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Notes -
UCLA isn't being punished for its speech. The grants are being revoked in accordance with a long-standing legal precedent that allows the Federal government to take away public money from institutions that illegally discriminate on the basis of race. The only difference between previous applications of this strategy and the present one is the race of the people being illegally discriminated against.
The First Amendment does not actually guarantee the rights of large institutions to discriminate against Asian kids.
Oh, I was arguing under the premise that Tao was indeed being targeted for signing the open letter etc., with the discrimination thing as a handy cudgel. I am open to a factual argument that this is not the case, and have no objection to UCLA being punished for discrimination against Asian kids; I am generally against affirmative action. But lots of people in this conversation were saying "well if Tao was punished for signing the letter, it serves him right" and I find that to be a position worth arguing against even if that's not the fact of the matter in this particular instance.
People on this forum are arguing that Tao deserves to be caught in the blast radius because of his speech, but that's separate from the formal legal justification that the Executive used for its actions against UCLA. Freedom of speech is about what powerful institutions are and are not allowed to do, not about whether individuals who suffer misfortune did or did not have it coming.
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