BOSTON (Reuters) — A federal judge on Wednesday ruled U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully terminated about $2.2 billion in grants awarded to Harvard University and can no longer cut off research funding to the prestigious Ivy League school.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, in Boston marked a major legal victory for Harvard as it seeks to cut a deal that could bring an end to the White House’s multi-front conflict with the nation’s oldest and richest university.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school became a central focus of the administration’s broad campaign to leverage federal funding to force change at U.S. universities, which Trump says are gripped by antisemitic and “radical Left” ideologies. Burroughs, however, said that the Trump administration used allegations of antisemitism on campuses as “a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

Three other Ivy League schools stuck deals with the administration, including Columbia University, which in July agreed to pay $220 million to restore federal research money that had been nixed because of allegations the university allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.

As with Columbia, the Trump administration took actions against Harvard related to the anti-Israel protests that roiled its campus and other universities in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

Trump during an August 26 Cabinet meeting demanded Harvard pay “nothing less than $500 million” as part of a settlement. “They’ve been very bad,” he told Education Secretary Linda McMahon. “Don’t negotiate.”

Among the earliest actions the administration took against Harvard was the cancellation of hundreds of grants awarded to researchers on the grounds that the school failed to do enough to address harassment of Jewish students on its campus.

The Trump administration has since sought to bar international students from attending the school; threatened Harvard’s accreditation status; and opened the door to cutting off more funds by finding it violated federal civil rights law.

Harvard has said it has taken steps to ensure its campus is welcoming to Jewish and Israeli students, who it acknowledges experienced “vicious and reprehensible” treatment following the onset of Israel’s war in Gaza.

But Harvard President Alan Garber has said the administration’s demands went far beyond addressing antisemitism and unlawfully sought to regulate the “intellectual conditions” on its campus by controlling who it hires and who it teaches.

Those demands, which came in an April 11 letter from an administration task force, included calls for the private university to restructure its governance, alter its hiring and admissions practices to ensure an ideological balance of viewpoints and end certain academic programs.

After Harvard rejected those demands, it accused the Trump administration of retaliating against it in violation of First Amendment free speech protections by abruptly cutting funding the school says is vital to supporting scientific and medical research.

Burroughs in a separate case has already barred the administration from halting its ability to host international students, who comprise about a quarter of Harvard’s student body.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Amy Stevens and Lincoln Feast)

Thank God we fought a revolution in this country so that we are not ruled by the idiotic rules of the modern United Kingdom.

Graham Linehan is a comedian and comedy writer who was just arrested in the UK — for his tweets.

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon in the UK. In mid-August, the New York Post titled an article, “UK free speech crackdown sees up to 30 people a day arrested for petty offenses such as retweets and cartoons.” The Post wrote:

Bernadette Spofforth lay in jail on a blue gym mattress in a daze, finding it difficult to move, even breathe. “I just closed down. But the other half of my brain went into Jack Reacher mode,” she said, referring to the fictional action hero. “Every single detail was in this very vivid, bright, sharp focus.”

She remembers noticing that you can’t drown yourself in the toilet, because there’s no standing water in it and the flush button is too far to reach if your head were in the bowl. She’d end up being detained for 36 hours in July 2024. Three girls had just been murdered in Southport, England, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. But Spofforth was not under suspicion for the crime.

Instead, horrified, and in the fog of a developing tragedy, she’d reposted on X another user’s content blaming newly arrived migrants for the ghastly crime — clarifying in her retweet, “If this is true.” Hours later she realized she may have received bad information and deleted the post — but it had already been seen thousands of times. …

Her story is one repeated almost hourly in the UK, where data suggests over 30 people a day are arrested for speech crimes, about 12,000 a year, under laws written well before the age of social media that make crimes of sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character.”

Four police vehicles arrived at her home days later.

Linehan wrote on Substack:

The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up.)

The tweet read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the ba**s.”

Linehan was arrested for that tweet. He was also arrested for another tweet in which there was a gigantic trans protest in London, of which he tweeted a photo, captioned, “A photo you can smell,” followed by a tweet in which he wrote, “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** em.”

“At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated,” he wrote. “Then I was shown into a small green-tiled cell with a bunk, a silver toilet in the corner and a message from Crimestoppers on the ceiling next to a concave mirror that was presumably there to make you reflect on your life choices. … At one point, I said ‘I bet I know who made this complaint. Lindsay Watson’ (demented ex-copper troon who was fired for his online conduct). Then, lo-and-behold, one of my lawyers sent me this reply to the ‘bollocks’ tweet.”

The reply stated, “That weird ex-copper claims he has reported this to police and is trying to get other troons to do so. Just FYI.”

Welcome to England, the birthplace of the Magna Carta, where they are tearing down the institutions that make a functional society.

WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show

It’s not just that these folks in the UK are interested in tearing away free speech and saying you’re not allowed to tweet a bad thing, that bad tweets might land you in jail: They are importing people from parts of the planet who hate and despise all of the centralizing Western principles, such as free speech.

I write in “Lions And Scavengers” about the coalition of scavengers, about the idea that you have barbarians — the people from outside who hate our civilization — who join forces with the lechers inside our civilization who believe that they are marginalized by our traditional institutions and values, and then they make common cause together. 

That’s the UK in a nutshell.

It is no coincidence that on Tuesday, the Home Secretary of the UK, Yvette Cooper, said that the UK is going to take in refugees from Gaza. She stated:

I confirm that the Home Office has put in place systems to issue expedited visas with biometric checks conducted prior to arrival for children and their immediate accompanying family members. We have done the same for all the Chevening scholars and are now in the process of doing so for the next group of students from Gaza who have been awarded fully funded scholarships and places at UK universities so that they can start their studies in autumn this year.

Later this year, we will set out plans to establish a permanent framework for refugee students to come and study in the UK so that we can help more talented young people fleeing war and persecution to find a better future, alongside capped and managed ways for refugees to work here in the UK.

Congrats to the people of Great Britain. They don’t just have to contend with the insanity inside their borders, but out of some sort of misplaced sympathy, they are going to be importing people who almost certainly do not share their values.

There are plenty of other countries on planet Earth that are more akin ideologically and culturally to the people of Gaza, but according to the wonderful folks in the UK, those countries don’t exist.

There’s been some opposition within Westminster to taking in refugees from Gaza.

Conservative shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick expressed apprehension at the idea of resettling Palestinians in the UK. He wrote in The Telegraph, “The truth is that Gaza’s Arab neighbors are prepared to offer humanitarian support, but consider the idea of inviting Gazans into the country at any scale a risk only a fool would take.”

Which, of course, is true.

This is a misapplied sense of guilt directed at the Third World by the Labor Party in the UK, a belief that in the oppressor/oppressed matrix, the UK is an oppressor; Israel is an oppressor; the people of Gaza are the oppressed, and therefore the people of the UK must accept people who believe that Western civilization is in and of itself wrong and terrible.

As a side note, we should point out at this point here that Qatar — which is essentially Hamas with nicer suits — owns much of London.

“A cursory look at Property Week shows that the Qatari Investment Authority, Qatari Holding and Qatari Diar own 23,253,699 square feet of London, making Qatar the largest owner of London property. Reports vary about the sum invested, alleged to be £35 billion. Qatar’s square footage is more than HM The Queen’s Crown Estate,” Sunday Guardian Live reported.

If you ever wonder why Europe is so warm toward importing people who truly hate their civilization, a big part of the reason is this — money.