In this case, I think it’s a good mistake. Harvard needs reform and the public us unlikely to be sympathetic with poor mouthing from an institution sitting on a $53 billion endowment.
Harvard isn't going to reform. They are the people who were behind DEI in the first place. It didn't result out of error, and it didn't result out of stupidity.
Well, then they can struggle on without taxpayer dollars. Win-win for the administration.
However, these “noble” academics worship the almighty dollar above all else, and Harvard hired some Trump insider lawyers to represent it, playing a classic double game. My prediction remains that they will work out a compromise.
Well, there is a bit of Captain Ahabian with Donald, but on the other hand, the current iteration of Harvard is several magnitudes more nefarious than Moby Dick. Harpoon it, and all other Ivies will fall in line.
Betting against Harvard has not been a good idea, historically.
If Trump more narrowly focused on DEI, I think this could have worked, the way law firms are dropping DEI. A sizable constituency within these institutions wouldn’t mind if Trump gave them an excuse to cut DEI. But this was several bridges too far.
I don't understand all the nuances of the Harvard imbroglio and the legalisms I find boring but I do support the stripping of federal funds from left-wing universities that hate me. Harvard is a despicable, morally corrupt institution unworthy of federal funds. I like subsidizing Harvard about as much as I like subsidizing the defense of Europe thirty-three years after the USSR ceased to exist.
I understand the feeling but science research funding is separate from University funding. The people who do basic science research and cancer research are responsible for funding their labs and mostly do so through government grants. These are not the people who initiate or even necessarily favor the DIE nonsense.
I don't mind cancer research but I am sure some of the science research is woke like why African-American women breastfeed their children at lower rates than caucasian(deliberately lower case) women.
I get it, but large government systems are always a little corrupt. Everyone wants to wet his beak or feel one of his own is wetting his beak. I figure, it could be a lot worse. That's not to argue we shouldn't strive for reform. I'm just not ready to get excited about tearing down the whole system.
By now, a lot of medical research is woke. If the central premise is there is NO human biodiversity, every disparital outcome will be recoined as systemic racism.
I am sure if given a go-ahead, Big tech can organize a move for basic science research (including cancer) to some more favorable pastures in red states. It's not like those researchers are locked with chain and some tremendously heavy weight to Cambridge, MA. If their grants move to Texas or Wyoming, they would move there. Manhattan project had no problem moving the people to New Mexico in the early 1940s.
I’m about to leave for a couple of weeks in the UK and France to visit our old neighborhoods and friends. I may have to hide behind my illness if asked “why is Trump doing (______)” ?
Could you not be honest with them? One of the reasons Europe is in the grip of TDS is because nobody challenges it. Although you might be surprised how many ordinary Europeans support Trump. Even more so when you just talk about the policies and disconnect them from the man.
Aren't they supposed to be reciprocal tariffs? Meaning that Europeans have tariffs on American goods? Maybe they could lower theirs so that we could lower ours?
Canada tried to negotiate with Trump on tariffs. Trump swung wildly this way and that and paid no attention to the agreement he himself negotiated in his first term. I began to get seriously turned off Trump at that point.
I’ve turned completely against him now. Me and a large fraction of the Canadian population.
I find that Europeans you might encounter in places of leisure are often not stupid, which unfortunately tends to correlate with disliking the Trump administration.
From what I've seen on UK podcasts, even the professional journalists are ill- or mis-informed about the US and especially Trump. A year ago, they thought Biden was fine.
Sure, but that was elite misinformation, which is a related but separate issue. We live in a post-Liberation Day era. The admin broadcast their comprehension of economics for the world to see. Consequently, the correlation between IQ and approval of Trump is only trending towards being even more pronounced.
Any honest person paying attention could see Biden was impaired in 2020.
It's also pretty obvious now that the initial, pulled-from-ass tariff rates were designed to shock the system, force negotiations, and isolate China, and the scheme seems to be working, so far. Crazy like a fox, as the saying goes.
I don't believe it's horrible to punish the over-leveraged now and then, despite my father losing his patrimony (and his third of my late mother's) on margin calls in 2008-9, thanks to the wicked step-monster.
“The system seems to be working so far” just seems like grasping at straws, to be honest. China is clearly pissed off, Europe is confused, no one understands what Trump wants, and Navarro has come off looking like an idiot to anyone who comprehends this issue.
Kind of confused about this comment – it should be pretty obvious at this point that Biden was indeed impaired for much of 2024 if not earlier, and that media outlets failed to cover this story responsibly. Agreement on this ground-level truth feels like a pretty basic necessity for discussion at this point, just as one must admit that the administration has no overarching strategy for (or understanding of) tariff policy. I feel like I’m fighting a war on two fronts here ;)
I think this is really hard to gauge. The media around the world hate Trump, and perhaps most other western countries' elites, whose interests those media represent, hate Trump, but not everybody does.
I've lived my whole adult life outside the USA, and I get all kinds of reactions to Trump from ordinary people I meet. If you went to the UK at the moment, for example, the overwhelming problems they face from immavasion, crime, and speech suppression means you'd find plenty of Trump supporters.
The problem is that it's very hard to break through media filters. People outside the USA don't get a very clear picture of Trump and his actions, or of any other US-specific issues, because their media sources are picking up US stories from CNN and the NYT and packaging them for their own readers/viewers. And CNN and the NYT are likewise picking up foreign stories from the BBC, the CBC (you're Canadian, right?), ABC in Australia, and so on, and funneling them back into the USA. It's a hall of gaslit mirrors, to mix my metaphors grotesquely, but I think you know what I mean.
This is why the UK's Daily Mail is so important -- it's the single most effective English-language media source breaking through this cosy mutual-narrative-reinforcing arrangement at the moment. In many ways it's pretty terrible, and it tends to fall back on comfy bromides on some subjects, but it does include many 'counter-narrative' stories every single day. It's also addictive to follow -- I know quite a few establishment-friendly Brits, for example, who feel they really should be *seen* reading the Guardian or the Times, but who consume the DM ravenously in secret. And to bring this back around to the original topic -- they don't hate Trump.
In addition to their own inexperience in government, it must be difficult for Trump appointees to find competent staff they can trust not to undermine them or their agendas. They won't find many in the DC area.
Two people who worked for Hegseth before were just shown the door at the Pentagon for leaking, allegedly.
"...it must be difficult for Trump appointees to find competent staff they can trust not to undermine them or their agendas."
Sounds like this is what might have happened here. Incompetence, or Sabatoge?
It's certainly a question worth asking. The irony here is that incompetence is everywhere.
Which explains why an "A" at Harvard today stands for "Average." That's been the case for a long time. As Jaques Barzun once said, in so many words, the university never recovered from the campuses disturbances that swept the country from 1965 to 1968. And he said that in 1980! The great cultural historian and behavioral theorist Morse Peckahm officially pronounced the university dead in a speech given in NYC in front of a bunch of financial big wigs and university presidents. That was in 1971! Put bluntly, the country is going the way of the university. Both are unsavable.
Yep. The slyest thing the anti-Trump forces did was make it totally disrespect able to work for Trump. We can have as much disdain as we like for politicians and people who like government work, but we have to admit that sucessfully navigating the government is a very different skill set.
This is the main reason I think Trump needed to win for the good of the country. I'm displeased with what he's been doing this term but long run I think we are better off if people think there could be consequences for using creative prosecution against their political enemies. That New York prosecutor is being hounded now for a mortgage fraud case that looks as approximately tacky-tac and what she went after Trump for. Maybe that could be the end of it and we can move on to loyal opposition stuff.
Most administrations must rely on junior personnel from the previous party administration to help run the new administration. But Dubya's minions aren't friends of Trump. I'm willing to bet most of the Bush family voted for Kamala Harris out of hateful spite.
I’m a bit baffled by the tone of the letter to Harvard. It’s true that the administration is not fully formed and many people will have to be taught to remember that they aren’t the boss. Still better than the first Trump reign.
The NYT surprised me. Just think, the same media outlet that couldn’t,in nearly four years, find out who was running the country while Biden was running his pants is all over the timing and content of this letter. Perhaps the Times should look into the matter from both sides. Is Harvard using grants to study cancer or promote an agenda that has nothing to do with research. Just asking, NYT.
No. The government grants are. Same source with the same expectation of outcomes. I’m against the whole non- profit system. Seen it up close and personal. It means they can play by different rules, much less accountability. If a company researches they can be held liable. Harvard is exempt from that control. The taxpayer has very limited access to the research that they are paying for. But they do have standards for receiving the funds that must be met. Like, not discriminating on admissions or hiring or grant applications.
If they do it is the constitutional duty of the department of education or DOJ to enforce the laws of the land.
Gender-affirming "care" for minors and the neurotic? Raced-based hiring and promotion? Enforcing covid panic and orthodoxy, since alternative treatments would stop the vaxes' emergency approvals? Plenty of agendas to choose from.
You brought up hospitals and agendas. FDA rules don't allow for emergency approval if another safe and effective treatment is available. I don't know about Canada, but the US medical establishment, of which Harvard is a leader, suppressed or stymied availability and studies of other possible treatments, such as Ivermectin and prophylactic HCQ.
Frankly, I don't care much about the racial preferences, though elite schools deserve the shiv. In the long run, DEI only ruins their brand, and bright whites and Asians are better off elsewhere.
I don’t know much about the cancer research but I know very much about the Statin research and development at the same university. The agenda was that a pill developed by a pharmaceutical company and partially funded by US taxpayers was put out as a miracle cholesterol drug. I’ll leave that conclusion to others.
What I do know is how much money was made by the company. They could have named a campus building Lipitor Hall.
I just have a hard time trusting the pharma companies, the government grant process and Harvard.
I don't know the history of statin research but I'm with you on the implied non-miracle drugness of it all. Every few years I read the research on cholesterol and statins for people with relatively normal levels (used to be > 220, now for no reason they recommend them if your total is over 200) and ever few years I come away unimpressed. I mean, yes they show some effect, but they report that effect in a kind of mathematically dishonest way to make it seem larger than it is. Once you remind yourself of publication bias the whole thing seems like a big nothing.
Say that in a room full of doctors and they look at you like one of those anti vax nutters.
I had a friend who was married to the head of Harvard Medical School. Her take on the relationship between Harvard and the Pharmaceutical Industry was damning. The government grants were directed to research favorable to the company and in line with political considerations of the researchers.
Millions went for research to show the benign effect of Agent Orange on humans. Just a herbicide. That hasn’t worked out well at all. I have first hand knowledge of that fiasco.
I shouldn't be surprised. What was the Sinclair Lewis line about the difficulty of getting a man to understand something when his living depends on the opposite? Or maybe it was someone else.
I remember back in the 1990s some bold doctor proved that peptic ulcer disease was almost completely caused by the bacterium h. Pylori and within a few years (seemed to me) we had the crisis in dysplasia in Barret's esophagus.
Yes. We were told it was safe, tested in University labs. Learned not to trust the government or the people who are funded by the government. The grant givers want the research to confirm the conclusions they have already recached. They usually do or the grant money goes away.
Sorry if I sound cynical but I have seen it too often
The very smart people at Harvard don’t seem to remember that the Supreme Court has already told them that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional and yet they have promised to continue to do so. I hope the Feds drop the hammer on them.
Right and they now seem to be backtracking. Hopefully there will be much more of that soon. They seem to be grasping disaster from the jaws of potential victories.
You can't really blame the "task force on antisemitism" for not expecting 100% executive backing on everything they do. They certainly got it in the past. And they are still getting it now in the present case. And they—or their fellow travelers—had no problem at all remaking the leadership of the entire Ivy League last year in a fit of pique at not getting enough sympathy from (mostly foreign) university students after the October 7 attack in Israel.
The case against Harvard and the other prestige universities is not some arcane inside-baseball technicality. The universities have been flagrantly violating antidiscrimination law for years—decades actually. Their hedge-fund-uber-alles management makes a mockery of their charity status. And their faculty and curriculum are openly and gratuitously hostile to ordinary Americans. Everyone who is not on their cash or prestige payroll already hates them, so it's not like the White House has to recruit the public to their cause.
In reality, Harvard's federal funding and nonprofit status should have been stripped a long time ago. Trump's just the guy who finally pressed the button, even if he did it primarily for a foreign ethnic lobby. Sure, Harvard will fight back (or "throw down"—as if anyone at Harvard was ever anywhere near a real street fight, lol), but you are one among many people who has documented how unimpressive today's "elites" really are. They've been coasting beneath unearned, inherited laurels for a long time.
Maybe Trump'll back down, as he generally does on everything else (if only the media's fearmongering over "Trump the Dictator" were actually justified!), but if so, it won't be because Harvard's limp wrists suddenly stiffened for a street fight, it will be because Trump is actually just a big softy (and an Ivy League grad himself).
Another rookie move is treating the NYT as “news” of any kind.
Team Trump is doing fine. Dershowitz for example (self promoting prick that he is) thinks Trump has already won and the rest is just face saving kayfabe by Harvard.
One thing I don’t understand about this story: if it was a mistake, why is Trump doubling down by new threats, like removing Harvard’s tax-exempt status?
Several problems with your answer. The antisemitism charge isn’t new: several students already brought a lawsuit against Harvard. From what I’ve read, the situation has improved considerably.
The Harvard endowment is made up of money other people have given to the university (typically in wills) usually with strings attached specifying how it can be used. It’s not a piggy bank,
The research money is being spent on science and medical research, much of it carried out at area hospitals.
The question isn't whether or not Harvard does anything nice with its funding. Harvard receives billions of dollars of US taxpayer money with the very big string attached that they must obey federal antidiscrimination law. They have egregiously flouted this for years. It's long overdue for them to be called to account.
Financially, despite enjoying tax exempt status, Harvard's vast endowment functions more as a predatory hedge fund, whose rapaciousness not only makes for-profit hedge funds blush but has almost certainly logged many violations of FCPA, anti-money laundering statutes, and even Mann Act-type violations. You can look up Larry Summers's foreign hijinks or Steve's posts on the Rape of Russia for details if you're interested.
As far as the "antisemitism charge" not being new, no, it's not. It's also not actually illegal even if it were true. The irony is that it is this flimsy whining from the people most privileged at Harvard that has finally triggered the potential penalties that Harvard skirted for so long.
Antisemitism isn't illegal but some actions students take can be motivated by antisemitism and be illegal.
That said, every time I've read an article over the past year about antisemitism on campus it's vague reports of Jews being intimidated and mostly just about young idiots supporting the cause of the (arguably) worst people on earth. It's not illegal to be stupid and choose the wrong team. The prisons would never be big enough.
Anyway the principle of not automatically defending the administration is a good one. They need to be held accountable just like anyone else in government.
Whether the email/letter was a mistake or not, attacking Harvard is another one of the 80/20 policy areas where Trump is on the side of 80% of the American population. Harvard has a $50 billion endowment, they get around $8 billion per year from the federal government (for what?), and they have been violating federal law (the Civil Rights Act) for the past fifty years. There is not a single normal American citizen who is on Harvard's side, so I think that sticking a shiv in Harvard's guts is sound policy (just like deporting rapists and murderers who also happen to be illegal aliens is good 80/20 policy). Forcing these issues also serves to bring out the fact that Democrat politicians really do care more about keeping Harvard on government welfare and rapist illegals in the country than they do about normal American citizens.
> "An official on the administration’s antisemitism task force ..." <
LOL. That there even is an "Anti-Semitism" task force is sad and pathetic. If there is one group that essentially can not be publicly criticized in America it is Jews. (Even the now sainted blacks could be criticized as long as it is over "culture" like shooty young men or illegitimacy.) As Steve has pointed out, Jews could benefit from more criticism.
We finally have a "conservative" administration showdown with the leftist universities. Is it over biased racialized admissions? Over toxic anti-white, anti-Western ideological indoctrination? Over massive parasitic bloat funded by our tax dollars? No. It is over students protesting against Israel!
America finally has its Hitler and ... he loves pandering to the Jews.
Yep that's what everyone in history has always claimed right before they start murdering or expelling their Jews. You can complain all you want about how downtrodden the white gentiles are in American society, but you know deep in your heart that's just the losers sniping at the cool kids. You know you and your descendants are in no physical danger.
Ah, the sweet voice of reason amongst the roar of idiots.
Thanks for the details on the mistake.
In this case, I think it’s a good mistake. Harvard needs reform and the public us unlikely to be sympathetic with poor mouthing from an institution sitting on a $53 billion endowment.
Harvard isn't going to reform. They are the people who were behind DEI in the first place. It didn't result out of error, and it didn't result out of stupidity.
Well, then they can struggle on without taxpayer dollars. Win-win for the administration.
However, these “noble” academics worship the almighty dollar above all else, and Harvard hired some Trump insider lawyers to represent it, playing a classic double game. My prediction remains that they will work out a compromise.
And here was me hoing that no compromise was possible, lol
Oh, please. The first rule of wisdom is that you don’t believe articles in the New York Times!
Pathetic attempt to defend Trump.
Trump’s winning. He’s beating Harvard. It’s not difficult. You people just sound like cowards.
It doesn’t matter about me or what I sound like. Many people including some Trump voters, do not think he’s winning.
Well, there is a bit of Captain Ahabian with Donald, but on the other hand, the current iteration of Harvard is several magnitudes more nefarious than Moby Dick. Harpoon it, and all other Ivies will fall in line.
Betting against Harvard has not been a good idea, historically.
If Trump more narrowly focused on DEI, I think this could have worked, the way law firms are dropping DEI. A sizable constituency within these institutions wouldn’t mind if Trump gave them an excuse to cut DEI. But this was several bridges too far.
Trump seems to be in some sort of blitzkrieg mode.
https://babylonbee.com/news/oh-no-trump-already-solved-every-problem-as-president-elect-and-now-will-have-nothing-to-do-as-president/
I don't understand all the nuances of the Harvard imbroglio and the legalisms I find boring but I do support the stripping of federal funds from left-wing universities that hate me. Harvard is a despicable, morally corrupt institution unworthy of federal funds. I like subsidizing Harvard about as much as I like subsidizing the defense of Europe thirty-three years after the USSR ceased to exist.
"Organizations with billions in endowments" kind of tops my list of "Organizations that don't need federal funding."
I understand the feeling but science research funding is separate from University funding. The people who do basic science research and cancer research are responsible for funding their labs and mostly do so through government grants. These are not the people who initiate or even necessarily favor the DIE nonsense.
I don't mind cancer research but I am sure some of the science research is woke like why African-American women breastfeed their children at lower rates than caucasian(deliberately lower case) women.
I get it, but large government systems are always a little corrupt. Everyone wants to wet his beak or feel one of his own is wetting his beak. I figure, it could be a lot worse. That's not to argue we shouldn't strive for reform. I'm just not ready to get excited about tearing down the whole system.
By now, a lot of medical research is woke. If the central premise is there is NO human biodiversity, every disparital outcome will be recoined as systemic racism.
I am sure if given a go-ahead, Big tech can organize a move for basic science research (including cancer) to some more favorable pastures in red states. It's not like those researchers are locked with chain and some tremendously heavy weight to Cambridge, MA. If their grants move to Texas or Wyoming, they would move there. Manhattan project had no problem moving the people to New Mexico in the early 1940s.
Well, that's probably true.
My brother!
I’m about to leave for a couple of weeks in the UK and France to visit our old neighborhoods and friends. I may have to hide behind my illness if asked “why is Trump doing (______)” ?
Could you not be honest with them? One of the reasons Europe is in the grip of TDS is because nobody challenges it. Although you might be surprised how many ordinary Europeans support Trump. Even more so when you just talk about the policies and disconnect them from the man.
Putting huge tariffs on European goods generally does not go down well with Europeans.
Aren't they supposed to be reciprocal tariffs? Meaning that Europeans have tariffs on American goods? Maybe they could lower theirs so that we could lower ours?
They are not entirely in response to tariffs. They are in response to trade deficits which are not always the result of tariffs.
Nope. They have nothing to do with other countries tariffs at all. It’s 100% based on trade deficits.
And yet most of the European countries and the EU itself fell over themselves to make a deal.
No they didn’t. Plus the EU bargains as a bloc.
A legal theory that is breaking down in front of our eyes.
Canada tried to negotiate with Trump on tariffs. Trump swung wildly this way and that and paid no attention to the agreement he himself negotiated in his first term. I began to get seriously turned off Trump at that point.
I’ve turned completely against him now. Me and a large fraction of the Canadian population.
I find that Europeans you might encounter in places of leisure are often not stupid, which unfortunately tends to correlate with disliking the Trump administration.
From what I've seen on UK podcasts, even the professional journalists are ill- or mis-informed about the US and especially Trump. A year ago, they thought Biden was fine.
Sure, but that was elite misinformation, which is a related but separate issue. We live in a post-Liberation Day era. The admin broadcast their comprehension of economics for the world to see. Consequently, the correlation between IQ and approval of Trump is only trending towards being even more pronounced.
Any honest person paying attention could see Biden was impaired in 2020.
It's also pretty obvious now that the initial, pulled-from-ass tariff rates were designed to shock the system, force negotiations, and isolate China, and the scheme seems to be working, so far. Crazy like a fox, as the saying goes.
I don't believe it's horrible to punish the over-leveraged now and then, despite my father losing his patrimony (and his third of my late mother's) on margin calls in 2008-9, thanks to the wicked step-monster.
“The system seems to be working so far” just seems like grasping at straws, to be honest. China is clearly pissed off, Europe is confused, no one understands what Trump wants, and Navarro has come off looking like an idiot to anyone who comprehends this issue.
“Elite misinformation” according to MAGA = accurately reporting facts.
Kind of confused about this comment – it should be pretty obvious at this point that Biden was indeed impaired for much of 2024 if not earlier, and that media outlets failed to cover this story responsibly. Agreement on this ground-level truth feels like a pretty basic necessity for discussion at this point, just as one must admit that the administration has no overarching strategy for (or understanding of) tariff policy. I feel like I’m fighting a war on two fronts here ;)
Nope they’re well informed. That’s why they don’t like him. He applied tariffs to an island whose only inhabitants are penguins.
If he hadn't, China or some other bad actor would use it as a pass-through. They don't play by Western rules.
Penguins are very sneaky and can’t be trusted at all! 🐧
But doesn't that island exports goods to the USA? People work there.
Nope no one lives there but penguins! 🐧🐧🐧
The whole world outside the US dislikes Trump. Not 100% of the population but it’s high.
I think this is really hard to gauge. The media around the world hate Trump, and perhaps most other western countries' elites, whose interests those media represent, hate Trump, but not everybody does.
I've lived my whole adult life outside the USA, and I get all kinds of reactions to Trump from ordinary people I meet. If you went to the UK at the moment, for example, the overwhelming problems they face from immavasion, crime, and speech suppression means you'd find plenty of Trump supporters.
The problem is that it's very hard to break through media filters. People outside the USA don't get a very clear picture of Trump and his actions, or of any other US-specific issues, because their media sources are picking up US stories from CNN and the NYT and packaging them for their own readers/viewers. And CNN and the NYT are likewise picking up foreign stories from the BBC, the CBC (you're Canadian, right?), ABC in Australia, and so on, and funneling them back into the USA. It's a hall of gaslit mirrors, to mix my metaphors grotesquely, but I think you know what I mean.
This is why the UK's Daily Mail is so important -- it's the single most effective English-language media source breaking through this cosy mutual-narrative-reinforcing arrangement at the moment. In many ways it's pretty terrible, and it tends to fall back on comfy bromides on some subjects, but it does include many 'counter-narrative' stories every single day. It's also addictive to follow -- I know quite a few establishment-friendly Brits, for example, who feel they really should be *seen* reading the Guardian or the Times, but who consume the DM ravenously in secret. And to bring this back around to the original topic -- they don't hate Trump.
Here in Canada Trump has become wildly unpopular thanks to the tariffs and threats to annex the country.
Sure, but there's a lot of world outside Canada.
In addition to their own inexperience in government, it must be difficult for Trump appointees to find competent staff they can trust not to undermine them or their agendas. They won't find many in the DC area.
Two people who worked for Hegseth before were just shown the door at the Pentagon for leaking, allegedly.
"...it must be difficult for Trump appointees to find competent staff they can trust not to undermine them or their agendas."
Sounds like this is what might have happened here. Incompetence, or Sabatoge?
It's certainly a question worth asking. The irony here is that incompetence is everywhere.
Which explains why an "A" at Harvard today stands for "Average." That's been the case for a long time. As Jaques Barzun once said, in so many words, the university never recovered from the campuses disturbances that swept the country from 1965 to 1968. And he said that in 1980! The great cultural historian and behavioral theorist Morse Peckahm officially pronounced the university dead in a speech given in NYC in front of a bunch of financial big wigs and university presidents. That was in 1971! Put bluntly, the country is going the way of the university. Both are unsavable.
Yep. The slyest thing the anti-Trump forces did was make it totally disrespect able to work for Trump. We can have as much disdain as we like for politicians and people who like government work, but we have to admit that sucessfully navigating the government is a very different skill set.
Not just disrespectable, they become targets of the media, lawfare, and corrupt law enforcement. Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, Giuliani, it's a long list
This is the main reason I think Trump needed to win for the good of the country. I'm displeased with what he's been doing this term but long run I think we are better off if people think there could be consequences for using creative prosecution against their political enemies. That New York prosecutor is being hounded now for a mortgage fraud case that looks as approximately tacky-tac and what she went after Trump for. Maybe that could be the end of it and we can move on to loyal opposition stuff.
Nah!
Most administrations must rely on junior personnel from the previous party administration to help run the new administration. But Dubya's minions aren't friends of Trump. I'm willing to bet most of the Bush family voted for Kamala Harris out of hateful spite.
I’m a bit baffled by the tone of the letter to Harvard. It’s true that the administration is not fully formed and many people will have to be taught to remember that they aren’t the boss. Still better than the first Trump reign.
The NYT surprised me. Just think, the same media outlet that couldn’t,in nearly four years, find out who was running the country while Biden was running his pants is all over the timing and content of this letter. Perhaps the Times should look into the matter from both sides. Is Harvard using grants to study cancer or promote an agenda that has nothing to do with research. Just asking, NYT.
They’re funding a lot of medical research, much of it at hospitals in the area. A hospital is an odd place to “promote an agenda.”
Check out the Children’s Hospital in Houston for the most blatant example.
Harvard isn’t funding a hospital in Houston, are they?
No. The government grants are. Same source with the same expectation of outcomes. I’m against the whole non- profit system. Seen it up close and personal. It means they can play by different rules, much less accountability. If a company researches they can be held liable. Harvard is exempt from that control. The taxpayer has very limited access to the research that they are paying for. But they do have standards for receiving the funds that must be met. Like, not discriminating on admissions or hiring or grant applications.
If they do it is the constitutional duty of the department of education or DOJ to enforce the laws of the land.
All I can say is a great deal of successful science and medical research came from government funding.
I would be interested to see that information.
Gender-affirming "care" for minors and the neurotic? Raced-based hiring and promotion? Enforcing covid panic and orthodoxy, since alternative treatments would stop the vaxes' emergency approvals? Plenty of agendas to choose from.
The letter ordered Harvard to stop using DEI. I don’t know what you mean by Covid “panic.” Nor your digs about vaccines.
You brought up hospitals and agendas. FDA rules don't allow for emergency approval if another safe and effective treatment is available. I don't know about Canada, but the US medical establishment, of which Harvard is a leader, suppressed or stymied availability and studies of other possible treatments, such as Ivermectin and prophylactic HCQ.
Frankly, I don't care much about the racial preferences, though elite schools deserve the shiv. In the long run, DEI only ruins their brand, and bright whites and Asians are better off elsewhere.
Ivermectin is not an effective treatment for Covid. Canada relied on vaccines and had a noticeably lower death rate than the US.
I don’t know much about the cancer research but I know very much about the Statin research and development at the same university. The agenda was that a pill developed by a pharmaceutical company and partially funded by US taxpayers was put out as a miracle cholesterol drug. I’ll leave that conclusion to others.
What I do know is how much money was made by the company. They could have named a campus building Lipitor Hall.
I just have a hard time trusting the pharma companies, the government grant process and Harvard.
I don't know the history of statin research but I'm with you on the implied non-miracle drugness of it all. Every few years I read the research on cholesterol and statins for people with relatively normal levels (used to be > 220, now for no reason they recommend them if your total is over 200) and ever few years I come away unimpressed. I mean, yes they show some effect, but they report that effect in a kind of mathematically dishonest way to make it seem larger than it is. Once you remind yourself of publication bias the whole thing seems like a big nothing.
Say that in a room full of doctors and they look at you like one of those anti vax nutters.
I had a friend who was married to the head of Harvard Medical School. Her take on the relationship between Harvard and the Pharmaceutical Industry was damning. The government grants were directed to research favorable to the company and in line with political considerations of the researchers.
Millions went for research to show the benign effect of Agent Orange on humans. Just a herbicide. That hasn’t worked out well at all. I have first hand knowledge of that fiasco.
I shouldn't be surprised. What was the Sinclair Lewis line about the difficulty of getting a man to understand something when his living depends on the opposite? Or maybe it was someone else.
I remember back in the 1990s some bold doctor proved that peptic ulcer disease was almost completely caused by the bacterium h. Pylori and within a few years (seemed to me) we had the crisis in dysplasia in Barret's esophagus.
Agent Orange? As was used in Vietnam?
Yes. We were told it was safe, tested in University labs. Learned not to trust the government or the people who are funded by the government. The grant givers want the research to confirm the conclusions they have already recached. They usually do or the grant money goes away.
Sorry if I sound cynical but I have seen it too often
The very smart people at Harvard don’t seem to remember that the Supreme Court has already told them that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional and yet they have promised to continue to do so. I hope the Feds drop the hammer on them.
But the demands went well beyond discontinuing DEI.
Right and they now seem to be backtracking. Hopefully there will be much more of that soon. They seem to be grasping disaster from the jaws of potential victories.
The demand that JD Vance get a weekly column in the Harvard Lampoon was simply beyond the pale.
😎
You can't really blame the "task force on antisemitism" for not expecting 100% executive backing on everything they do. They certainly got it in the past. And they are still getting it now in the present case. And they—or their fellow travelers—had no problem at all remaking the leadership of the entire Ivy League last year in a fit of pique at not getting enough sympathy from (mostly foreign) university students after the October 7 attack in Israel.
The case against Harvard and the other prestige universities is not some arcane inside-baseball technicality. The universities have been flagrantly violating antidiscrimination law for years—decades actually. Their hedge-fund-uber-alles management makes a mockery of their charity status. And their faculty and curriculum are openly and gratuitously hostile to ordinary Americans. Everyone who is not on their cash or prestige payroll already hates them, so it's not like the White House has to recruit the public to their cause.
In reality, Harvard's federal funding and nonprofit status should have been stripped a long time ago. Trump's just the guy who finally pressed the button, even if he did it primarily for a foreign ethnic lobby. Sure, Harvard will fight back (or "throw down"—as if anyone at Harvard was ever anywhere near a real street fight, lol), but you are one among many people who has documented how unimpressive today's "elites" really are. They've been coasting beneath unearned, inherited laurels for a long time.
Maybe Trump'll back down, as he generally does on everything else (if only the media's fearmongering over "Trump the Dictator" were actually justified!), but if so, it won't be because Harvard's limp wrists suddenly stiffened for a street fight, it will be because Trump is actually just a big softy (and an Ivy League grad himself).
Another rookie move is treating the NYT as “news” of any kind.
Team Trump is doing fine. Dershowitz for example (self promoting prick that he is) thinks Trump has already won and the rest is just face saving kayfabe by Harvard.
One thing I don’t understand about this story: if it was a mistake, why is Trump doubling down by new threats, like removing Harvard’s tax-exempt status?
See my previous comment.
https://open.substack.com/pub/stevesailer/p/one-reason-i-dont-always-rush-to?r=18q98a&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=110307015
Several problems with your answer. The antisemitism charge isn’t new: several students already brought a lawsuit against Harvard. From what I’ve read, the situation has improved considerably.
The Harvard endowment is made up of money other people have given to the university (typically in wills) usually with strings attached specifying how it can be used. It’s not a piggy bank,
The research money is being spent on science and medical research, much of it carried out at area hospitals.
The question isn't whether or not Harvard does anything nice with its funding. Harvard receives billions of dollars of US taxpayer money with the very big string attached that they must obey federal antidiscrimination law. They have egregiously flouted this for years. It's long overdue for them to be called to account.
Financially, despite enjoying tax exempt status, Harvard's vast endowment functions more as a predatory hedge fund, whose rapaciousness not only makes for-profit hedge funds blush but has almost certainly logged many violations of FCPA, anti-money laundering statutes, and even Mann Act-type violations. You can look up Larry Summers's foreign hijinks or Steve's posts on the Rape of Russia for details if you're interested.
As far as the "antisemitism charge" not being new, no, it's not. It's also not actually illegal even if it were true. The irony is that it is this flimsy whining from the people most privileged at Harvard that has finally triggered the potential penalties that Harvard skirted for so long.
We all agree on the DEI thing.
Not saying you’re wrong in your accusations about the endowment but Trump didn’t mention any of those items in his letter.
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Letter-Sent-to-Harvard-2025-04-11.pdf
No anti-semitism isn’t illegal. Also Trump is now examining people’s social media for further hints of anti-semitism.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-antisemitism-immigrants-social-media
Antisemitism isn't illegal but some actions students take can be motivated by antisemitism and be illegal.
That said, every time I've read an article over the past year about antisemitism on campus it's vague reports of Jews being intimidated and mostly just about young idiots supporting the cause of the (arguably) worst people on earth. It's not illegal to be stupid and choose the wrong team. The prisons would never be big enough.
It may not be a piggy bank, but it’s certainly untaxed.
Anyway the principle of not automatically defending the administration is a good one. They need to be held accountable just like anyone else in government.
Whether the email/letter was a mistake or not, attacking Harvard is another one of the 80/20 policy areas where Trump is on the side of 80% of the American population. Harvard has a $50 billion endowment, they get around $8 billion per year from the federal government (for what?), and they have been violating federal law (the Civil Rights Act) for the past fifty years. There is not a single normal American citizen who is on Harvard's side, so I think that sticking a shiv in Harvard's guts is sound policy (just like deporting rapists and murderers who also happen to be illegal aliens is good 80/20 policy). Forcing these issues also serves to bring out the fact that Democrat politicians really do care more about keeping Harvard on government welfare and rapist illegals in the country than they do about normal American citizens.
for what? Without looking it up I'd guess the overwhelming majority of that is for research.
Correct. The US began funding science and medical research via universities after WW2. Very successful.
> "An official on the administration’s antisemitism task force ..." <
LOL. That there even is an "Anti-Semitism" task force is sad and pathetic. If there is one group that essentially can not be publicly criticized in America it is Jews. (Even the now sainted blacks could be criticized as long as it is over "culture" like shooty young men or illegitimacy.) As Steve has pointed out, Jews could benefit from more criticism.
We finally have a "conservative" administration showdown with the leftist universities. Is it over biased racialized admissions? Over toxic anti-white, anti-Western ideological indoctrination? Over massive parasitic bloat funded by our tax dollars? No. It is over students protesting against Israel!
America finally has its Hitler and ... he loves pandering to the Jews.
Yep that's what everyone in history has always claimed right before they start murdering or expelling their Jews. You can complain all you want about how downtrodden the white gentiles are in American society, but you know deep in your heart that's just the losers sniping at the cool kids. You know you and your descendants are in no physical danger.
Sir, you are a disingenuous twit.
I know you are but what am I?