The Hartmann Report - When Harvard, one of America’s oldest and most revered institutions of higher learning, stands defiant as the federal government freezes billions in funding simply because it refuses to knuckle under to authoritarian demands — like gutting DEI programs and turning faculty into immigration informants — we’re no longer playing the usual game of politics.

This is the open throttling of academic freedom, part of a larger, deliberate campaign to silence dissent, centralize power, and erase democratic norms.

We’ve seen this playbook before in other countries — but now it’s being run right here, in the land that once proudly called itself the world’s beacon of liberty.

Democracy doesn’t die in darkness, as the saying goes; it suffocates in broad daylight.

Americans are witnessing an unprecedented assault on the very foundations of our democratic experiment, orchestrated with a precision that would make authoritarian strongmen worldwide nod in approval.

Senator Chris Murphy has raised alarm bells about what he describes as a methodical attack on American institutions that are supposed to keep government accountable to its citizens. By his account, the strategy isn’t dramatic coups or burning parliaments; that’s not how modern democracies perish. Instead, they’re slowly dismantled through the calculated erosion of accountability mechanisms.

History provides a disturbing playbook, and we’re watching it unfold right now here in America. Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğan didn’t need tanks in the streets. They understood that the process is multi-part but straightforward:

— Legitimize political violence,
— Capture the media,
— Intimidate lawyers,
— Install corrupt leaders within regulatory and police agencies,
— Disappear first minorities and later opposition leaders,
— Silence universities, and
— Starve opposition movements by denying their nonprofit status and funding.

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