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Opinion
The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
News / Opinion / Letters to the Editor

Letter: Authoritarian action is dangerous

By Corbin Muck, Vancouver
Published: February 4, 2025, 6:00am

On Jan. 27, the Trump administration released a memo which would “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.”

The impetus for this absolute madness is to secure funding against “DEI, woke gender ideology, and the new green deal.”

This is dangerous and transparently illegal.

First, to state the obvious, this order is an obvious smokescreen, invoking a grab bag of far-right bogeyman as means to justify an authoritarian power grab. And second, and of immediate importance, this measure would make kids go hungry, people lose their homes, people lose their health care, people lose their jobs, and it is literally going to get people killed.

Literally. Actually. Here and now. At your kids’ school, in your friends’ lives and in your neighbors’ homes.

This is not an intellectual exercise. It is not an abstraction. It is life or death, an inflection point where an avowedly authoritarian regime is testing its limits.

All of us have an obligation to resist this as deeply and as fully as the target were painted on each and every one of our backs, because that’s exactly what it is going on.

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