To President Kotlikoff and the Trustees of Cornell University,

When Ezra Cornell said “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study,” shortly after the United States fought a war to eliminate the institution of slavery, he established the principles of inclusion and access as founding elements of Cornell University. I am writing to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, not to capitulate to any demand that Cornell compromise these principles.

As an American Jew, I do not feel threatened by speech or protests opposing the actions of the current right-wing Israeli government. I do, however, feel threatened when the US President attempts to define who is American and who is Jewish, and orders that people be imprisoned or deported without due process when he disagrees with their protected speech. Historically, these sorts of actions have not ended well for Jews, even if we are not the people targeted first. I certainly object to the President taking these actions for my sake, and I ask you to ensure that Cornell does not facilitate punishment of any students for their speech.

The US President’s withheld funds and publicized demands are calibrated to hamstring academic inquiry and access. Cornell University provides critical academic infrastructure to the global educational community, such as hosting arXiv and the Legal Information Institute. Not only are these invaluable academic resources, but they are also available to the broader public. Restricting access to the US legal code is exactly the sort of thing that a rising authoritarian regime would do to limit themselves from the rule of law; Cornell is therefore likely to be a target regardless of other factors. If Cornell buckles to any of the President’s demands, Columbia University serves as a powerful cautionary tale about what will happen next: the President will make more, and broader, demands. And as we have seen with Columbia, the President has not restored funding in exchange for meeting his initial demands. There is no reason to expect a reward for compliance.

On the other hand, we have more and more examples of institutions finding success and relief when they fight back against obviously illegal or unconstitutional behaviors. This requires bravery and effort, at least at first, but becomes easier as more institutions stand up and organize their efforts. I suggest looking to the leaders and faculty at Rutgers and Wesleyan Universities, and hope that Cornell will join them and other colleges and universities in a coalition to support the academic underpinnings of democracy.

This is a chance to lead with Ezra Cornell’s example.

Sincerely,

Joseph Shoer (Ph.D. ’11)

The bulwark against fascism is a strong set of institutions. Faced with the current set of anti-Constitutional power grabs, some of America’s institutions have been crumbling: independent agencies have been seized, Congress abdicated its core Constitutional powers as soon as the Republican Administration took power, and the judiciary has been slowly captured by right-wing politicization. Bad as it is, this is stuff that we pretty much expected to happen — after all, it was all in process already and announced during the campaign. There is a set of institutions whose utter silence confuses me, though. Where is the voice of the American business community?

We’re not in a recession yet, we don’t even have the full scope of tariffs in place yet, and still the Republican Administration is already causing economic chaos. The stock market is volatile. A trade war is in full swing. The regulatory landscape is a complete mystery. Government services that companies rely on are ending without warning. The Administration keeps threatening to use government powers to punish private entities for business activities and corporate cultures that they don’t like. The President, either as a private citizen or through his company, is launching spurious lawsuits to spur companies into settling with him. This is not a good environment for business, no matter the sector and no matter whether you’re projecting your financials ten, five, or even just one year out.

The situation is even worse for federal contractors, which receive most of the federal discretionary budget. Civil servants needed to approve contracts and sign checks have been fired. The Republican Administration is withholding payments for already-completed contract work. Contracts that were put in place through the intensively regulated, highly formalized federal procurement process are being dissolved without cause, and then immediately reallocated to Elon Musk’s companies without going through the same competitive procurement process. This is happening across government branches, including essential services.

I would think that companies across America would be speaking out, in both large and small ways, to preserve the stable conditions that led to steady American growth over decades. The conditions that they would have assumed in their long-term forecasts. There’s a lot that corporate America could do, from lobbying Congresspeople, to funding primary challengers, to maintaining their diversity initiatives, to defending themselves against spurious lawsuits in court. With only one or two prominent counterexamples, why aren’t they standing up for themselves — for their own financial gain?

One of the biggest reasons why this corporate silence confuses me is that we have examples constantly piling up that compliance doesn’t defend them from this Administration. A law firm that went out of its way to roll over for the Administration has been barred from future work with the government. A media company that anticipated the Administration’s desires and put money directly in their pockets has found a proposed acquisition blocked. A university that bent over backwards to police speech the way the right wing wants just got $400 million of research funding suspended.

In fact, it almost seems that this Administration hits hard at private institutions that do comply with their desires, while ignoring those that don’t. There is an easy way to understand this behavior: the Republican Administration is a bully. It’s made up of bullies. It’s turned the entire government into a bully. That’s what authoritarianism — fascism — fundamentally means. And a bully punches down. A bully hits out at those they perceive as weak, in an attempt to reinforce the idea that they are strong. A bully cares more about securing their own precarious dominance among their gang than about changing the behavior of outsiders.

A bully also hates confrontation. A bully backs down. We’ve seen this happening with the Administration, too, from immigration raids that turn up nobody to funding cuts that get reinstated when challenged.

It seems to me that corporate America has a choice. They can roll over now, suffer indignities, lose popularity, experience financial losses in the economic chaos, and — in the case of federal contractors — ultimately see their income streams unceremoniously diverted to Musk companies. Or, they can invest some near-term effort in punching back at the bullies and re-asserting a stable policy environment, in exchange for being able to make a profit at all in the medium and long term.

One of those paths simply seems untenable and irresponsible to me. The other path leads to financial gain, and also has the virtue of being right.

Why aren’t more companies doing what’s right?

To celebrate Christmas, NORAD tracks Santa.

There are various apocryphal stories about how this came to be, but however it started, the United States military presents NORAD’s Santa Tracker as a fun, celebratory way to do some public outreach for Christian American families. And media organizations in the US go along credulously; at my hotel breakfast I saw The Today Show put up clips from the NORAD Santa Tracker on their broadcast this past Christmas morning.

But I find the NORAD Santa Tracker to be extremely dark, emblematic of US military groupthink failures and fatalistic shoulder-shrugging on the part of the US media and public. It’s like a Christmas morning broadcast of Doctor Strangelove, accompanied by the reminder that US nuclear strategy learned absolutely no lessons from either scientific findings or the entire Cold War.

Why? Well, NORAD — or the North American Aerospace Defense Command — is a US military organization responsible for quickly identifying intrusions into north American airspace. Its specific focus is on strategic bombers and missiles — the delivery systems for nuclear warheads.

What is supposed to happen when NORAD identifies a high speed object entering North American airspace? NORAD reports to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so notification would immediately reach the highest levels of the US military. These people would then have to sort out wither the incoming object represents a threat to American nuclear command and control systems. Under the utterly insane and self-destructive Cold War nuclear doctrines that still hold today, if there’s an attack incoming that has the potential to disrupt US command and control, the US should respond with a full-scale nuclear retaliation against the aggressor — probably assumed to be Russia and China. So if, say, the object was heading on from the coasts towards the central Mountain region of the United States, that might qualify. Given developments in hypersonic missiles that can change course to evade air defenses, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs might have to assume that the weapons’ intended target is located far from its projected ballistic course. In other words, even if the incoming object is headed for the middle of the Nevada desert when detected, they might have to assume it could angle itself over to Cheyenne Mountain at the last moment.

NORAD has, in the past, accidentally left training simulations active in their computers, triggering this alert process.

The Chairman is supposed to check with one person before launching a planet-annihilating attack on the USSR: the President of the United States. It sure is fortunate for any humans living on Earth that the President is always someone reticent to activate nuclear weapons for any purpose and who has a serious regard for the safeguards preventing their use. Even if deployed in a so-called “limited” nuclear exchange — a few dozen warheads exploded out of the roughly 12,000 that exist — the ensuing nuclear winter would result in globally existential famines, potentially toppling the governments of even the “winner.” In other words, mutually assured destruction is practically baked in to anyone’s use of nuclear weapons — no retaliation required.

The bottom line is, according to current US nuclear doctrines, if NORAD actually detected Santa, life as we know it on Earth would end. Sleep tight on Christmas Eve, kids.

This is what the NORAD Santa Tracker represents to me: the US military cavalierly joking about an existential threat to myself, my family, my community, my people, and my country. And nobody in the US defense complex, civilian leadership, or media is interested in talking about eliminating that clear and present danger.

Incalculable damage will occur over the next four years, and it will take my kids’ entire lifetimes for us to dig back out of the hole we’ve put ourselves in. Okay, we know that. So let’s be clear-eyed and look at the world that is. I…am weirdly hopeful.

Data on trends across the globe show that inflation was high everywhere in the wake of pandemic-driven supply chain disruptions. The same data shows that incumbent parties lost major voter shares everywhere, in every election, all year. At the same time, exit polls show that the Republican coalition did not actually change much from 2020 to 2024. Trump objectively wasn’t a stronger candidate than before. There wasn’t a weakness in the Democratic campaign. There wasn’t even a weakness in polling. The deck was just stacked — with conditions set up by an underlying global susceptibility to shocks, reverberating through our interconnected economy for four years and counting, all in a disinformation environment where the misinformed drove the election result. People were frustrated, and it’s not clear the Democrats could have beaten the anti-incumbent headwinds.

(This is not meant to excuse people who “just wanted to send a message on the economy” from the fact that they necessarily overlooked Trump’s disregard of laws, his demonstrated misunderstanding of our system of government, his bullying attitude, his personal immorality, his hostile bigotry, or his odious social stances. Maybe they did so out of ignorance, in which case they were irresponsible about voting; or maybe they did so on purpose, in which case they were, and are, malicious.)

But I think the Democratic strategy now — beyond the day-to-day labor of backstopping a tilt into autocracy — should be clear. Let’s assume the next administration enacts everything from the Project 2025 playbook. That stuff is intensely unpopular and will create more major economic shocks, not to mention the countless immoral cruelties. The “Day 1” promises made during this campaign are likely to lead to higher inflation, if not an outright recession. So the path is simple: from now to 2028, make Republicans own everything. Swing back into power after they overextend. Then, use the clean slate provided by Project 2025’s scouring of government to offer a progressive counterargument that actually addresses the conditions of the working and middle classes in this country.

This is not to say there won’t be hard fights between then and now. I fully expect Republican legislators in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to put forward acts saying, “We are making an administrative change to how our state assigns Presidential Electors. They are now all awarded to the Republican candidate who receives the most votes.” We are in an extremely challenging disinformation environment, where most Americans’ news sources depend on the whims of the ultrarich across the globe. There will be difficult tactical threats, bigotry, and violence that the next administration will create on a day to day level, not to mention drastic economic hardships. I grieve for the freedom, values, and capabilities that we’ve just lost. I think others have written plenty about that — here are some of the essays I’ve found helpful, for one reason or another:

• Teri Kanefield on the connections between authoritarianism, the ability to grasp complexity, and the experience of Pinochet’s Chile
• Waging Nonviolence’s ways to mentally prepare for a coming autocratic administration
• A.R. Moxon on how an opposition to fascist rule must differentiate itself from the devil’s bargains the autocracy relies on

Given all that, let’s say the coming administration is just as bad as it announces it will be. People are going to hate it. So I see an opportunity. If they’re going to tear the house down, we can build it back up. Better.

Let’s see the progressive answer to Project 2025.

This will necessarily involve some flavor of restoring things back to normal. There will have to be some clawing back of lost fundamental rights. But, in the vacuum left by eliminating government departments and burning regulations, let’s see the case for progressive solutions to problems. This should be easy: when polled head-to-head, Democratic policies have been more popular than Republican policies for decades.

If they repeal Obamacare, kneecap Medicare and Medicaid, and leave a Wild West of predatory health care middleman companies, let’s see the plan for a new single-payer health system. We can look at every country that has such a system for ideas. They’re all better and cheaper than what we have now.

If they cut income, corporate, and capital gains taxes to benefit a New Gilded Age oligarchy, let’s see the plan to go back to a Reagan-era tax code, or even earlier — when America was the economic engine of the world. Evidently the economy didn’t suffer or lack for innovation when the top marginal income tax rate was 90%.

If they deregulate corporate activity, let’s see the case for vigorous antitrust enforcement.

If they collapse Social Security, food stamps, and other welfare programs, let’s see the plan to implement universal basic income. There are plenty of successful pilot programs out there now!

If they pump guns into our streets, let’s see a requirement for proof of liability insurance with every purchase of ammunition.

If they deport tens of millions of workers while pining about declining US population, let’s see a plan to make legal immigration easy, as it was for much of our history.

If they try to make gerrymandering permanent, let’s restore the House of Representatives to its original ratio of representatives to population.

If they militarize the police, let’s see a new structure where public safety departments rely more on paramedics, social workers, and mental health interventions to perform rigorous threat reduction.

If they propagandize and defund schools, let’s see a renewal of public education.

If they muzzle scientists, let’s see a plan for investment in American science and technology.

Let’s see public campaign financing, and all other money out of politics forever.

Let’s see reform of the judiciary, to prevent a partisan capture from ever again declaring itself immune to the law.

In short, let’s show that while Republican rule sets out to enrich a very few by exacerbating chaos, there are clear policy ideas to increase participation in our society, culture, economy, and government. Let’s show that one party is out to solve problems while the other causes them before our eyes.

When Vice President Harris moved up to the top of her election ticket, I recall there were a few news and analysis articles about how her new role would fit with her unsuccessful run for the Presidency four years earlier. One position I remember reading was that she’d struggled to articulate her values, other than saying that she was a problem-solver. The traditional news media seemed to think that this was a vague statement that told us nothing useful about Harris or how she might govern.

This election, more than anything else, is about what vision we, as a country and society, have for the role of government in our civic life. We should solve problems is exactly a statement of my values on the subject.

Harris’ opponent presents an entirely different set of values for the role of government in our lives. (Besides his immediately disqualifying attributes and behaviors.) He thinks government should pick winners and losers. Power exists for the sake of the powerful. This is why the ultrarich are cozying up to him: they figure that, if they establish positive personal feelings with him, they’ll be among the winners he chooses. The end result is a Russia-style oligarchy, enforced by the government choosing winners and losers in the most invasive ways throughout all of society: between political parties, media organizations, religions, genders, sexual behaviors, art, and culture.

This attracts people who imagine they’ll be picked as winners. I always have to remind myself that fascism is appealing: it says, in what seems to be a complex world with myriad problems, things are actually simple: the problems are Their fault. We just have to get rid of Them. It’s a classic bully’s attitude. Ironically, this feels good. It makes people feel like they have a handle on their problems. It can make people feel like they are pulling together to support their community. They can understand things easily. And they know what the solutions are: punch down, at Them.

It’s extremely Sith.

But does this actually address any problems? NO! A brief glance at history is all it takes to see that fact. A brief application of critical thinking is enough to reveal that there is no connection between violence to Them and any relevant change in the “winners'” lives.

Most unfortunately, it’s extremely hard to dig a society out of the deep hole that results.

I have a different vision. We should look at the world as it is, carefully assess the relevant options, and choose those that are likely to be most effective at generating the outcomes we want. Government should be a creative effort to move the world towards a better state.

Let’s solve problems! This is Harris and Walz. Let’s find out what is making our country so unequal, so divided, so difficult to deal with. Then let’s make targeted policy changes that help reduce those problems. Let’s invest in education. Let’s break up oligopolies. Let’s get money out of politics. Let’s make our health system more like the more successful and cheaper ones elsewhere in the world. Let’s intervene with those who fetishize violence before they before a problem, and make it harder for them to act out against others. Let’s prevent a changing climate from ruining our way of life. Let’s repair things that are broken, clean things that are dirty, and upgrade things that are old. For any of the Democratic Party’s blindnesses or failings, for any incrementalism or compromise, for all the difficulty of conveying a pithy emotional message in an increasingly complex world, they are the party that has an interest in solving problems.

While I strongly believe that this election presents no option at all, I think that Vice President Harris would be a strong candidate against any alternative — precisely because she’s a problem-solver. I’m an engineer: solving problems is part of my identity, and “we should solve problems” is exactly the kind of core value I can get behind.

Vote for Harris in 2024!

Now that the 2024 US Presidential election is determined as a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I will say this:

In 2016, I never considered voting for Trump because I thought he was an ignorant, bigoted bully who lied about everything and was only running for President for his own personal gain.

In 2020, I never considered voting for Trump because he governed as an ignorant, bigoted bully who lied about everything and used the office of President for his own personal gain.

In 2024, it is now documented that Trump is a rapist, a fraudster, and an openly anti-Constitutional fascist who instigated an attempt to overthrow the US Government and suborned a major political party to the goal of ensuring that he escapes any accountability.

I want America to count my vote in 2028, and therefore, there is no other choice than to vote for Biden in 2024. Do I wish the situation was different? Of course! I’m a policy-minded, solutions-oriented person and I want to weigh different options to solve problems against each other. But anyone sitting things out or writing in someone more aligned with their principles is making an unviable choice that very well might condemn us all.

It deeply worries me that the media continues to feign equivalence and that self-described conservatives aren’t out on the streets putting their conservatism into practice by vehemently campaigning for Biden.

One of the US Congress’ items of business for the end of the year is passing the National Defense Authorization Act. This funds the US military budget, and the act always draws immense bipartisan support, even despite a few ancillary culture-war issues injected into it this year. Here are three things about this act I wish citizens and journalists were more aware of.

One, US military spending is scored on an annual basis — unlike in any other area of policy funding, where the Congressional Budget Office scores spending and revenue over a 10 year timeframe. What this means, practically for us citizens, is that when you see that the NDAA authorized a military budget of $860 billion when the Democrats were advocating for a $2 trillion infrastructure investment not so long ago, those aren’t really the numbers to compare. You should multiply the military budget by 10 to put them on the same footing: $2 trillion infrastructure investment vs. $8.6 trillion military budget, both over 10 years.

Two, there’s a constitutional reason why Congress has to re-authorize military spending every single year. The Framers, fresh off living through an experience where their own government had an army oppressing its own citizens, wanted to build a system of protection into the US Constitution to prevent their new government from being able to do the same. Traditionally, 1700s European governments did not maintain “standing armies,” instead they raised armies only when needed for defense (or attack), and sent the soldiers back to their civilian lives when the conflict was over. It was extremely unusual for the British government to be keeping soldiers active all the time. The Framers viewed a government keeping a standing army in peacetime as having only one purpose: to use force against the civilian populace, as they experienced in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. So, they built what they thought was a poison pill into the US Constitution: they forced Congress to vote every year to re-authorize the military. Surely enraged citizens would oust any Senator or Representative dumb enough to keep voting for a military in the next election? This worked for a while: there was no “US Army” until the Civil War; the country relied on individual state militias for its defense.

Three, in its entire history, the Pentagon has only ever conducted one financial audit, in 2018, which it failed. I bet when I say “they failed an audit,” you imagine that they couldn’t fully match up expenditures against incomes on all their balance sheets — you know, something down in the details. But, in fact, the problem was more that when auditors asked Pentagon departments for their incomes and expenditures, the answer they got was, “We don’t understand the question. You expected us to keep track of what and what?” The Pentagon apparently has no concept of the idea that it’s funded by US taxpayers and is supposed to be a good steward of that money. Worse, the Congressmembers and Senators who represent us are unwilling to force corrections to the US military system, because of its role propping up jobs in their states and because they fear their opponents would attack them as not sufficiently supportive of “the troops” if they don’t pour endless piles of cash into military development programs.

I worked on military programs for a portion of my career. Once, assigned a duplicative, mind-numbing analysis project that nobody could ever express any purpose for, I decided to exercise my creative abilities by coding up some labor-saving tools so that I could accomplish the purposeless work quickly and then devote more of my time to more interesting and valuable projects. However, I then got in trouble with my boss for not spending the full amount of hours I’d been assigned on the project. When I pointed out that I’d accomplished the required work, my boss told me that the most important thing for our project was to spend all the (taxpayer) money we’d been assigned that year, because otherwise we’d get less money the next year. I quit that job.

Congress could probably cut the US military budget in half without affecting troop levels or readiness at all. The current funding levels are unconscionably wasteful in peacetime. And reducing them would do more to reduce the size of government than any other ideas anyone has put forward in my lifetime.