Opinion: Outlines of a new dystopia

A woman holds a Palestinian flag as Harvard graduating students protest at the university’s commencement on May 23 in Cambridge, Mass.

A woman holds a Palestinian flag as Harvard graduating students protest at the university’s commencement on May 23 in Cambridge, Mass. Nancy Lane / Boston Herald/TNS

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Published: 06-16-2025 9:00 AM

It is hard to get your head around the scope of the totalitarian project being engineered by the Trump regime. The dimensions of the project are expansive. Instead of a constitutional republic, they desire a monarch-president with greatly expanded powers. Instead of three co-equal branches of government, they favor an entirely submissive Congress (which they have) and a corrupt complicit Supreme Court whose majority acquiesces to the Executive.

They are a constellation of mediocre white yes-men (with a few white women thrown in) who will sell out the working class every time in favor of billionaires.

Back in the 1960’s, people on the left emphasized naming the system responsible for the Vietnam War. Now, we need to name the revised system which Trump and his cronies have created. Capitalism is a tired old word that inadequately conveys what is coming. It is only part of the picture.

The Steve Bannon metaphor “flooding the zone” comes closer to describing how the process is unfolding, but the project is anything but populist. As noted, it is at the service of the billionaire class and their profit.

There is the war on colleges and universities. Then there is the war on science and scientific research. There is also a war to control federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency. As with classical fascism, there is scapegoating and the need to blame an entity. These fascists have landed on immigrants to explain all that is wrong in America.

Although they have tried unsuccessfully to align immigration with criminality, much of the Trump regime’s anti-immigrant aggression has been directed at students. There is a thinly veiled anti-intellectualism underlying this offensive. They want to kick foreign students out of the country, especially students of color. The reasons given are invariably flimsy. It is usually an op-ed written to defend Palestinian rights or something the student posted on social media that contravenes Trumpian orthodoxy.

Most commentators are seeing a piece of what is going on but not the big picture. The Trump regime is attempting to criminalize dissent. International students get arrested for the crime of expressing a minority view. Then, they get shipped to distant jurisdictions and face deportation. The Trump regime wants to set the parameters for allowable thought.

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What is going on is far worse than McCarthyism.

In the past, even if politicians were upset with a professor or the goings-on at a particular university, they were not trying to control the intellectual life of whole universities. Now, the Trump regime wants to control curriculum. They want to decide what is intellectually acceptable. This is an unprecedented threat to academic freedom.

To quote Vice President Vance, “professors are the enemy.” The Trump regime wants control of all cultural and artistic institutions, particularly those that are left leaning or are more free-thinking. They hate that universities and cultural institutions like the Smithsonian have made a sincere effort to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Cancelling millions of dollars in grants to researchers, banning international students and attempting to eliminate tax exempt status as they are doing at Harvard are part of their power grab scheme.

Harvard has been forced to sue because the university recognized Trump’s agenda is an attack on the First Amendment. It is a stand-in for all colleges and universities who all face the same threat to academic freedom. The Trump regime is using antisemitism (which they could care less about) as an excuse to attack private institutions outside their control.

Surveillance capitalism is now employed to monitor the social media accounts of thousands of foreign students. ICE and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are using AI and data mining to find suspect students whose visa could get revoked. Tech companies are cooperating with this endeavor. The effort has a Big Brother quality.

A further follow-the-money aspect is the connection between Trump’s mass round-up of immigrants and the private prison companies that profit from that enterprise. Companies like GEO and CoreCivic are making a killing housing masses of arrested immigrants who have no criminal convictions. These companies run what are effectively concentration camps and they charge the government $120,000 per immigrant. The companies then donate a percentage of profit back to Trump.

Many of these arrested immigrants have American citizen children. The private prison industry has effectively turned these children into orphans.

Trump’s war on science deserves mention. His administration has arbitrarily fired thousands of workers who ran America’s scientific infrastructure. The effort is about destroying the U.S. as an international center of learning. It will absolutely lead to a brain drain. You might think no one would benefit from assaulting science but since the COVID-19 pandemic, MAGA conservatives have made anti-science a new normal. In the name of health freedom and fighting elitism, they dismiss mainstream science, including around vaccines.

The budget bill that passed the House cuts biomedical research on cancer, infectious disease and Alzheimer’s. These MAGA conservatives seem determined to lower life expectancy in the U.S. It is like they are at war with scientific expertise if they perceive it as in conflict with their hard right ideology.

This shows up most blatantly around climate change. The Trump regime has withdrawn support from any science research that even mentions the words “climate change.” They have purged government websites of climate data. They are escalating the production of greenhouses gases, like a death wish.

Looking broadly, what is going on is the equivalent of a national book burning. Anything that conflicts with the Trump game plan goes into the burn pile. It is the new Dark Ages. The masked, unidentified ICE agent who is armed to the teeth is their public image.

Nothing is automatic in this life though. MAGA’s jihad to undermine liberal democracy is not a done deal. While we still have some rights, it is incumbent on people of all political persuasions to push back hard. We can stop this.

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.