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Olivia Rosane at Common Dreams on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.—Erika As they drew nearer to Gaza on Sunday, the 12 crew me...
06/09/2025

Olivia Rosane at Common Dreams on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
—Erika

As they drew nearer to Gaza on Sunday, the 12 crew members of the Freedom Flotilla vessel the Madleen remained undeterred in their mission to deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave, even as an Israeli official issued new threats.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced on social media Sunday afternoon that he had instructed the Israel Defense Forces "to act to prevent the Madleen hate flotilla from reaching the shores of Gaza—and to take whatever measures are necessary to that end."

"To the antisemitic Greta and her fellow Hamas propaganda spokespeople, I say clearly: You should turn back—because you will not reach Gaza," Katz said, referring to Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, one of the 12 people on board. "Israel will act against any attempt to break the blockade or assist terrorist organizations—at sea, in the air, and on land."

The crew members, however, said they would not turn back and that they hoped to reach Gaza by Monday.

"Israel's Defense Minister has once again threatened unlawful force against civilians, attempting to justify violence with baseless smears," the group posted on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Instagram. "We will not be intimidated."

"The Madleen is a peaceful civilian vessel, unarmed and sailing in international waters with humanitarian aid and human rights defenders. This mission is independent, guided only by conscience and solidarity with Gaza," the crew members wrote.

​"Israel's Defense Minister has once again threatened unlawful force against civilians, attempting to justify violence with baseless smears," the crew members said. "We will not be intimidated."

Trump wants to build a statue of Chrisotpher Columbus on Native land, as Matt Sledge reports at The Intercept.—ErikaA pr...
06/08/2025

Trump wants to build a statue of Chrisotpher Columbus on Native land, as Matt Sledge reports at The Intercept.
—Erika

A provision buried deep in the House budget bill allocates $40 million toward President Donald Trump’s plan for a vast garden of larger-than-life statues — and it could get built on sacred Native land.

The House version of the budget reconciliation bill passed last month contains funding for Trump’s proposed National Garden of American Heroes, which would lionize figures ranging from Andrew Jackson to Harriet Tubman.

While the garden does not have an official location yet, one candidate is minutes from Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the iconic carvings of presidential faces in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Trump first announced his plan for a national statue garden during a July 4, 2020, address at Mount Rushmore in response to the racial justice protesters toppling Confederate statues.

The potential statue garden site near Mount Rushmore belongs to an influential South Dakotan mining family that has offered to donate the land, an offer that has support from the state’s governor.

The Black Hills, however, are sacred land to the region’s Indigenous peoples, and its ownership following a U.S. treaty violation is contested. One Native activist decried the idea of building another monument in the mountain range.

“I’m quite sure,” said Taylor Gunhammer, an organizer with the NDN Collective and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, “that Harriet Tubman would not be pleased that people trying to build the statue of her on stolen Lakota land have apparently learned nothing from her.”

Trump’s plan for a National Statue Garden could get built on sacred Native land currently held by a wealthy South Dakota mining family.

Maya Yang at The Guardian on Bernie's words on Trump's authoritarian escalation in LA.—ErikaBernie Sanders warned of the...
06/08/2025

Maya Yang at The Guardian on Bernie's words on Trump's authoritarian escalation in LA.
—Erika

Bernie Sanders warned of the US’s slide into authoritarianism following Donald Trump’s decision to deploy the national guard to Los Angeles over the city’s protests against federal immigration raids.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday, the leftwing Vermont senator said: “We have a president who is moving this country rapidly into authoritarianism … My understanding is that the governor of California, the mayor of the city of Los Angeles did not request the national guard but he thinks he has a right to do anything he wants.”

Sanders, and many others, have long warned for the potential risk to American democracy that Trump represents in his second term. Since returning to the White House Trump has roiled American politics and civic life with numerous actions including attacking universities, slashing government spending and firing tens of thousands of employees and rolling back the rights of LGBTQ+ people.

Sanders added: “He is suing the media who criticizes him. He is going after law firms who have clients who were against him. He’s going after universities that teach courses that he doesn’t like. He’s threatening to impeach judges who rule against him. And he’s usurping the powers of the United States congress. This guy wants all of the power. He does not believe in the constitution. He does not believe in the rule of law.”

Pointing to the Republican-led House and Senate, Sanders went on to say that the future of the US “rests with a small number of Republicans in the House and Senate who know better, who do know what the constitution is about”.

“It’s high time they stood for our constitution and the rule of law,” Sanders said.

Senator says the future of the US ‘rests with a small number of Republicans in the House and Senate who know better’

John Feffer in his latest essay at Foreign Policy in Focus on the right's victory in Poland and what to make of it.  Tom...
06/08/2025

John Feffer in his latest essay at Foreign Policy in Focus on the right's victory in Poland and what to make of it. Tom

"Beginning in the late 1980s, Eastern Europe shifted from being a political backwater to a political bellwether. By shrugging off the Soviet yoke and exiting communism, the region pointed toward the future collapse of the Soviet Union and the cresting of a third wave of democratization. The fast-track liberalizations of Eastern Europe in the 1990s encouraged similar bouts of deregulation and marketization elsewhere in the world. The disintegration of Yugoslavia presaged centrifugal conflicts that would engulf Libya, Sudan, and Ukraine.

And if you want to understand the popularity of Donald Trump in the United States, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the global backlash against liberalism first acquired its distinctive right-wing populist flavor in Eastern Europe, beginning with hapless presidential hopeful Stanislaw Tyminski in 1990. The failure of liberal parties in the region to usher in broad prosperity—and the creation of distinct post-communist classes of haves and have-nots—led directly to the rise of right-wing populist parties and politicians. Even the egalitarian effect of European Union transfers was not enough to prevent the success of Viktor Orban in Hungary, Robert Fico in Slovakia, and the Law and Justice Party in Poland.

Today, the region is torn between broadly liberal, pro-EU politicians and their broadly illiberal, nationalist, and xenophobic rivals. What separates the two is often just a percentage or two at the polls. In Romania, a representative of that first group, pro-EU presidential candidate Nicusor Dan, won last week’s election but only after a pair of far-right opponents nearly pulled off an upset victory.

In Poland, meanwhile, the political winds blew in the other direction, as Karol Nawrocki nosed past the pro-EU candidate. It was a very close election, with Nawrocki garnering 50.89 percent of the vote and his opponent getting 49.11 percent. Nawrocki is linked to the right-wing Law and Justice Party (P*S), and he has now become a major obstacle in the path of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s plan to bring Poland back into the European mainstream.

Over the last decade, the world has suffered bouts of political whiplash as right-wing populists and their opponents have battled it out at the ballot box. In the United States, Trump has come back for a second term after besting liberal Kamala Harris while the progressive standard-bearer Lula has returned to office in Brazil after the defeat of “Trump of the Tropics” Jair Bolsonaro. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, after leaving government in disgrace in 2019, won the general elections last year (only to be squeezed out of power by three other parties joining together to form a coalition government). After elections this week, South Korean progressives will return to government after losing by a tiny margin last time around.

To be sure, some autocrats— like Orban, Narendra Modi in India, and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador—have proven almost election-proof. And some progressive parties, like Morena in Mexico, have also remained in power across terms.

But the polarization of politics in Eastern Europe, which has already produced wild swings at the polls, points to a new era of instability when election results are hard to predict because the electorate is so evenly divided and the society so starkly polarized. Is governance even possible in such a see-saw world?

Let’s take a closer look at Poland to see what the future of democracy looks like.

The Return of Tusk

The Law and Justice Party (P*S) patterned its remaking of Poland on the example of Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Socially conservative, it promised a more aggressively Christian Poland that would be less tolerant of homosexuality and immigrants. Since taking power in 2005, it followed Orban’s model by exerting more control over the judicial sector, systematically restricting media freedoms, and pushing back against perceived interference by European institutions.

Unlike its libertarian counterparts elsewhere in the world, P*S actually favored more government involvement in the economy—to direct resources to an underfunded health sector, encourage pro-family policies, institute a minimum wage, and provide tax exemptions for young workers. These economic policies were a thank-you to Poland B, the folks who didn’t benefit from the liberalization of the 1990s and who exacted their revenge by putting P*S in office.

The other element that distinguished P*S from its regional counterparts was its intense animosity toward Russia. Part of this was general Russophobia that dates back to the tsar’s enthusiastic participation in the dismemberment of Poland in the eighteenth century, the Soviet attempt to reoccupy parts of the country in 1919, and Stalin’s later grip over the government in Warsaw. But part of the animosity is of more recent vintage. In 2010, one of the founders of P*S, L**h Kaczynski, died in a plane crash in Smolensk, in western Russia, which was the result of human error but which some Poles are convinced was a Russian plot.

So, while Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico align themselves with the illiberalism of Vladimir Putin, Kaczynski’s twin brother Jaroslaw, who continues to pull P*S strings in the background, will have nothing to do with the Kremlin.

In 2023, P*S came out on top for a third straight parliamentary election. But it didn’t win enough seats to form a government. Donald Tusk, who returned to Poland after a stint as the president of the European Council, led his Civic Platform party into a coalition government with the Left and the Christian Democratic Third Way party.

Tusk has subsequently steered Poland away from illiberalism and back into the good graces of Brussels. The EU has once again opened the spigot of funding for Poland. But other promised reforms have been hard to push through because the government doesn’t have a parliamentary majority sufficient to overcome a presidential veto. And the Polish president, the P*S-aligned Andrzej Duda, loved to use his veto power.

That’s why this week’s presidential election was so important. If a liberal had won the presidency, the Tusk-led government could have finally passed many of its promised reforms. Instead, to the dismay of Tusk and others, Karol Nawrocki continued the P*S winning streak, which means that the party will control the presidency from 2015 to at least 2030.

What Nawrocki Represents

A conservative historian and former boxer, Nawrocki has little power outside of his ability to wield a veto. But that’s a veritable superpower. He will likely use it to block abortion access and LGBTQ rights. During his campaign, he shredded a copy of Gender Q***r: A Memoir to demonstrate his commitment to “family values.”

Unlike Orban, he supports Poland’s actions on behalf of Ukraine. Like Orban, he is anti-immigrant, including the million or so Ukrainian refugees who fled to Poland after the Russian invasion in 2022.

Nawrocki represents a beachhead for the MAGA movement in Poland. Trump endorsed him. And the Conservative Political Action Conference held its first meeting in Poland in the week leading up to the election—to give Nawrocki a last-minute boost. Homeland Security head Kristi Noem appeared at the gathering to announce that Nawrocki and other European politicians in attendance “will be the leaders that will turn Europe back to conservative values.”

Nawrocki has made his outsider status an advantage. He’s a first-time politician and, at his campaign’s outset, half of Polish voters had never heard of him. Like Trump, he somehow managed to survive several scandals—including allegations of procuring prostitutes for clients—that would have killed the careers of other politicians.

Perhaps his greatest asset, however, was that he wasn’t associated with the current Tusk government. In February 2025, nearly 60 percent of Poles were dissatisfied with Tusk and his coalition partners.

The Progressive Disadvantage

The far right, when it attains power, doesn’t observe the niceties of the law. In Poland, P*S went straight for the judicial jugular to stack the courts in its favor. Trump issues unconstitutional executive decrees. Daniel Noboa handed out money to essentially buy the recent election in Ecuador.

Liberals, on the other hand, are generously more scrupulous about obeying the law (at least in comparison). They play by the rules, which means that they must somehow restore some semblance of democracy within the legal constraints of democracy. It’s as if one side digs a giant hole with a backhoe without bothering to file an environmental impact statement or inform the owners of the land. The other side scrambles to meet all the legal requirements of filling in the hole, and then is given only a trowel to do the job.

That’s certainly been the case in Poland. P*S attacked independent judges and tried to silence critical journalists. Tusk, meanwhile, has been bound by democratic rules (the presidential veto) and democratic procedures (the presidential election).

The far right generally doesn’t give a fig about democracy. Right-wing ideologue Curtis Yarvin once called for “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” which put him on the margins of discourse in 2008 when he published his manifesto under the pseudonym of Mencius Moldbug. Today, his proposal to cede all power to a CEO-in-chief has become a near-reality, and Yarvin has become a veritable MAGA whisperer with close links to J.D. Vance, among others.

Unfortunately, however, defending democracy isn’t necessary a winning strategy for progressives. Satisfaction with U.S. democracy actually increased after Donald Trump’s election last November. To win, progressives have to focus not just on the plutocrats or Trump’s violations of civil rights but on the intersection of the two: corruption.

Anti-corruption campaigns are populist, cut across ideological categories, and capitalize on the desire of people to “throw the bums out.” Trump and his allies around the world are corrupt, above all. Voters should be more exercised about the breaking of political rules but in practice they’re angrier about the breaking of economic rules and the outright theft of government resources.

The other takeaway from Poland is the continued popularity of an economic agenda that truly benefits the have-nots. One of Duda’s vetoes, just last month, was to shoot down a Tusk effort to reduce health care revenue. When will liberals learn? Nawrocki’s insistence during his campaign on an agenda of economic populism provided him with just enough of amargin of victory.

An anti-corruption platform married to a social democratic agenda would be a killer combo for progressive candidates. Many countries are teetering politically, capable of being nudged one way or another by a small percentage of voters. Can left and liberals find a way to work together to fashion broadly popular campaigns—as in France in 2024 and South Korea in 2025—to prevent MAGA forces from taking over the world?"

What can progressives learn from the victory of the far right in Poland?

At his substack, Robert Reich on Trump and Musk -- and be sure to check out his analysis of what's going on (which follo...
06/08/2025

At his substack, Robert Reich on Trump and Musk -- and be sure to check out his analysis of what's going on (which follows the set of recent Trump/Musk quotes he lines up). Tom

"I’m trying not to be too delighted about the new reality TV show starring Elon and Donald, but the dialogue is truly extraordinary (I’m quoting them verbatim but putting their volley in what appears to be its intended order).

ELON (February 7, 2025): “I love as much as a straight man can love another man.”

ELON (June 3, 2025, four days after leaving the Trump regime): “[Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a] disgusting abomination” and “shame on those who voted for it” and “In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people”

DONALD (June 5, 2025): “You saw a man who was very happy when he stood behind the Oval desk. Even with a black eye. I said, do you want a little makeup? He said, no, I don’t think so. Which is interesting, Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will any more.”

ELON (June 5, 2025): “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate. … Such ingratitude.

DONALD: “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!”

ELON: “Such an obvious lie. So sad. … This bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!”

ELON (in response to a Musk supporter who calls for Trump to be impeached): “Yes.”

DONALD: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

ELON: “In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.”

DONALD: “Elon is suffering from Trump derangement syndrome.”

ELON: “Time to drop the really big bomb: Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT! … Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”

ELON: [Reposts video of Trump partying with Epstein in 1992 with a “hmm” emoji.]

ELON [Posts a poll and asks]: “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”

ELON: “The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.”

I’ve been predicting the divorce for six months. It was inevitable. Both have massive egos and insatiable needs for money, power, and attention.

I’m not a psychoanalyst, but both had abusive fathers who humiliated them — and I suspect that this contributed to their cruelty. Both turned their rage on the U.S. government and many people dependent on it. And in just a few months they destroyed institutions that had been built over decades or more.

Now, they’re turning their rage on each other.

It’s mutual destruction. Tesla’s market value has fallen 17 percent since the outbreak of hostilities. I assume Trump’s polls are showing similar declines.

Other than their pathological narcissism, the other similarity between Musk and Trump is that both have grown far richer since Election Day by using the government to pad their pockets.

Trump’s corruption has been well documented. Musk’s corruption isn’t far behind: His net worth has increased by more than $100 billion since Election Day. A new report from the staff of Senator Elizabeth Warren shows in remarkable detail how Musk used the U.S. government for personal gain. Musk has also scraped up more government data about every American and much of the rest of the world’s people than any other person controls.

The biggest difference between them? Trump values loyalty above all other attributes. Musk values disruption above all else.

The end of their storied bromance raises two questions:

1. Does Trump’s anger over Musk’s disloyalty toward him exceed Musk’s delight in disrupting Trump’s signature goals?

2. How much will they destroy each other in the process?

What do you think?"

A Big Beautiful Brawl

Hey, give him full credit.  As Kate Zernike of the New York Times reports, Donald Trump is doing a remarkable job of tak...
06/08/2025

Hey, give him full credit. As Kate Zernike of the New York Times reports, Donald Trump is doing a remarkable job of taking down science in America (and creating hiring and research bonanzas for China and Europe)! Tom

"Ardem Patapoutian’s story is not just the American dream, it is the dream of American science.

He arrived in Los Angeles in 1986 at age 18 after fleeing war-torn Lebanon. He spent a year writing for an Armenian newspaper and delivering Domino’s at night to become eligible for the University of California, where he earned his undergraduate degree and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience.

He started a lab at Scripps Research in San Diego with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, discovered the way humans sense touch, and in 2021 won the Nobel Prize.

But with the Trump administration slashing spending on science, Dr. Patapoutian’s federal grant to develop new approaches to treating pain has been frozen. In late February, he posted on Bluesky that such cuts would damage biomedical research and prompt an exodus of talent from the United States. Within hours, he had an email from China, offering to move his lab to “any city, any university I want,” he said, with a guarantee of funding for the next 20 years.

Dr. Patapoutian declined, because he loves his adopted country. Many scientists just setting out on their careers, however, fear there is no other option but to leave.

Scientific leaders say that’s risking the way American science has been done for years, and the pre-eminence of the United States in their fields.

China and Europe are on hiring sprees. An analysis by the journal Nature captured the reversal: Applications from China and Europe for graduate student or postdoctoral positions in the United States have dropped sharply or dried up entirely since President Trump took office. The number of postdocs and graduate students in the United States applying for jobs abroad has spiked.

A university in France that created new positions for scientists with canceled federal grants capped applications after overwhelming interest. A scientific institute in Portugal said job inquiries from junior faculty members in the United States are up tenfold over the last two months.

“We are embarking on a major experiment in restructuring the innovative engine in America, and China is the control,” said Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, which was established by President Abraham Lincoln to advise the government on science policy. “China is not going to cut its research budget in half.”

Since the 1950s, when the federal government expanded the National Institutes of Health and created the National Science Foundation as public-private research partnerships, the United States has become the international mecca for science. It was the uniquely American system that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s science adviser, Vannevar Bush, envisioned in his landmark report, “Science, The Endless Frontier”: Federal money enabled scientific discoveries that made American research institutions the envy of the world, and they in turn fueled the rise of the United States as the leader in technology and biotechnology.

As that system attracted international talent, it came to depend on the aspiring scientists who come to the United States to work in university labs at low wages for the privilege of proximity to the world’s best researchers. They often stay: In the American defense industry and fields like engineering and computer and life sciences, at least half the workers with doctorates are foreign-born.
Image Ardem Patapoutian holds a chair that he signed at a Nobel Prize Museum in Sweden.

Now, American science finds itself fighting on several fronts as the Trump administration seeks to cut budgets and seal borders, to punish universities for their liberalism and federal health agencies for their responses to Covid.

Federal science budgets have been slashed. Stricter immigration policies have spread fear among international scientists working in the United States, and those who had hoped to. Graduate and postdoctoral students have had their visas canceled, or worry they will. The administration cut off funding for international students at Harvard — a judge blocked the move, but other universities worry about being next.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged to “aggressively revoke” the visas of Chinese students in what he called “critical fields,” which almost certainly includes science, where labs often have more Chinese than American-born graduate students and postdocs.

President Trump has worried about the nation losing its scientific edge to “rivals abroad,” as he wrote in a letter in March to his science adviser, Michael Kratsios. He urged Mr. Kratsios to continue Vannevar Bush’s vision, “recapturing the urgency which propelled us so far in the last century.” Yet Mr. Kratsios argues that philanthropies and industry should pick up more of the cost, and that too much federal science spending goes to bureaucracy.

“Spending more money on the wrong things is far worse than spending less money on the right things,” he said in a speech at the National Academy in May.

But even at Johns Hopkins, which has benefited from the philanthropy of former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, those dollars can’t make up the shortfall. Industry doesn’t typically fund basic research, and it costs more to do research in industry in part because companies, unlike university labs, have to pay competitive wages.

Dr. Patapoutian calls all of these challenges “a gift” to China.

“It’s not just the international students, the whole system is on hold because the uncertainty does not allow you to plan,” Dr. Patapoutian said. “With all these grants frozen or cut, it creates this massive chaos.”

Just under half of the graduate students and postdocs in his lab hail from other countries. Now he is seeing less interest from abroad, but like many other lab heads he is not hiring new postdocs anyway: “Everybody’s kind of bolted down making sure we have the funds to keep the people we have.”

In the first half of the 20th century, American scientists joined European universities to make fundamental discoveries: the structure of molecules (J. Robert Oppenheimer), the structure of DNA (James Watson). The rise of fascism in Europe drove many Jewish scientists to the United States.

After World War II, “we brought the rocket scientists here,” said Dr. McNutt. “That’s what got us to the moon.”

While the logistics and expense of moving entire labs is likely to daunt more established researchers from moving, for postdocs and others just starting their labs, other countries offer the promise of greater stability.

“They are going to be able to recruit the best and brightest, proven people,” Dr. McNutt said. “They are going to give them labs. They’re going to give them equipment and funds, no questions asked.”

At Johns Hopkins, which has long received more N.I.H. funding than any other university, Richard Huganir, the chairman of neuroscience, said he is “terrified” of being unable to enroll international students. His department has 36 labs with 100 graduate students and postdocs, about 30 percent are international.

“For us, it would be losing 30 percent of our work force,” he said. “They are integral to the whole fabric of American science, and losing that population would be devastating.”

Graduate students and postdocs are going home to China and Korea for jobs, he said.

Beyond losing talent, Dr. Huganir worries about the increasing isolation of American science. He canceled plans to host an international meeting at Hopkins because foreign scientists did not want to come to the United States; organizers considered moving it to Oxford, in England, but realized international students in the United States would not go because they fear not being allowed back in. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top federal health official, this week said he wanted to bar scientists at the N.I.H. and other federal agencies from publishing in leading scientific journals, which he called “corrupt.”

Mathias Unberath, a computer scientist who studies computer-assisted medicine, came to Hopkins from Germany eight years ago. He has 13 doctoral students and two postdocs, all but five from abroad. “My whole team, including those who were eager to apply for more permanent positions in the U.S., have no more interest,” he said. Those looking for jobs are applying in Europe, “including some of my superstars,” he said. One American citizen, the recipient of a prestigious Siebel scholarship and an award for best paper, has taken a postdoc in Germany.

Dr. Unberath himself was in the hospital with his wife, who had just given birth to their second son, when the first Trump administration suspended H-1B visas — Dr. Unberath had one. Now, he said, even if his students can get visas, they see the cuts to the N.S.F. and N.I.H. and worry they will not be able to get the early career grants they need to earn tenure. “And if you don’t make tenure,” he said, “well, then what?”

Daphne Koller came from Israel to do her Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford, became a professor there and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship before founding two tech companies, Coursera, which puts university courses online, and Insitro, which uses artificial intelligence to drive drug discovery. Most of the first employees at both companies, she said, were hired right out of universities, and most were foreign-born.

“I would like nothing better than for the U.S. education system to really have the same emphasis on rigor and science and STEM so that we can train great scientists and engineers here,” Dr. Koller said. “That would be incredible, but it doesn’t happen magically. Even if that were ultimately the case, it’s wonderful for a country to be in the unique position where it is the beacon, the magnet for the best and brightest from all over the world.”

No institution has been more affected than Harvard, as the administration has made it an example of what it sees as the woke excesses of higher education.

Rudolf Pisa, in a cell biology lab there, lost the N.I.H. grant that helps postdoctoral researchers transition to running their own labs. He came from the Czech Republic to do his Ph.D. at Rockefeller University in New York because he believed the American approach to science was “brave.” His wife, a neuroscientist at Boston University, is American, but fears it is only a matter of time before her grant is canceled, too. They are looking for jobs in Europe.

“Two months ago I would not have thought of any of this,” Dr. Pisa said. He had considered himself a good investment for the United States. His work at Rockefeller helped lead to a patent and then a company to design cancer drugs that would be less likely to develop resistance over time. “We created jobs,” he said. “There’s more out of it than just the papers.”

The head of Dr. Pisa’s lab, Tom Rapoport, said five of his students had their visas revoked before a judge temporarily restored them. He also lost the federal grant that funds his lab — despite a perfect score from N.I.H reviewers. He may have to reduce his lab from 14 people to eight, only one of them is American.

Dr. Rapoport knows well how political turbulence affects science. His parents fled Na**sm in Germany and Austria to train and work in the United States: His mother was a pediatrician, his father a biochemist who discovered how to prolong the shelf life of blood, which the U.S. military used to save countless service members. They left after being blacklisted as members of the Communist Party, ending up in East Germany.

Dr. Rapoport was a professor there until the fall of the Berlin Wall; after, he had trouble getting a position, he said, because universities were suspicious of those from the East. He joined Harvard in 1995 because he admired the innovation and rigor of American science. “This is scientific heaven,” he said. “Or it used to be.”

He worries that Americans don’t appreciate how the system has worked for so long. “Many people look at us as just parasites,” he said. “All the medicines that people take, they were all developed in the U.S. There’s essentially nothing developed by anyone else. We are on the top of the whole thing, and we’re really risking it all.”

As the United States cuts budgets and restricts immigration, China and Europe are offering researchers money and stability.

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