Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“Do We Still Have Rule of Law?”
discusses the severity of the Trump administration’s attacks on free speech and due process at . Of the snatching of Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street in a Boston suburb, Woodhouse writes: “Ozturk isn’t even accused of participating in an act of civil disobedience, like the student from South Korea. She wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper. For expressing her views on Israel’s war on Gaza, she has, by [Marco] Rubio’s estimation, ‘participated in a movement’ in which other people at other schools who she’s never met in her life committed criminal acts, and can thereby be deported. This ‘participated in movements’ canard means that if you’re here on a student visa, and possibly even as a permanent resident, criticizing Israeli government policy is a violation of your status that can get you deported. Much to my chagrin, I’ve gotten into enough Twitter arguments about this over the last few days to know that a not insignificant number of Americans think that’s totally fine.”He continues: “Trump is going after lawful immigrants for two reasons: to show the immigration hardliners in his base that he’s deporting foreigners, whoever they are and for whatever reason, and because they’re easier to persecute than citizens. If you think this is just an immigration thing and it has nothing to do with your rights as an American, then consider the fact that as he carries out these deportations, he’s also blackmailing Columbia into clamping down on student protesters, citizen and non-citizen alike, and into appointing a third party to monitor one of one of its academic departments. And there are 59 other colleges and universities being investigated. The obvious goal here is to chill speech that’s critical of Israel, whoever’s saying it. They’re just declaring it straight up: writing an op-ed is the same as vandalizing a building, which is the same as materially supporting a terrorist organization. Citizens can be caught up in this Orwellian dragnet, too. This doesn’t stop with the foreign-born.”
“Defending Free Speech: FIRE and Substack Partner to Protect Writers in America”
In the wake of Ozturk’s abduction, Substack and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have teamed up to protect writers from escalating attacks on free speech in the United States.
FIRE’s statement notes that “Earlier this week, federal immigration officials arrested a Tufts University student off the street, allegedly for an op-ed she wrote in a student newspaper calling for the university to divest from Israel. If true, this represents a chilling escalation in the government’s effort to target critics of American foreign policy…To preserve America’s tradition as a home for fearless writing, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Substack are partnering to support writers residing lawfully in this country targeted by the government for the content of their writing…If you fit this category, whether or not you publish on Substack, we urge you to get in touch immediately at thefire.org/alarm or pages.substack.com/defender.”
In an interview about this collaboration, Substack co-founder
notes: “We’ve had people come to Substack in recent years who had been former critics of us who used to say ‘Substack is this evil right- or left-wing place because it platforms this thing.’ They wind up finding themselves censored when the worm turns and they appreciate the wisdom of a consistent stance in favor of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of the press.”“Liberal Internationalism After USAID”
Margot Tudor reflects on the colonial project of organizations like USAID for Africa Is a Country: “Justifications of the moral function, technocratic efficiency, and international security of the US and UK aid agencies are rooted in long-held beliefs about the West’s paternalistic responsibility for the Global South. This has its origins in colonial relationships and the legacies of the civilizing mission. The West’s supposed benevolence and superiority has been [integral] in shaping the history of humanitarianism and for guiding the lines of who was perceived as deserving of aid or not. To create the archetype of the savior, one must continually construct the archetype of the ‘saved’ as passive, needy, infantilized, and ‘desperate’ to justify continued operations and growth in a sector that should ultimately be aiming for its own redundancy.”
She argues that the “coloniality of liberal internationalist logic and aid delivery has been well documented, most often by those described as ‘recipients’ in the Global South as well as critical activists and scholars. The liberal internationalist order was designed to police and protect member states unequally; to be strong enough to intervene in Global South nations but too weak to hold powerful states, such as the UN permanent members, to account. Western and strong postcolonial nations alike, such as Indonesia and India, have long violated foundational principles whilst using ‘protecting democracy’ or national security as justifications. The liberal order has relied on humanitarian organizations to defuse the consequences of these interventions and to continue to preach the gospel in support of retaining the same liberal structures and logics that failed to prevent the violence in the first place. In the aftermath of recent cuts, reactionary calls to support liberal internationalism in its time of need feel extraordinarily disconnected from a world where we are acutely aware of these state violations and the inadequacies of the humanitarian ‘smoothing over’ process.”
“Will Liberation Day Transform the World?”
analyzes the Trump administration’s economic strategy for Unherd: “Trump is…not the first President to seek the controlled disintegration of the world economy by means of a devastating blow. Nor is he the first to purposely damage America’s allies to renew and prolong US hegemony. Nor the first who was prepared to hurt Wall Street in the short run in the process of strengthening US capital accumulation in the long term. Nixon had done all that half a century earlier. And the irony is that the world the Western liberal establishment is grieving over today came into being as a result of the Nixon Shock. While admonishing the idea of a US President delivering a rude shock to the world economy, they are lamenting the passing of what only came into being because of another President’s readiness to deliver an even ruder shock. That is, the Nixon Shock gave birth to the darlings of today’s liberal establishment: neoliberalism, financialisation and globalisation.”Varoufakis asks “if the Trump Shock has anything like the success of the Nixon Shock, what will this world look like? Perhaps it is too early to tell, but neoliberalism is already being contested by the technofeudal creed of neoreactionaries such as Peter Thiel. Cloud capital is displacing financial capital and replacing the divine role of the market with the holy grail of the transhuman condition (the merger of cloud capital, AI and the biological individual). Financialisation will soon be under similar pressure. As AI develops, Wall Street will not be able to continue resisting the merging of cloud capital and finance, as seen in Elon Musk’s ambition to turn X into an ‘everything app.’ Such developments will do to payments what the internet did to fax machines, with serious repercussions for financial stability, including any future role for the Federal Reserve. And in place of the dream of a Global Village, we will have the Walled Nation. Nevertheless, that globalisation recedes does not mean that autarky is possible. The Trump Shock is pushing us into a Bisected Planet, one part of it comprising vassal countries that have yielded to the Trump Plan and a second part where the BRICS experiment is allowed to take its course.”
“Do You Want to Be a Synonym?”
At
, writes: “I had a dinner with a friend tonight and we spoke of how the new era which has just begun makes lots of our knowledge, or the ways of thinking, about international relations, economic policies, poverty and wealth etc. seem obsolete, old-fashioned, quaint and at times silly. We talked about people whose writings were influential and incisive twenty or more years ago, and who have nothing to say today except repeat what we have heard from them hundreds of times before. And doing it in a most boring and tedious way [sic].”“There are writers who have a very short and very bright influence at a point in time. Let's say it is similar to what Yuvan Noah Harari has done recently. He became an intellectual celebrity. I am ready to wager though not only that no-one will read him in ten years’ time (actually no-one reads him right now) but that he would not even be remembered. Writers like him are like passing stars: they are with us for a bit and then nobody recollects they were ever around. No-one reads them, nobody quotes them: like comets that suddenly appear and then disappear in the darkness forever.”
Milanovic goes on to describe two other categories of writers: those who become representative of their time, and those who transcend their time.
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.