Politics
Pro-Palestinian activists prepare to rally at Democratic convention in Chicago
He walked down a side street, eyes darting here and there, wondering how it would unfold.
“What kind of fences will the police have? Will they bring dogs?” Hatem Abudayyeh asked. He stopped in the shadow of the United Center, home of the NBA’s Bulls and the NHL’s Blackhawks and a draw for tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who are expected to protest against U.S. support for Israel at the Democratic National Convention this month. “I hope they don’t militarize it,” he said. “The first statement the police made was about mass arrests. They’ve backed off a little. But they’re trying to intimidate us.”
The son of Palestinian immigrants, Abudayyeh is one of the march’s organizers and has long been at the center of civil rights protests. He was investigated by the FBI more than a decade ago — no charges were brought — and in 2017 he helped block traffic at Chicago O’Hare International Airport over then-President Trump’s Muslim travel ban. The demonstration he is preparing comes as this onetime city of stockyards and slaughterhouses hopes it can avoid the chaos and police brutality that marked the antiwar protests that engulfed the Democrats’ convention here in 1968.
Hatem Abudayyeh, a longtime Palestinian activist and organizer, is preparing for a march on the Democratic National Convention at Chicago’s United Center this month.
(Alex Garcia / For The Times)
“Palestine is this generation’s Vietnam War,” Abudayyeh said, noting that more than 39,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, have been killed by Israeli forces since Hamas attacked Israel in October. “We’re unabashed about the Palestinian right to self-defense to end Israeli genocide. We have momentum. I don’t think we’ll lose any steam with [President] Biden out of the race. Kamala Harris and other Democrats are still backing Israel.”
Abudayyeh’s parents emigrated from the Israeli-occupied West Bank village of Al Jib and settled on Chicago’s North Side in the 1960s. Both were activists and community leaders, who on Sundays drove their son to Arab neighborhoods on the South Side so he would know his lineage and learn that social change comes from sacrifice and solidarity. That lesson has kept him on the front lines of hundreds of demonstrations. But few as consequential as the national stage he and his compatriots from more than 150 organizations will find themselves on when an energized Democratic Party arrives here with the expectation of nominating Harris for president.
“I don’t feel there’s anything to lose,” said Abudayyeh, 53, a large man with glimmers of gray in his beard who calls himself an “anti-imperialist” and sounds at times like a provocateur from a long-ago newsreel. “We’ve already dealt with political repression. We know the feds are here and will be crawling up and down Chicagoland.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters chant at University of Chicago police officers as a student encampment is dismantled in May.
(Charles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press)
The Chicago Police Department has been training to de-escalate threats of unrest at the convention and is calling in hundreds of law enforcement officers from across the state for backup. The department — just weeks after a Fourth of July weekend that saw more than 100 shootings citywide — is under intensifying pressure over security after the assassination attempt on Trump at a Pennsylvania rally last month. This comes after a 2021 report by the city’s Office of Inspector General found the department was marred by confusion and intelligence failures during violence related to the George Floyd protests a year earlier.
The police will “not only allow everyone who comes here to express their 1st Amendment rights, but we will protect their rights while doing it,” department Supt. Larry Snelling told reporters recently. “What we will not tolerate is vandalism to our city. What we will not tolerate is violence.”
Activists at the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression prepare protest signs for demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention.
(Alex Garcia / For The Times)
The overall goal of the protest — organizers have condemned the Democratic Party as being “a tool of billionaires and corporations” — is ending U.S. military aid to Israel and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. That same demand ignited demonstrations that shook college campuses in the spring. But the protesters in the March on the DNC 2024 come from many causes, including immigrant, reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, anti-racist networks and those seeking to stop police repression in minority communities.
“We are in unconditional solidarity with the Palestine liberation movement,” said Frank Chapman, a mentor to Abudayyeh and field organizer and education director of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. “Our political destinies are entwined. All those billions of dollars going to Israel could be used to build up America and reverse the injustices against Black Americans. You can’t have a war on poverty and at the same time perpetuate genocide overseas.”
Activists stapled together protest signs on a recent evening at the alliance’s South Side headquarters, where a picture of Malcolm X hung on the wall, and outside, not far from the L train, a man carried an open bottle in a crumpled bag and wandered beneath a sign for Living Hope Church and a lawyer’s billboard that read, “Call Top Dog.” The activists ranged in age from students to a gray-haired man; they moved swiftly and quietly stacking signs near the windows like a small army waiting to advance.
New York delegates protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War on the floor of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
(Getty Images)
“It feels like we’re building something,” Adrian Gallegos, a computer science major at the University of Illinois Chicago, said next to rows of “Stop Police Crimes” signs. The air was sharp with the spirit of rebellion, as if one were listening to Jimi Hendrix while eavesdropping on the 1960s anti-establishment musings of Black Panther deputy chairman Fred Hampton or Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman.
“The system has been exploiting and oppressing people for 400 years,” said Kobi Guillory, co-chair of the Chicago alliance. “It’s inevitable it will crumble under the weight of its own contradictions.”
The 1968 peace movement “was a mostly white-led movement. This is not,” said Chapman, a revered figure in the city’s civil rights scene for half a century. “The struggle for peace today is more multi-ethnic and multi-international. It is broader and deeper than the antiwar movement around Vietnam. This will lead to a political realignment for people of color and working-class white people who want change.”
Abudayyeh sees similarities to and contrasts with 56 years ago. The 1968 convention followed Democrat incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to seek another term; this year Biden dropped out of the race. Then and now, the Democrats were divided over unpopular wars. But the Israel-Hamas war is different from the Vietnam War, which consumed the American imagination for years, killing more than 58,000 U.S. service members and an estimated 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese. Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip is supported by U.S. military aid, but Washington has not declared war, and no American soldiers are dying.
What’s more, the politics of Chicago and the country are not the same as in 1968, when the nightly news echoed with reports of rioting and the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Back then, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was known as “the Boss,” ordered a clampdown on dissent, and police attacked protesters with billy clubs and tear gas, leaving hundreds arrested or injured. Current Mayor Brandon Johnson is a progressive and onetime union organizer who has supported activists and in June ordered a task force to study making reparations to Black residents.
The protests at this year’s convention will confront a troubled and distracted land. The assassination attempt against Trump, Biden’s departure, the rise of Harris and battles over abortion, inflation, book banning, housing prices and other issues have left many Americans inward-looking and dispirited about the future. But Abudayyeh said the injustices against Palestinians are visceral enough to force Democrats, including Harris, who has been more forceful than Biden in criticizing Israel for creating a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip, to take notice of the marchers’ demands at the convention.
Chicago police officers forcefully disperse demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 29, 1968.
(Michael Boyer / Associated Press)
“Yes,” he said, “the timing is right.”
The other day, Abudayyeh, wearing a face mask after a bout with COVID-19, drove beyond his office at the Arab American Action Network, where he is executive director, to an Arab neighborhood of sweet shops, jewelry stores and beauty academies. The streets and swirling dialects connected him to Palestinians, like his deceased parents, who emigrated here after Middle East wars and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
“They always wanted to return home, but [Palestinians are] now an established presence in Chicago,” said Abudayyeh, who has a daughter, and is also national chair for the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. “It took my parents 25 years to buy a house and give up on the dream of going back.”
The conversation, as often with Abudayyeh, who seems to be in many places at once, turned in a new direction. Protest organizers, he said, have been in a months-long struggle with the city on a route that would allow demonstrators to march close to the United Center.
Hatem Abudayyeh speaks in downtown Chicago in January 2009, protesting against Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip.
(Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press)
“We’re making progress,” he said. “When we first filed for a permit, the city wanted to keep us four miles away from the center.” The new plan allows protesters to gather at and march from Union Park, several blocks from the site. “We’re within sight and sound,” he said, “but they’re not giving us a long enough route to accommodate tens of thousands of people.”
Abudayyeh is accustomed to the reach of the state. Two years after working with antiwar activists at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., the FBI raided his home, seizing computers, files, books and documents. His bank accounts were frozen. The sweep was part of an investigation into about two dozen activists in the Midwest suspected of supporting international terrorist organizations. Abudayyeh was targeted over helping arrange delegations to Gaza and the West Bank of activists opposed to Israeli occupation.
He said he had no connection to militant groups. Months earlier, he had been invited to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing of the White House, for an outreach meeting for Arab Americans. Activists and community leaders came to his defense. He refused to answer a grand jury subpoena, and more than two years later his confiscated materials were returned and no charges were filed.
“This is a massive escalation of the attacks on people that do Palestine support work in this country and antiwar work,” he said at the time. “We’re not going to stop speaking out against U.S. support of Israel’s violations of the Palestinian people.”
Abudayyeh coordinated the defense committee in 2017 for Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian activist imprisoned in Israel for her involvement in two bombings in Jerusalem in 1969. Above, Odeh is joined by supporters outside a federal courthouse in Detroit in 2017.
(Carlos Osorio / Associated Press)
Abudayyeh’s statements and sentiments are often provocative in an age when some protesters against the Gaza war have been assailed as antisemitic or for espousing terrorism for their support of Hamas. He has called Hamas “a legitimate resistance force” and has said “the real terrorists are the governments and military forces of the U.S. and Israel.” When Iran retaliated against Israel with missiles and drones in April, Abudayyeh broke the news during an activist meeting, where a few in the crowd cheered.
In 2017, Abudayyeh coordinated the defense committee for Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian activist imprisoned in Israel for her involvement in two bombings in Jerusalem in 1969. Odeh said she confessed after being tortured by the Israeli military. She was released in a prisoner swap a decade later and eventually moved to Chicago, where she was associate director of the Arab American Action Network. She became an American citizen but was deported after pleading guilty to not disclosing her criminal history to immigration officials.
Abudayyeh’s activism has been ingrained since childhood. His father, who worked for an insurance company, was a co-founder of the Arab Community Center, and his mother was Chicago chapter president for the Union of Palestinian Women’s Assns. He attended UCLA in the early 1990s, studying biology and English and hoping to join a progressive campus culture. Instead, he said, he found a mostly white and well-to-do population that was uninterested in activism, except for Latino students who taught him about the Chicano movement.
Abudayyeh stands outside the office of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago in 2011.
(Charles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press)
“I saw that social change wasn’t going to happen at UCLA,” he said, noting that that was no longer the case, given the university’s pro-Palestinian protests in recent months. He left campus and returned to Chicago, where he coached high school basketball and was increasingly drawn to civil rights issues and working with the Palestinian community. In 2002, he traveled to Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank as part of a program to teach young Arab and Palestinian Americans and others about the Israeli occupation so they could return to the U.S. to help organize for Palestinian independence.
“I came back from that trip transformed,” he said. “I think for a while I had felt diaspora guilt. I realized I had to commit more of my life to ending the occupation. I owed it to my parents and my grandparents and cousins of mine who did not have the opportunity I had to grow up in safety and security. They faced bullets and repression.”
The morning after his drive to the Arab neighborhood, Abudayyeh parked near Union Park and walked toward the United Center in west Chicago. He approached from a side street, wondering how close he could get during the convention. He talked logistics and spoke of the St. Paul Principles for protest — put together by activists at the 2008 Republican convention — that call for solidarity and opposing “any state repression of dissent including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence.”
The parking lots were empty. A local film crew was shooting video. “I know the camera guys,” he said. “The reporters don’t always come to our protests. But the photo guys do. They know me.” He turned and walked back toward Union Park. He mentioned that his father never finished college; he had children and relatives back in Al Jib to support. It was that way for many, he said, turning past First Baptist Church, his jeans frayed and cuffed, his T-shirt blowing in a hot breeze.
Marchers, he said, would be arriving from across the country in buses, trains and caravans. He predicted they would fill the park and swell into the streets. There were only weeks left to prepare. The sun was high and he was sweating. He pulled down his COVID mask and took a breath, disappearing into the shadows at the edge of the park and driving home for a few hours’ rest.
“I don’t feel there’s anything to lose,” Abudayyeh said about the upcoming protest in Chicago. “We’ve already dealt with political repression. We know the feds are here and will be crawling up and down Chicagoland.”
(Alex Garcia / For The Times)
It is one of the more baffling story lines of Donald J. Trump’s second term. The president has said he wants to personally visit Fort Knox to ensure that no one has stolen the government-owned gold bars that are stored there.
Mr. Trump has not explained why any gold might be missing from the nation’s heavily guarded reserves. His own Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has insisted that there is no reason to worry. “All the gold is there,” Mr. Bessent emphatically told Bloomberg in February, at one point looking directly into a camera and addressing the American people.
Mr. Trump’s interest in the gold reserves has been largely overshadowed by his family’s involvement in various cryptocurrency ventures, which has raised ethical concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
The president has a long history of embracing conspiracy theories, and is known to be a fan of golden and gilded things. It is difficult to say what exactly is behind his recent fanning of unfounded fears about Fort Knox, which have been floating around since at least the 1970s.
A White House spokesperson did not respond when asked to comment for this story.
What is certain is that gold is on many investors’ minds these days. Generally seen as a safe place to park wealth during tumultuous periods, the precious metal has risen to record prices recently, in part because of the global economic uncertainty that the president’s shifting tariff policies caused.
Some of Mr. Trump’s allies, including his eldest son, serve as pitchmen for gold investment companies that advertise heavily on their podcasts or radio shows.
And some of them have been using fresh concerns about Fort Knox to make a profit.
The Gold Conspiracy That Wouldn’t Go Away
If nothing else, Mr. Trump’s Fort Knox obsession has resurfaced one of the deeper cuts in the American conspiracy theory catalog.
One reason the government holds onto such large stores of gold is to confer a sense of financial stability, even though the country moved off the gold standard in the 20th century. According to the United States Mint, 147.3 million ounces of gold, about half of the government’s stash, is held at Fort Knox.
The Kentucky facility, known formally as the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, almost never allows visitors and is kept under famously heavy lock and key — an inaccessibility that may explain much of the intrigue around it.
One of the main early proponents of the idea that gold was missing from Fort Knox was a lawyer named Peter Beter, who earned a modicum of notoriety in the 1970s by spreading dark theories in a mail-order audio cassette series. Among other things, Mr. Beter believed that “organic robotoids,” controlled by Bolsheviks, had infiltrated the federal government.
By 1974, concerns about the gold reserves grew so intense that a congressional delegation and a few news outlets, including The New York Times, were invited to Fort Knox for a rare inspection. A reporter for The Times described the effect of seeing a vault 6 feet wide and 12 feet deep, stacked with 36,236 glistening gold bars, as “awesome.”
Another wave of concern crested in 2011, when then-Representative Ron Paul, the Texas Republican, introduced a bill calling for an inventory of the reserves. At a subcommittee hearing, Mr. Paul said people had become worried that “the gold had been secretly shipped out of Fort Knox and sold.” He added, “And, still others believe that the bars at Fort Knox are actually gold-plated tungsten.”
U.S. House of Representatives
The inspector general of the Treasury Department at the time, Eric Thorson, told Mr. Paul that audits were performed yearly, with “no exceptions of any consequence.”
U.S. House of Representatives
More recently, Mr. Trump’s first-term Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, had a chance to check on the gold in August 2017, with Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, in tow. Photos were taken of the men among the gold bars.
“Glad gold is safe!” Mr. Mnuchin wrote on Twitter, now known as X.
Questions About Ft. Knox Bubble Up Again
The latest concerns appear to have taken off on Feb. 14, when the website ZeroHedge, which occasionally promotes conspiracy theories, tagged Elon Musk in a post on X. The post asked him to make sure the gold at Fort Knox is there.
“Surely it’s reviewed at least every year?” Mr. Musk replied.
“It should be. It isn’t,” ZeroHedge responded. (Mr. Bessent, the Treasury secretary, would later say that the gold is still audited annually.)
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican and the son of Ron Paul, chimed in, calling for an audit. “Let’s do it.”
The next day, Alex Jones, the “InfoWars” conspiracy theorist, said on his talk show that when he was a child, his great-uncle told him some of the gold was missing, and that the “deep state” was involved in the “crime of the century.”
Mr. Musk responded to this post as well. “It would be cool to do a live video walkthrough of Fort Knox!” he wrote.
Then came Glenn Beck, the conservative radio and TV host, who posted an open letter to Mr. Trump the next day, asking if he could take a camera crew to Fort Knox to “restore faith in our financial system.”
The chatter about the gold reserves was growing louder.
By Feb. 20, Mr. Trump was telling a press gaggle on Air Force One that he planned to go to Fort Knox to “make sure the gold is there.”
How the Conspiracy Theory Has Been Integrated Into Sales Pitches for… Gold
Since then, the idea that the government’s gold reserves may have gone missing has been integrated into the sales pitches of companies that trade in gold coins and gold investment accounts. The companies advertise heavily on Trump-friendly TV and internet shows.
InfoWars, The Dan Bongino Show, The Ben Shapiro Show, Triggered with Don Jr.
A number of “gold I.R.A.” companies have suggested that a future audit of Fort Knox could determine that gold is missing, setting off a crisis among Americans about the stability of the economy. Amid such chaos, the companies argue, privately held gold would be a lucrative safe haven for investors.
One of the companies, Birch Gold Group, is endorsed by the president’s eldest son and bills itself as “Donald Trump Jr’s gold company.” A recent article on Birch Gold’s website stated that the idea of an “empty Fort Knox” had gone “from conspiracy theory to mainstream concern.” A discovery that gold was missing from Fort Knox, the article stated, would be the “quickest way down for the U.S. dollar.”
“It is only those without physical gold exposure that feel the need to panic, perhaps with good reason, about the greenback’s admittedly dismal prospects,” states the article, which is accompanied by an offer for a “FREE gold IRA info kit.”
The younger Mr. Trump lauded his father’s plans to visit Fort Knox in a Feb. 24 episode of his online talk show, on which he regularly makes pitches for Birch Gold. “If it’s empty,” he said, “I would imagine there’s hell to pay.”
On Feb. 27, Lear Capital, a gold company that Mr. Beck promotes, posted, “As calls for a Fort Knox audit grow louder, investors should stay informed and consider their exposure to gold as part of a diversified portfolio.”
On Instagram, Rogan O’Handley, a conservative influencer who goes by the handle DC Draino, posted a plug for Donald Trump Jr.’s preferred gold company.
“If Fort Knox is empty, do you know what Gold prices will do?,” Mr. O’Handley wrote. “Get a **Free** info packet from Birch Gold – LINK IN MY BIO – to learn more about @birchgold’s tax-advantaged precious metals retirement plans.”
On another section of Birch Gold’s website, a “Message from Donald Trump Jr.” raised the possibility that his father’s administration could “revalue America’s gold reserves on the national balance sheet from their outdated book value of $42” — the price per ounce the government assigns for bookkeeping purposes — “to current market prices.”
This, he wrote, “could cause a surge in gold prices.” He added, “The potential upside for gold investors is substantial.” A gold I.R.A., he added, would be a great way to benefit. He did not mention that Mr. Bessent had publicly stated that he had no plans to revalue the gold reserves.
Above the message was a digitally altered photo of the president at a desk, showing off an important-looking signed document, a wall of gold bricks behind him.
Mr. Trump has still not visited Fort Knox.
The Trump administration is asking all federal agencies to find ways to terminate all federal contracts with Havard University amid an ongoing standoff over foreign students’ records at the Ivy League school.
The General Services Administration is planning to send a letter Tuesday instructing all federal agencies to review the estimated $100 million remaining in federal contracts with Harvard and potentially “find alternative vendors,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by Fox News.
The remaining federal contracts include a $527,000 agreement for Harvard ManageMentor Licenses, which was awarded in September 2021, a $523,000 contract for Harvard to conduct research on energy drinks and the health outcomes of other dietary intakes overtime, which was awarded in August 2023, and a $39,000 contract for gradate student research services, which was award in April 2025, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News.
TRUMP ACCUSES HARVARD OF BEING ‘VERY SLOW’ TO TURN OVER FOREIGN STUDENT INFO
Protesters outside Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., April 25, 2025. (JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
The New York Times first reported about a draft of the letter.
In the letter, GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum said Harvard “continues to engage in race discrimination, including in its admissions process and in other areas of student life.”
He said Harvard has shown “no indication” of reforming its admissions process, despite the Supreme Court ruling that university’s long-standing policy discriminates on the basis of race.
For applicants in the top academic decile, admissions rates were 56% for African-Americans, 31% for Hispanics, 15% for Whites and 13% for Asians, according to the lawsuit. Gruenbaum said Harvard “now has to offer a remedial math course, which has been described as ‘middle school math’ for incoming freshmen.” He said that was a direct result “of employing discriminatory factors, instead of merit, in admission decisions.”
Gruenbaum also cited possible violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 regarding Harvard’s hiring, promotion, compensation, and other personnel-related actions. He said discriminatory practices “have been exposed at the Harvard Law Review, where internal documents that have been made public detail the pervasive and explicit racial discrimination in the publication’s article selection and editor appointment process.”
“GSA is also aware of recent events at Harvard University involving anti-Semitic action that suggest the institution has a disturbing lack of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students,” Gruenbaum wrote. “Harvard’s ongoing inaction in the face of repeated and severe harassment and targeting of its students has at times grounded day-to-day campus operations to a halt, deprived Jewish students of learning and research opportunities to which they are entitled, and profoundly alarmed the general public.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Harvard University for comment Tuesday.
President Donald Trump speaks during the Memorial Day wreath-laying in Arlington National Cemetery on May 26, 2025. (Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
Harvard has already sued in federal court seeking the restoration of about $3.2 billion in federal grant funding already frozen by the administration since last month.
In a separate suit, the university was granted a temporary restraining order on Friday that temporarily blocks the government from canceling the school’s certification in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. The program permits the university to host international students with F-1 or J-1 visas to study in the U.S. Harvard said the revocation would impact more than 7,000 visa holders – more than a quarter of its student body.
A brief federal court hearing was held Tuesday morning in federal court in Boston on the matter. A judge scheduled another hearing for Thursday to allow both parties more time to present their case.
President Donald Trump said in a TRUTH Social post on Monday that he is “considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land.”
“What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!” he wrote.
JUDGE TEMPORARILY PAUSES TRUMP MOVE TO CANCEL HARVARD STUDENT VISA POLICY AFTER LAWSUIT
The president also accused Harvard of being “very slow” in handing over documents about foreign students and of having “shopped around and found the absolute best judge (for them).”
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said last week that she revoked Harvard’s certification after the university refused to comply with multiple requests for information on foreign students while “perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies, and employs racist ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ policies.”
A pedestrian with an umbrella walks by Harvard Yard as a Nor’easter hits the New England area in Cambridge, MA on May 22, 2025. (Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The requested records include any and all audio or video footage in Harvard’s possession regarding threats to other students or university personnel, “deprivation of rights” of other classmates or university personnel, and “dangerous or violent activity, whether on or off campus” by a nonimmigrant student enrolled at Harvard in the last five years.
Noem is also asking for any and all disciplinary records and audio or video footage of any protest activity involving nonimmigrant students. DHS said that Harvard’s responses so far have been insufficient.
Fox News’ Sarah Tobianski contributed to this report.
PALM DESERT — They came to the baking desert to honor one of their own, a political professional, a legend and a throwback to a time when gatherings like this one — a companionable assembly of Republicans, Democrats and the odd newspaper columnist — weren’t such a rare and noteworthy thing.
They came to bid a last farewell to Stuart Spencer, who died in January at age 97.
They came to Palm Desert on a 98-degree spring day to do the things that political pros do when they gather: drink and laugh and swap stories of campaigns and elections past.
And they showed, with their affection and goodwill and mutual regard, how much the world, and the world of politics, have changed.
“This is how politics used to be,” Democrat Harvey Englander said after sidling up to Republican Joel Fox. The two met through their work with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., a spawn of the Proposition 13 taxpayer revolt, circa 1978.
“We had different views of how government should work,” Englander said as Fox nodded his assent. “But we agreed government should work.”
Spencer was a campaign strategist and master tactician who helped usher into office generations of GOP leaders, foremost among them Ronald Reagan. The former president and California governor was a Hollywood has-been until Spencer came along and turned him into something compelling and new, something they called a “citizen-politician.”
Hanging, inevitably, over the weekend’s celebration was the current occupant of the Oval Office, a boiling black cloud compared to the radiant and sunshiny Reagan. Spencer was no fan of Donald Trump, and he let it be known.
“A demagogue and opportunist,” he called him, chafing, in particular, at Trump’s comparisons of himself to Reagan.
“He would be sick,” Spencer said, guessing the recoil the nation’s 40th president would have had if he’d witnessed the crass and corrupt behavior of the 45th and 47th one.
Many of those at the weekend event are similarly out of step with today’s Republican Party and, especially, Trump’s bomb-the-opposition-to-rubble approach to politics. But most preferred not to express those sentiments for the record.
George Steffes, who served as Reagan’s legislative director in Sacramento, allowed as how the loudly and proudly uncouth Trump was “180 degrees” from the politely mannered Reagan. In five years, Steffes said, he never once heard the governor raise his voice, belittle a person or “treat a human being with anything but respect.”
Fox, with a seeming touch of wounded pride, suggested Trump could use “some pushback from some of the ‘old thinking’ of the Stu Spencer/Ronald Reagan era.”
A flag flown over the U.S. Capitol in Spencer’s honor was displayed at his memorial celebration, along with White House schedules from the 1984 campaign.
(H.D. Palmer)
Behind them, playing on a big-screen TV, were images from Spencer’s filled-to-the-bursting life.
Old black-and-white snapshots — an apple-cheeked Navy sailor, a little boy — alternated with photographs of Spencer smiling alongside Reagan and President Ford, standing with Dick Cheney and George H.W. Bush, appearing next to Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Wilson, a spry 91, was among the 150 or so who turned out to remember Spencer. He was given a place of honor, seated with his wife, Gayle, directly in front of the podium.)
In a brief presentation, Spencer’s son, Steve, remembered his father as someone who emphasized caring and compassion, as well as hard work and the importance of holding fast to one’s principles. “Pop’s word,” he said, “was gold.”
Spencer’s grandson, Sam, a Republican political consultant in Washington, choked up as he recounted how “Papa Stu” not only helped make history but never stinted on his family, driving four hours to attend Sam’s 45-minute soccer games and staying up well past bedtime to get after-action reports on his grandson’s campaigns.
Stu Spencer, he said, was a voracious reader and owned “one of the greatest political minds in history.”
Outside the golf resort, a stiff wind kicked up, ruffling the palm trees and sending small waves across a water hazard on the 18th green — an obvious metaphor for these blustery and unsettled times.
Fred Karger first met Spencer in 1976 when his partner, Bill Roberts, hired Karger to work on an unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign. (In 2012, Karger made history as the first out gay major-party candidate to run for president.)
He no longer recognizes the political party he dedicated his life to. “It’s the Trump-publican Party,” Karger said. “It’s no longer the Republican Party.”
But politics are cyclical, he went on, and surely Trump and his MAGA movement will run their course and the GOP will return to the days when Reagan’s optimism and dignity and Spencer’s less-hateful campaign style return to fashion.
His gripped his white wine like a potion, delivering hope. “Don’t you think?”
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