The billion-dollar scheme: What Trump truly wanted from FIFA

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures next to Jared Kushner at Ben Gurion International Airport, amid a U.S.-brokered prisoner-hostage swap and ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, in Lod, Israel, October 13, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Matthew Rozsa

July 28, 2026 

ALTERNET

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and foreign policy adviser, real estate developer Jared Kushner, has always aroused controversy, from making money during his government globetrekking and trying to build a controversial resort in Albania to initially failing to be approved for a national security clearance.

Now it appears Kushner is trying to develop a large financial stake in the world’s most popular sporting league — and the president himself stands to benefit.

“Thrive is looking to build a globally diversified investor base by relying on sovereign wealth funds, along with other blue-chip institutions from Europe, Asia and Latin America,” reported Politico’s Sophia Cai and Ben Johansen on Tuesday. “Already, Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has drawn congressional scrutiny for raising billions of dollars from foreign sovereign wealth funds, including those controlled by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. The Kushner brothers operate separate businesses.”

According to Politico, Thrive has pledged to assist FIFA in raising up to $4.2 billion so the soccer league can detach its governing body from its commercial operations, similar to the auto racing league Formula One. The thinking is that this will backstop a JP Morgan-led effort to attract institutional investors as consumers turn to live sporting events in a world driven by AI.

“But before any of that can happen, FIFA’s 211 member associations — one for each country or territory that participates — have to vote on the proposal,” Cai and Johansen wrote. “It has already generated swift blowback, including from UEFA, which represents the 55 member nations in Europe.”

UEFA is apparently not enthusiastic.

“The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade — especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially,” UEFA said in a statement on Tuesday. “None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell.”

Despite the UEFA’s opposition, Kushner’s plan could work out quite well for the Trump family, as it has sought to enrich itself repeatedly during his second term. Trump himself is also close friends with FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

“That thinking helped shape discussions with Infantino, whom Jared Kushner has known for years, according to the person familiar with the firm’s thinking,” Politico reported. “The proposal would consolidate FIFA’s media rights, sponsorships, ticketing, hospitality, licensing and other commercial operations into a new subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise, while leaving FIFA’s nonprofit governing structure intact.”

Jared Kushner's business dealings have repeatedly intersected with his government roles, raising ethical concerns. His firm Affinity Partners has raised billions from foreign sovereign wealth funds including Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar—countries with direct interests in U.S. policy.

Kushner previously profited from international travel while serving as Trump's senior adviser, and attempted to develop a controversial Albanian resort. He initially failed to obtain a security clearance, yet served as a top foreign policy adviser.

SpaceX Stock Purchases by US Lawmakers Raise Conflict of Interest Concerns

“Members of Congress are continuing to buy and sell stocks as if they’re on Wall Street,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. “We need a FULL ban on congressional stock trading.”

SpaceX executives and others celebrate as they ring the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite to celebrate the launch of the company’s initial public offering in New York on June 12, 2026.
(Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jul 28, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

Congressional lawmakers from both major parties who have purchased stock in Elon Musk’s SpaceX—including some serving on committees whose work intersects with the company’s business—are facing increasing scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest, CNBC reported Tuesday.

According to CNBC’s Luke Fountain and Justin Papp, six lawmakers—Reps. William Timmons (R-SC), John McGuire (R-Va.), Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), Gil Cisneros (D-Calif.), Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), and John James (R-Mich.)—or members of their immediate families bought between roughly $83,000 and $245,000 in SpaceX shares combined. All of the purchases occurred within six days of SpaceX’s June 12 initial public offering.

Although all of the purchases were legal and there is no evidence of insider trading, Fountain and Papp noted that “five of the lawmakers serve on committees whose work intersects with SpaceX’s defense, satellite, [artificial intelligence], federal contracting, or securities businesses.”

Responding to the report, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) took to social media to call for a full ban on congressional stock trading.



Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Stop Insider Trading Act in a bipartisan vote; however, the current legal framework is primarily based on preventing self-dealing and boosting disclosure, not a trading ban.

Last year, Jayapal introduced the bipartisan Restore Trust in Congress Act, and Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) revived the ETHICS Act, both of which would “prohibit members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children from owning or trading individual stocks, securities, commodities, or futures.”

Monday’s disclosure comes as SpaceX is already facing intense scrutiny over its growing influence in Washington, DC. In 2023, environmental groups sued the Federal Aviation Administration over approvals allowing expanded Starship launches in South Texas, arguing the agency violated federal environmental law by failing to adequately assess impacts on nearby wildlife refuges and endangered species amid a string of failed launches in which rockets exploded.

Earlier this year, tribal and conservation groups filed a lawsuit aiming to stop the US Fish and Wildlife Service from handing over 715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas to SpaceX in exchange for 683 acres elsewhere.

While conservationists contend that SpaceX launches and explosions threaten wildlife and sensitive habitats, astronomers have warned that the company’s rapidly expanding Starlink satellite constellation is cluttering near-Earth orbit, degrading dark skies, and interfering with astronomical observations.

Critics have also raised concerns about Musk’s relationship with federal regulators, with questions repeatedly raised surrounding the independence of agencies responsible for overseeing SpaceX as the company seeks further launch approvals.

While Musk’s short-lived stint as the de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency ended last year, a mix of former employees from Musk companies SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI were granted access or assigned to at least 15 executive branch agencies during 2025, according to reporting by The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, Wired, and other outlets.

‘Making a Killing, Literally and Figuratively’: Big Oil Profits Set to Double Amid Deadly Heat

“Big Oil’s greed is incompatible with a livable planet and unless governments rein it in, they will make a mockery of international climate targets,” said one Oxfam campaigner.


Activists hold a demonstration to remember the 2,700 people who died during a recent heatwave and call for climate action, on July 13, 2026 in London.
(Photo by Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jul 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

An analysis published Tuesday highlights how the world’s top fossil fuel companies are expected to rake in nearly twice as much in second-quarter profits as they did during the first quarter of 2026, a windfall that comes as their polluting products help fuel extreme heat that kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world annually.

Oxfam International’s analysis warns that the profits of the world’s six largest oil and gas companies are on track to skyrocket from $23 billion during the first quarter of the year to $45 billion in Q2 as emissions from their products intensify deadly heatwaves.

“Projected full-year profits of BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies amount to $147 billion, more than their combined profits over the previous 21 months (Q2 2024 to Q4 2025),” the report states. “Among the biggest winners, Chevron is expected to report that it has quadrupled its profits to $1,200 a second in the last three months, while ExxonMobil’s profits are expected to have tripled to $1,800 a second.”

“Oil and gas corporations share an outsized responsibility for the climate crisis,” the publication continues. “Emissions from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies were sufficient to cause around 1 in 4 heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023—heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change.”



Conflicts like the US-Israeli war of choice on Iran and the ongoing Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine, as well as Big Oil greed, are among the leading factors blamed for spiking fuel costs.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that top US fossil fuel executives have sold nearly $400 million in their own companies’ stock since Trump launched the Iran War on the last day of February.

“Fossil fuel corporations are making a killing, literally and figuratively,” Mariana Paoli, Oxfam’s climate policy lead, said in a statement Tuesday.

“As extreme heat, floods, and storms devastate communities across the world, the industry is preparing another bonanza of profits,” she continued. “Families are paying the price three times over—through destroyed homes and harvests, through soaring energy prices, and through a cost-of-living crisis worsened by dependence on fossil fuels.”

“Big Oil’s greed is incompatible with a livable planet, and unless governments rein it in, they will make a mockery of international climate targets,” Paoli added.

The report comes amid a summer of dangerous heat events in the United States, including prolonged “heat domes” that have pushed temperatures to life-threatening levels and contributed to at least dozens of deaths, as well as more record heatwaves in Europe that have left thousands dead and fueled massive wildfires.

“Yet rather than scaling back fossil fuel production and accelerating the transition to renewable energy, the six largest fossil fuel corporations plan to increase oil and gas production by 14% by 2030 compared to 2024 levels, equivalent to pumping an additional 2.5 million barrels of oil a day,” Oxfam noted.

Paoli said Tuesday that “while Big Oil fuels extreme weather events, rich countries are refusing to increase the public climate finance that poorer countries urgently need to cope with the climate crisis.”

“Until governments make the richest polluters pay, fossil fuel corporations will keep driving us deeper into climate chaos,” she added. “Taxing the richest polluters could help close the gap in funding for climate adaptation and speed the transition towards renewable energy. Fossil fuel corporations must feel the heat, not us.”

Oxfam contends that the “rich polluter profit tax” it has modeled could raise as much as $400 billion globally in its first year based on 2024 figures, compared with the estimated $290 billion to $1 trillion needed annually by 2030 to compensate for the loss and damage caused by climate change in the Global South. Unlike one-off windfall profits taxes, the rich polluter profit tax would be permanent.

“We are facing a climate emergency, therefore governments should each impose this tax swiftly,” Oxfam said last month. “Countries across all continents should form a ‘coalition of the willing’ to coordinate and speed up their efforts and counter fossil fuel company lobbying and tax avoidance.”

The Oxfam analysis follows the release earlier this month of a World Health Organization (WHO) report showing nearly 500,000 annual heat-related deaths worldwide in the years 2000-19—a figure expected to grow as extreme temperatures driven by the climate emergency become the new normal.

“Mitigating climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions is imperative and urgent to limit the magnitude of human costs from extreme heat,” WHO said.

Report Shows How Trump’s Fossil Fuel Agenda Is ‘Making Everyone’s Lives More Expensive’

Between 2026-40, the average wholesale price of liquefied natural gas could be 80% higher than during the past decade, thanks to Trump’s acceleration of exports and the construction of AI data centers.


A barge moves along the water past ExxonMobil and QatarEnergy’s Golden Pass liquefied natural gas facility in Port Arthur on April 2, 2026.
(Photo by Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Jul 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As President Donald Trump’s push for artificial intelligence data centers sends demand for natural gas soaring, a report released Tuesday projects that wholesale prices will likely double by the late 2030s if his energy and AI policies continue, driving up household energy bills.

The report from the climate activist group Oil Change International, which argues for an end to reliance on fossil fuels, found that recent surges in wholesale natural gas prices are being driven by Trump’s so-called “energy dominance” agenda, which has cranked up natural gas exports.

In his second term, Trump has resumed and accelerated approvals for new natural gas export terminals following a pause on permits under the Biden administration.

Nearly 90 million metric tons of new annual liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity reached a final investment decision as of June, on top of 60 million that had already been under construction, the report found. Combined, the researchers predicted that these projects could double US LNG exports by the early 2030s.

While pursuing energy dominance, Trump is also pursuing “AI dominance,” which has included the breakneck development of data centers specifically built to run on fossil fuels, including natural gas.

His administration has fast-tracked federal permits for data center developers, loosened environmental review processes, and directed his agencies to provide incentives to finance the data center boom.

Gas is expected to power much of the near-term energy use from these data centers. The facilities, which operate 24/7, are being constructed faster than transmission lines can keep up, meaning that new gas plants are being proposed as an alternative.

The report finds that the demands of the AI data center boom could increase gas consumption by 17% by the early 2030s. With the cheapest gas being rapidly depleted, more demand will require producers to expand drilling in parts of the country where it’s significantly more expensive to operate, like the Haynesville shale region of Louisiana and East Texas.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have gutted federal support for wind power construction and other renewable energy sources, which will further increase dependency on gas.

In addition to pumping more planet-heating greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the report finds that this increased demand will likely cause prices to soar for consumers.




Citing fluctuations in the Henry Hub gas price benchmark, the report projected that between 2026-40, the average wholesale price of gas could be 80% higher than during the past decade of US LNG exports, which it notes was “a decade when energy price volatility was already causing hardship in the US and LNG-importing countries.”

“Trump’s policies are making everyone’s lives more expensive while Big Tech and the fossil fuel industry cash in. Our research shows that the cost-of-living crisis will only escalate in the coming years if Congress and government agencies don’t intervene,” said Lorne Stockman, research director at Oil Change International.

“Our leaders must stand up to Trump, phase out LNG exports, stop the reckless data center build-out, and transition the US economy off of fossil fuels to make energy affordable again,” he added.

Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, argued in an op-ed for Common Dreams on Tuesday that Oil Change’s report, as well as another recent report demonstrating how the fossil fuel industry had hidden the climate damage caused by natural gas from the public for more than half a century, showed that it’s long past time to “make gas a dirty word” in a similar fashion to oil.

“Politicians locking us into natural gas are guaranteeing that our kids will spend much of their lives paying far more for energy than they should—and far more than people in the rest of the world will be spending,” he wrote.

McKibben noted recent reporting in The New York Times detailing how, in the wake of Trump’s war in Iran, which has caused LNG prices to soar across Europe and Asia, nations are beginning to “unshackle” themselves from it as an alternative fuel source. Not so in the US.

“The natural gas industry,” he wrote, “is destroying the climate, and destroying people’s lungs, and it’s trying to lock us into this expensive practice for decades to come.”

Op-Ed

Higher Ed Can’t Be Neutral in an Age of Brutality. It Must Choose Democracy.

Contemporary proponents of “institutional neutrality” fail to grasp that universities have never been outside politics.

By Henry A. Giroux ,

Truthout

July 26, 2026

Demonstrators from the pro-Palestine encampment on Columbia's Campus show a banner as they barricade themselves inside Hamilton Hall, an academic building which has been occupied in past by student movements, and name it after a Palestinian child killed by the Israeli military on April 30, 2024, in New York City.Alex Kent / Getty Images
Demonstrators from the pro-Palestine encampment on Columbia's Campus show a banner as they barricade themselves inside Hamilton Hall, an academic building which has been occupied in past by student movements, and name it after a Palestinian child killed by the Israeli military on April 30, 2024, in New York City.

Alex Kent / Getty Images

Across the United States, and increasingly in other democracies under siege, higher education faces a coordinated assault unlike anything witnessed in generations. State governments are prohibiting the teaching of histories that confront slavery, colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, structural racism, and widening inequality. Books are disappearing from classrooms and libraries. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are being dismantled. Faculty are encountering political intimidation, ideological surveillance, and threats to their employment. Students who have protested Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza have been suspended, arrested, disciplined, and treated less as citizens exercising democratic rights than as enemies of public order. Universities themselves are facing threats of financial retaliation if they refuse to conform to the demands of increasingly authoritarian governments.

These developments should not be mistaken for good faith disagreements over curricula or academic priorities. They represent an effort to reorganize the conditions under which knowledge itself is produced, circulated, and legitimized. They determine which histories deserve remembrance, which injustices may be named, which questions remain permissible, and which forms of citizenship become imaginable. This is not an expansion of intellectual diversity — it is an authoritarian restructuring of higher education. Its deeper purpose is pedagogical. It seeks to transform the university from a democratic institution into an instrument for manufacturing conformity, organized forgetting, and political obedience.

Much of the current discussion in public forums nevertheless continues to frame the university’s crisis exclusively in terms of internal ideological imbalance. Universities are criticized for becoming too political, insufficiently open to conservative perspectives, or excessively influenced by progressive scholarship. Such criticisms may contain elements worthy of discussion. Universities should always remain open to self-criticism and should resist every form of intellectual orthodoxy, regardless of its political source. But these concerns become profoundly misleading when detached from the larger political forces transforming higher education from the outside. The greatest danger confronting universities today is not simply that certain viewpoints may receive greater attention than others; it is that political authorities increasingly seek to determine which viewpoints may legitimately exist at all.

For this reason, intellectual diversity cannot be reduced to an equal number of competing opinions. It is not achieved by balancing syllabi according to ideological categories or by treating every perspective as equally grounded in evidence and democratic values. Genuine intellectual diversity rests upon a far deeper democratic foundation. It depends upon academic freedom, institutional autonomy, secure public funding, shared governance, independent research, historical honesty, and the right of faculty and students to pursue controversial questions without fear of political retaliation. Once these conditions begin to disappear, diversity itself becomes an increasingly empty abstraction. One cannot claim to value the marketplace of ideas while dismantling the institutions that make such exchange possible.

State governments are prohibiting the teaching of histories that confront slavery, colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, structural racism, and widening inequality.

This distinction matters because authoritarian movements have always understood something that many defenders of liberal democracy continue to underestimate: Education is never peripheral to politics. Schools and universities shape public memory, moral imagination, civic literacy, and the capacity to distinguish truth from propaganda. Every educational institution teaches far more than disciplinary knowledge. It teaches what kinds of citizens matter, whose histories deserve remembrance, what forms of agency are possible, and which futures remain imaginable.

History repeatedly demonstrates this lesson. Fascist movements have consistently regarded universities as strategic sites in the struggle for political power. They have sought not merely to censor dissent but also to reconstruct public consciousness itself. Nazi Germany did not simply eliminate political opponents; it transformed universities into laboratories of ideological conformity. Jewish scholars were expelled, critical intellectuals silenced, historical inquiry subordinated to racial mythology, and scientific research enlisted in the service of eugenics and genocide. Education became a machinery for manufacturing obedience rather than cultivating judgment.

Faculty are encountering political intimidation, ideological surveillance, and threats to their employment.

Historical analogies must always be employed with care. The contemporary United States is not Germany in 1933. Yet historical differences do not erase recurring patterns. They enable us to recognize, in new forms and under different conditions, the mobilizing passions and pedagogical mechanisms of authoritarianism. When democratic remembrance is attacked and the lessons of the past are erased, society cultivates what Robert Jay Lifton calls “psychic numbing,” a diminished capacity to respond to human suffering, accompanied by moral indifference and the erosion of ethical judgment.

Authoritarian politics continues to recognize a truth too often neglected by liberal defenders of higher education: Democratic institutions cannot survive once citizens lose the historical consciousness, ethical imagination, and critical capacities necessary to challenge organized lies and manufactured ignorance. The struggle over education is therefore never secondary to politics. It is one of politics’ decisive terrains. Authoritarians attack universities precisely because education is one of the few institutions capable of producing citizens who can recognize and resist authoritarian power. Recognizing education’s political significance also exposes one of the most influential myths shaping contemporary higher education: the claim that universities can remain institutionally neutral.

The Myth of Institutional Neutrality

This understanding exposes the limitations of the currently legitimating language of neutrality. The claim of institutional neutrality is a myth. It has become a defining rhetoric of contemporary university administrations. Harvard’s 2024 report on its institutional voice argued that the university should refrain from taking positions on public controversies unrelated to its “core function,” while Yale’s 2024 policy on its institutional voice similarly declared that the university would generally avoid public statements on political and social issues in the name of neutrality. Such appeals to neutrality present themselves as safeguards for open inquiry, but they often function as ideological cover for institutional silence in the face of assaults on democracy, academic freedom, and human rights.

Authoritarian movements have always understood something that many defenders of liberal democracy continue to underestimate: Education is never peripheral to politics.

Universities have always been political institutions shaping and being shaped by the conflicts, values, and power relations of the societies they inhabit. Every curriculum privileges certain traditions of knowledge over others. Every institution reflects historical struggles over whose experiences matter, whose voices deserve recognition, and what forms of citizenship should be cultivated. The relevant question has never been whether education is political but which politics it advances.

As Stuart Hall argued, “It is not possible … to study human societies … in a ‘value-neutral’ framework. Knowledge is always from a certain point of view.” He therefore warned that intellectuals “must never confuse commitment to the truth with value-neutrality, with standing outside of history.” Hall’s insight makes clear that the issue is not whether universities are political, but whether they acknowledge the politics that already shape the production of knowledge or disguise them behind the rhetoric of institutional neutrality.

What remains of institutional neutrality when Texas A&M requires presidential approval for courses on race and gender while imposing restrictions on student research? The language of institutional neutrality evaporates the moment university administrations substitute militarized policing for democratic dialogue. What remains of neutrality when Columbia University summons the New York City Police Department to dismantle student encampments protesting in solidarity with Palestinians? Or when universities such as Ohio State and Indiana University respond to peaceful demonstrations with heavily militarized policing, including the deployment of police snipers on surrounding rooftops? Or when the University of Pennsylvania capitulates to the punitive demands of the Trump administration and vindictive donors by dismantling DEI initiatives, curbing academic freedom and free speech, and targeting trans students? These are not politically neutral administrative decisions. They are acts of institutional alignment with repressive power that transform universities from spaces of critical inquiry into instruments of censorship, surveillance, and ideological conformity.

Yet contemporary appeals to neutrality increasingly expose themselves as mere ideological performances. They identify as political only those forms of knowledge that challenge existing relations of domination while treating market values, corporate influence, billionaire philanthropy, militarized research, nationalism, and racial hierarchy as ideologically innocent. In these appeals, politics becomes visible only when it questions established power; the operation of power itself disappears beneath the reassuring language of balance, civility, and objectivity. Far from standing above politics, neutrality often functions as a form of public pedagogy. It teaches students that silence in the face of injustice is professionalism, that accommodation is wisdom, and that democracy can survive without moral courage. When the very pedagogical, cultural, and economic conditions that make democracy possible are under assault, neutrality becomes complicity.


The claim that universities can remain politically neutral during moments of democratic crisis is not merely mistaken — it is profoundly dangerous.

The claim that universities can remain politically neutral during moments of democratic crisis is not merely mistaken — it is profoundly dangerous. Under such conditions, neutrality ceases to be prudence and becomes complicity. Universities educate not only through what they teach but through what they refuse to defend. Every act of institutional silence communicates a lesson about the meaning of citizenship, courage, and public responsibility. As Hall observed in defending radical intellectual Walter Rodney against state repression, governments fear critical ideas because they possess the power “to move people into action.” Universities have become targets not because they are excessively political but because they remain among the few institutions capable of cultivating critical consciousness, democratic agency, and the collective capacities necessary to resist domination and imagine otherwise. When universities retreat into managerial caution as democratic institutions are dismantled, they teach students that conformity is safer than dissent, that moral responsibility yields to bureaucratic calculation, and that the defense of democracy lies outside the university’s mission.

The irony is striking. Those who insist that universities must avoid politics often remain conspicuously silent about the most sweeping political interventions currently reshaping higher education. Increasingly, these interventions no longer appear simply as overt censorship or legislative coercion. They also arrive in the reasonable language of institutional reform, scholarly rigor, viewpoint diversity, and political neutrality. As recent reporting on Republican efforts to “save the humanities” suggests, the struggle is no longer simply over what universities teach but over who possesses the authority to define legitimate knowledge, civic education, and the purposes of higher learning. The vocabulary of reform increasingly masks an effort to institutionalize a new ideological orthodoxy under the banner of restoring neutrality.

The fiction of institutional neutrality becomes even harder to sustain when universities themselves are subjected to political extortion. As the American Association of University Professors argues in a recent report, “U.S. higher education has, in effect, become a target of a massive extortion racket.” The report documents how the Trump administration has pressured universities by withholding or threatening federal research funds already legally owed to them unless institutions comply with sweeping political demands. Under such conditions, appeals to neutrality become profoundly disingenuous. What remains of institutional neutrality when universities must purchase their independence by submitting to political blackmail?


What remains of institutional neutrality when universities must purchase their independence by submitting to political blackmail?

This logic increasingly shapes a broader body of commentary that attributes the crisis of higher education primarily to the political left. Across a range of essays, books, policy reports, and institutional commentaries by figures such as Jonathan Haidt, Heather Mac Donald, and organizations such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the National Association of Scholars, the humanities are portrayed as having been weakened by progressive scholarship, identity politics, and social justice concerns, while rigorous inquiry is said to have given way to ideological commitment. Such arguments rest on a fiction of ideological innocence. They imagine a university that once stood above struggles over class, race, colonialism, gender, empire, and inequality rather than recognizing that these forces have always shaped what counts as legitimate knowledge. Even more significant, they direct public attention toward an alleged excess of critical scholarship while diverting it from the far more consequential forces hollowing out higher education: decades of neoliberal austerity, corporate governance, public disinvestment, political intimidation, and the increasingly direct intervention of authoritarian governments into what may be taught, researched, and remembered. Rather than confronting these structural transformations, they redirect attention toward an imagined ideological crisis within the university while leaving the deeper assault on higher education largely untouched.

These commentators rarely object when legislatures dictate curricular content, when governors threaten universities with financial punishment, when faculty are dismissed for engaging controversial public questions, when books are removed from libraries, or when students are disciplined for exercising democratic rights. Politics appears objectionable only when it challenges dominant relations of power. When it protects existing hierarchies, legitimates state violence, accommodates corporate influence, or normalizes organized injustice, it suddenly becomes invisible.

Institutional neutrality, under such conditions, becomes less a democratic principle than a rhetorical device disguising the politics already embedded in institutional priorities, financial investments, governing structures, and public silence. Universities are never outside politics; the question is whether they will acknowledge their political responsibilities openly or conceal them behind the language of neutrality.

The debate over intellectual diversity therefore remains fundamentally incomplete because it asks the wrong question. The issue is not simply whether universities represent a broad enough range of viewpoints. The deeper question concerns the democratic conditions under which intellectual life itself becomes possible. Universities belong to a broader democratic culture composed of public schools, libraries, independent journalism, social movements, museums, artists, writers, and public intellectuals. Collectively, these institutions preserve historical consciousness, cultivate ethical judgment, encourage informed dissent, and expand the public imagination. They enable citizens to distinguish truth from propaganda, justice from domination, and democratic responsibility from political conformity. When universities abandon these responsibilities in the name of neutrality, efficiency, or market relevance, they cease to function as democratic public goods and become little more than credentialing institutions adapted to existing relations of power. And when this wider public culture is weakened through censorship, privatization, political intimidation, organized forgetting, and the corrosion of public values, universities cannot flourish in isolation. Their crisis is inseparable from the crisis of democracy itself, which is inseparable from the political economy reshaping higher education.
Neoliberalism and the Assault on the Democratic University

Yet the debate over neutrality remains incomplete for another reason: Even when it acknowledges the political struggle over ideas, it often ignores the economic structures that increasingly govern higher education itself. It treats universities primarily as communities of ideas while remaining remarkably silent about the corporate institutional order that increasingly governs higher education itself. As Rashid Khalidi has observed, many universities now function less as educational institutions than as “money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation[s], with a minor sideline in education.” Khalidi’s observation points to the managerial and financial transformation of higher education that discussions of intellectual diversity too often ignore. Discussions of knowledge proceed as though ideas exist independently of the material conditions under which they are produced. Universities are imagined as autonomous intellectual communities whose principal challenge lies in balancing competing viewpoints.

The crisis of the humanities offers one of the clearest expressions of this transformation. Humanities bachelor’s degrees in the United States fell to 165,489 in 2024, the lowest number since 1991 and roughly 30 percent below their 2012 peak. Yet this decline tells us less about an alleged domination of universities by the political left than about decades of public disinvestment, market-driven restructuring, managerial governance, vocational reductionism, and the increasing subordination of higher education to corporate priorities. The crisis of the humanities is fundamentally political and economic before it is ideological. To reduce the crisis to ideology is to overlook the structural transformations that have fundamentally altered the mission, governance, and civic purpose of higher education over the last four decades.

Every university teaches through its curriculum, its institutional priorities, the values it rewards, the histories it preserves, and the forms of citizenship it encourages. It is embedded within relations of power that shape not only what is taught but what becomes thinkable in the first place. Every institution of higher education operates within a political economy that influences whose knowledge is funded, whose research receives institutional support, whose histories are remembered, and which forms of inquiry acquire legitimacy. To speak about intellectual diversity while ignoring these institutional realities is to separate ideas from the social conditions that make them possible.

This transformation is hardly incidental: Neoliberal capitalism has transformed universities as profoundly as it has changed virtually every other democratic public institution. Public funding has steadily declined. Corporate partnerships have expanded. Billionaire philanthropy increasingly shapes research agendas. Military contracts influence institutional priorities. Administrators have adopted the language of branding, metrics, efficiency, entrepreneurial innovation, and measurable outcomes. Students have become consumers investing in future earnings. Faculty have become increasingly contingent labor subjected to audits, managerial oversight, and demands for immediate economic utility. Education itself has been reorganized according to the logic of investment rather than the requirements of democratic life.

This transformation has consequences extending far beyond budgets or administrative organization. It reshapes the meaning of knowledge itself. Under neoliberal capitalism, education increasingly loses its status as a site of democratic learning and becomes a private investment. Knowledge becomes valuable to the extent that it generates economic growth, technological innovation, workforce flexibility, or commercial advantage. Questions concerning justice, historical memory, ethical responsibility, democratic citizenship, ecological survival, inequality, and the cultivation of the imagination are increasingly subordinated to questions of the market or ignored altogether.
Education as Democratic Public Pedagogy

This narrowing of education’s purpose helps explain why contemporary debates over intellectual diversity often remain trapped within procedural questions while avoiding more fundamental issues of power. Missing entirely is any sustained discussion of how concentrated wealth, corporate influence, donor pressure, privatization, and austerity shape the production of knowledge itself. The deeper question isn’t whether universities include sufficient ideological diversity; it is the role of economic and political power in determining what counts as legitimate knowledge, what research receives support, which disciplines flourish, and what forms of inquiry are quietly marginalized.


Democracy depends upon the educational practices through which people learn to think historically, judge critically, act courageously, and imagine otherwise.

Capitalism today functions not only as an economic system but also as one of the most powerful pedagogical forces shaping contemporary consciousness. Neoliberalism is itself a vast system of public pedagogy, educating people to believe that markets are the template for shaping all social relations, competition is the highest civic virtue, the individual is the sole and most important site of agency, and private success is the measure of public value. It teaches values long before students enter a classroom. Through corporate media, digital platforms, advertising, financial institutions, and the culture industries, it normalizes competition over cooperation, privatization over public responsibility, consumerism over citizenship, disposability over solidarity, and individual success over the common good. It cultivates a moral vocabulary in which efficiency replaces justice, profitability replaces public responsibility, and market value becomes the measure of human worth.

Universities increasingly reproduce this pedagogical order. Rather than serving as democratic spaces capable of questioning dominant assumptions, they are encouraged to become extensions of the market itself. Programs are evaluated according to profitability. Research is assessed according to commercial application. Students are taught to view education primarily as vocational credentialing rather than preparation for democratic citizenship. Entire fields of inquiry devoted to ethics, history, philosophy, literature, cultural criticism, and the arts are pressured to justify themselves through economic metrics fundamentally alien to their democratic purpose.

Such developments are often presented as inevitable and prudent adaptations to economic reality. They are nothing of the sort. They represent political choices that redefine education according to the imperatives of capital rather than the needs of democracy. In doing so, they precisely undermine those forms of inquiry that make intellectual diversity meaningful. Genuine intellectual diversity requires time for reflection, institutional independence, historical depth, ethical questioning, and the freedom to pursue research unconstrained by immediate market demands. These conditions cannot flourish where knowledge itself has become increasingly commodified.

Democracy depends not merely upon constitutions, elections, or political institutions but upon the educational practices through which people learn to think historically, judge critically, act courageously, and imagine otherwise. Education, in this sense, is the formative practice of democracy itself. The crisis confronting higher education is therefore not simply an intellectual crisis; it is a crisis of democratic culture itself. The struggle over universities is inseparable from the struggle over the kinds of human beings that democratic societies hope to cultivate. The decisive question is whether students will acquire the historical consciousness, ethical imagination, civic courage, and critical capacities necessary to recognize domination, resist injustice, and imagine more democratic futures.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Henry A. Giroux

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

Pride and Proximity in Berlin

Adrienne Teitcher

 July 29, 2026

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Last weekend, I was sitting by the river, talking to a stranger about how our proximity to others, physical or sociological, determines the extent to which we experience them as fully alive, and also to mourn their deaths. It was twilight in the suburbs of Berlin; the quiet of this warm night air broken now and again by the party boats cruising by.

To illustrate my point, I said, “God forbid a bomb should go off in a café in Berlin. A few deaths would make headlines across Germany and all over the West, because we are—or feel ourselves to be—close to those who died. But if an apartment block in Beirut is leveled by an Israeli missile, it gets a single paragraph in the news, and then we all move on.” I felt a superstitious chill upon uttering these words.

That was around 10 p.m. Later, I would learn that this was the precise time someone drove a van into marchers attending the Christopher Street Day parade–the mainstream Pride event in Berlin–and then, after smashing into a tree, began stabbing those nearby.

Devastating.

This morning, after processing the attack with friends and fielding calls from distant family, I did something without even realizing: I turned the page on the carnage. I sat at my desk and I got back to work on a documentary I’m pursuing about the lie of denazification.

It was only when I messaged a friend about filming dates that I realized I was quite out of sync with those around me. She wrote back and said she was reeling from the attack and unable to talk right. And suddenly, I felt insensitive, reptilian even—cold.

So I had to ask myself: What was wrong with me? How could I already be back at my desk, catching up on work? Then I remembered: that’s exactly what I’ve been doing every single day for the past two and a half years at least, since Israel escalated its genocide against the Palestinians.

No one deserves to die because they chose to go out into the streets and affirm that their life has value—that they refused to be silenced or forced to hide who they are, by law, hate or violence. This is what Pride means to me.

Yet, just as no one deserves to die at a Pride march, no one deserves to die because they live in an apartment building selected seemingly at random by IDF high command, on the pretense that they shared their domestic space with “the enemy”.

Likewise, no one deserves to be turned into red mist because they’re sheltering in a tent in Gaza or Beirut when Israeli artillery drops.

120 schoolgirls do not deserve to die screaming in their school auditorium in Minab, Iran, in the opening act of the USA’s latest imperialist adventure.

A patient, lying in bed at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza, does not deserve to be set on fire when Israel carries out an air strike on a space that should be a safe haven.

None of these people deserved to die.

Yet time and again, after each slaughter was blotted out by yet another slaughter—even with the firebombing of the Al-Aqsa Hospital, the image of a shell of a person in a bed, seemingly shifting and rotating their stiffened body amid the raging flames—I just moved on.

As I sit at my desk, watching the footage once again, I wonder: Was this person alive? Or was it simply the force of the heat from the explosion caused by the Israeli airstrike that made their body move as if they were?

I feel sick, I physically recoil, as part of my mind tries to merge with the experience of this person, tries to imagine what it would mean to have your skin burn away and still somehow be conscious.

And yet, even after this gruesome exercise, I will move on. I know I will. This is what I do. And this is what disgusts me about myself.

I can only live this so-called life—go to work, pay taxes, dance, treat myself to a coffee, breathe the air, tell a joke, wonder if I should put grapes in my salad this evening—by pushing these memories away and welcoming the numb detachment that separates the functionally “normal” from the insane.

When did I decide that I wanted to be normal?

Pride exists because queer people—trans, lesbian, gay, intersex—have not always been seen as fully human. Yet when I look at the scores of daily deaths of brown people in the so-called Middle East, at the indifference to suffering when it occurs on bodies coded as “Muslim” or “Arab,” I see that the dehumanization runs far deeper for these communities than the violence and threats I experience as a trans woman in Berlin.

In the midst of this rising tide of imperial violence, Pride has lost its meaning. Proud of what? What is the goal? To assimilate into a nation state that exports deadly bombs to a warzone? And are we supposed to somehow take succor from the fact that the murderers who helm the German regime are willing to light the candles of us sexual deviants in this, our dark night?

Pride draws the lens of our awareness into a small, proximate circle—those around us, those who look like us, who think alike—and at best struggles to achieve access to an unjust power, while failing to speak to those killed or forced into unlivable lives by a bloodthirsty empire and its many, many tentacles.

I can’t think clearly anymore. I can’t feel freely. Because to feel the burden of these cruel days would mean to stop—completely—any exertion of energy, any movement within a single fiber of my being, unless that spark is an act of resistance to a world that normalizes the humiliation, degradation, herding, and slaughter of those whose lives are deemed to not matter.

Adrienne Teitcher is a trans artist based in Berlin.