’s pay-to-play billion dollar scheme is criminal, it is a species of moral depravity. At a time when the planet cries for a long-term perspective, the Republicans are ready to sell out our future for cash.

The Iroquois have a Seventh Generation Principle that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. Our Republicans are the polar opposite.

May 6 was Holocaust Remembrance Day. The world failed the Jewish people both before and during the years of World War 2, with catastrophic consequences. Six million Jews ended up dying in the concentration camps. As early as 1933, the Western press had reported on a national boycott of Jews in Germany carried out by Nazis. In November 1938, mobs of Nazis attacked hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned stores in events that came to be known as, Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.

In December 1942, the New Republic ran a feature story entitled “The Massacre of the Jews”. The article by Varian Fry depicted the Nazis’ genocidal project as well as how it was being carried out. News of the genocide got out but the United States and the other allied powers didn’t take it seriously, denied it, and largely looked the other way. There was minimal accountability for this most massive human rights cataclysm.

After the war, the scale of the industrialized killing became more widely known. The phrase “Never Again” became a popular response to the Holocaust.

But “Never Again” has not been equally applied to everyone. You might think “Never Again” would mean “Never Again To Anyone”. That is not the case.

There is no denying the traumatic and despicable Hamas attack of October 7 but we all have been witness to Israel’s disproportionate counter-attack. Whether you call it ethnic cleansing or genocide, Israel, in its military operations, has utterly failed to safeguard the civilian population in Gaza.

Since October 7, at least 34,943 Palestinians have been killed and 78,572 have been injured. The death toll in Israel from the Hamas attack is 1139 with an estimated 132 hostages still being held by Hamas. Over 14,500 of the Gaza victims are children and 9,500 are women. UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres has described Gaza as a “graveyard for children”. More than 1000 children in Gaza have lost one or both of their legs, often undergoing amputation without anesthesia.

Vast swaths of Gaza have been devastated and lay in ruins. An unknown number lay under the rubble. According to the UN, 69,000 housing units have been destroyed and another 290,000 damaged. 75% of the Gaza population have been displaced.

Israel has enforced a blockade of food, clean water and medicine. The UN says there’s a full-blown famine in northern Gaza. Human Rights Watch says Israel has used starvation as a weapon of war. Many hospitals in Gaza have been blown up and only 10 of 36 hospitals are even partially functional. All 12 Gaza universities have also been bombed by the Israelis and destroyed and 80% of Gaza schools have been either damaged or reduced to ruin.

Israel’s military actions have forced Gaza civilians south. Now one million civilian refugees are in Rafah and they are being told they must leave due to Israel’s imminent military action. There would appear to be no safe place for civilians to go. It is not clear if Israel’s end game is removing and forcing out all Palestinians in Gaza.

On the West Bank, messianic far right Jewish settlers have been carrying out pogroms against Palestinians, forcing people out of their homes.These settler Jews, like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich are both ideologically racist and fascist. They follow in the tradition of Meir Kahane.

The world is a complicated place and not all Israeli governments are the same. The Netanyahu government is, far and way, the worst government in Israel’s history. Its leaders deserve to be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court for the war crimes the Israeli state has carried out against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This has nothing to do with antisemitism. Tragically, any state, Israel included, can commit war crimes. Conflating criticism of war crimes and antisemitism is a dishonest dodge.

Under international law, Israel has a duty to mitigate civilian harm in its military operations. This it has obviously failed to do. Saying that Hamas is hiding behind civilians in no way justifies the extreme brutality in how Israel has conducted this war. Dropping 2000 pound bombs combined with relentless artillery fire in densely populated areas is guaranteed to cause high casualty events and it has.

Usually perpetrators of genocide don’t express their intentions explicitly but Israelis with command authority have repeatedly made genocidal statements. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has described Palestinians as “human animals”. Netanyahu has compared the Palestinians to the Biblical people of Amalek. Smotrich has called for “total annihilation” of Gaza.

A Palestinian lawyer living in Haifa Diana Buttu describes a genocide fever in Israel. She writes:

“For seven months, Israeli politicians and pundits have spewed genocidal statements on Israeli television and social media on a daily basis. Israeli far-right heritage minister, a man who early in the war called nuking Gaza an option, recently said that Israel “must find ways [to deal with] Gazans that are more painful than death”.”

Words precede actions and a culture of dehumanization of Palestinians laid the basis for this war. Israelis have proven that they are not exempt from vicious racism. Being the victim of a genocide in one historical period doesn’t preclude transformation into being a perpetrator in another historical period. To modify the words of Albert Camus, “Neither victims nor executioners”, victims can become executioners.

Protesting Israeli war crimes is most certainly not antisemitism. I would submit that college students protesting this war are continuing an honorable anti-war tradition pioneered by my 1960’s generation. Blaming students for protesting is just a way to deflect attention from the horrible crimes the state of Israel is currently committing. The need for an immediate ceasefire has never been more apparent.

Where the U.S. Supreme Court is concerned, the shocks keep coming. While you cannot always tell what a court will decide based on oral argument, it was bracing to watch a former president who tried to overthrow his last election have his attorneys argue for absolute power and lifetime immunity from any criminal prosecution. This was a case the Court didn’t have to hear.

We also had the spectacle of Justice Clarence Thomas sitting on a case in which he was utterly conflicted and should have recused. The silence around Thomas, especially from Chief Justice Roberts, was deafening. Because Thomas’s wife, Ginni, was a January 6 insurrectionist, he had no business being part of the case. Thomas embodies the ethical sleaze of billionaires buying a self-serving brand of justice.

However the Supreme Court ultimately rules on the January 6 case, there is no denying the huge favor they delivered to the Republican candidate for President. Delay is Trump’s agenda and he could not have asked for more from the Republican-appointed justices. Pushing the January 6 trial back until after the November election is all Trump wants. If he wins in November, Trump will dismiss Jack Smith’s January 6 case and all federal cases in which he is a defendant.

As should be clear, the Supreme Court majority wants a Republican president. Whatever they personally feel about Trump and how distasteful he is, they are bought into a Republican winning. They need that to pursue the Federalist Society vision they share.

This term they have done everything they can to make sure Trump can run again, first in Trump v Anderson, the Colorado case about interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment (which allowed Trump to remain on the ballot) and now in delaying the Jack Smith prosecution.

I would contrast the Court’s kid gloves treatment of the overwhelmingly white MAGA January 6 defendants in the Fischer v United States case with the treatment meted out to DeRay McKesson, a Black Lives Matter leader, who helped to organize a Baton Rouge protest after the fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling. In the protest, someone who remains unknown threw a rock that hit a police officer in the face causing serious injury.

McKesson had nothing to do with throwing the rock but the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. The Court below, the Fifth Circuit, ruled that a protest leader (McKesson) can be held liable for the violent action of a protest participant. Negligence is apparently in the eye of the beholder.

Leaving in place McKesson’s liability provided a crushing blow to the First Amendment rights of Black civil rights protesters in Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. In contrast, in any of the January 6 cases, it is like the Court majority is looking beyond the actual insurrection as if it did not happen. As Justice Gorsuch put it at the January 6 oral argument, they are writing a rule “for the ages”, not deciding the facts of a case.

The January 6 case follows in the wake of so many body blows the Court has inflicted on democracy. Citizens United destroyed campaign finance reform; Dobbs eviscerated women’s rights; Shelby County subverted voting rights; Heller and Bruen did in gun control.

And that barely begins to describe how the Republican majority justices have taken it upon themselves to remake America as they see fit. I also think of separation of church and state, partisan gerrymandering, ending affirmative action and obliterating environmental regulation.

Consistent with the Federalist Society desires, the Supreme Court has become an out-of-control super-legislature that operates without restraint. They are the kids in the judicial candy store. They can block any progressive change that emerges from the Executive Branch or Congress. Witness their intrusion into and tubing of Biden’s student debt relief plan. They now operate as an institutional counter-majoritarian break on any change that deviates from current conservative orthodoxy.

The fact that they are wildly unpopular doesn’t appear to faze them or slow them down. A 2023 poll showed only 18% of Americans had a great deal of confidence in the Supreme Court. To call the Court out-of-touch is generous.

Some Democrats have finally begun to realize that a continuation of the Supreme Court’s trajectory is a death knell for any kind of vibrant democracy. It is worse than is generally recognized. A study from last year concluded that unless Democrats expand the Supreme Court, they will not have a majority on it until 2065! Imagine 40 more years of this court doing more of what it is doing.

It is hard not to think they would rubber-stamp fascism. Fascist leaders typically don’t disband supreme courts. They simply get them to do their bidding. Forty more years of MAGA justice would be Jim Crow 2.0. It would not allow Congress or the President to act on climate change in the face of a climate emergency nor would it allow progress on gun control or immigration reform. The Court would likely be comfortable with indefinite one party rule.

Democrats need to move up expanding the Supreme Court on their list of priorities. Right now it is down the laundry list of demands. There is no constitutional prohibition against adding justices to the Court and it has been done many times before. After Mitch McConnell’s games keeping Merrick Garland off the Court and then the Coney Barrett eleventh hour jam, Republicans have no right to complain. They stole the Court and expansion is the only way to restore a semblance of fairness and democracy.

Last May Sen. Ed Markey (D.-Mass), Tina Smith (D.-Minn) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D.-Ga) introduced the Judiciary Act of 2023 that would expand the high court by adding four seats to create a 13-justice bench. The bill is unlikely to pass any time soon but Democrats did take a step forward in introducing the bill.

What is going on now is a democracy emergency. Fascism is waiting in the wings. The rule of law matters and expanding the Supreme Court is the single reform with the most potential to revitalize democracy and stymie voter suppression, partisan gerrymandering and billionaires buying elections. While it is true the Republicans would further pack the Court if they gained the presidency, there is no other reform that could disempower the MAGA justices.

Failing to respond to a system rigged in favor of the Court’s billionaire donors is not an option. Expanding the Court is doable and it is the most effective judicial reform to cure what is ailing us.