By Michael Goodwin. Media: Nypost
Demonstrators rally on Cambridge Common in a protest organized by the City of Cambridge calling on Harvard leadership to resist interference at the university by the federal government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 12, 2025.
REUTERS
The Democrats have finally found the leader of their resistance to President Trump.
No, it’s not Sen. Cory Booker and his self-serving 25-hour floor speech.
Nor is it Sen. Bernie Sanders or his first-class-flying socialist partner, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Or any of the misguided mayors and governors shielding migrant criminals from deserved deportation.
And it’s certainly not the idiotic vandals defacing Teslas with swastikas.
Instead, the honor of leading the resistance against the president of the United States goes to Harvard.
Why Harvard?
Because the New York Times, the spokesman and ringleader for the radical left, says so.
The Gray Lady has appointed Harvard to the job.
Bring it on!
In an article that hails the Ivy League school’s rejection of any White House penalties over eruptions of antisemitism on its campus, Times writer Elisabeth Bumiller approvingly quotes several people who praise Harvard’s stance and declare that it carries political significance way beyond the actual issues involved.
Her larger point is clear: This is war with an administration the left loves to hate. Bring it on!
Bumiller and Harvard arrive at this conclusion only by following a tortured path. The inversion of facts is so bizarre that they end up echoing pre-Civil War slaveholders’ claims about states’ rights.
In this case, Harvard and its defenders act as if antisemitic campus rallies are a civil right for the school instead of a violation of Jewish students’ civil rights!
And, unlike Columbia, which had the good sense to accept federal demands, Harvard is ready to fight.
In their letter rejecting intervention, Harvard’s lawyers say it “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
As others have noted, what would we call this blanket defense if the students who had been harmed were black instead of Jews?
In refusing even to negotiate, the so-called best and brightest have opened themselves to massive financial penalties.
The blowback started immediately, with the White House announcing it has frozen $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and canceled a $60 million contract.
The president also raised the prospect of ending Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
Overall, Harvard is said to get about $9 billion a year from Washington, with the vast bulk going to affiliated hospitals and medical centers.
Even allowing for the school’s endowment of about $52 billion, its decision to put discretionary federal money at risk in defense of antisemitic protests seems especially dumb.
So much for the best and brightest.
A call to arms
Bumiller’s article, like everything else in the Times when it comes to Trump, is an activist’s call to arms.
Among the Harvard defenders she cites is Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, whom Bumiller calls “a rare critic of the White House among university administrators,” which is absurd since they are a dime a dozen.
She’s thrilled he welcomed Harvard’s decision to fight and especially his line that, “It’s like when a bully is stopped in his tracks.”
See what she did there — Trump is a bully and he’s been stopped!
She also cites J. Michael Luttig, who tells her, “This is of momentous, momentous significance,” as if one momentous wasn’t enough.
She calls Luttig a prominent former federal appeals court judge “revered by many conservatives,” while ignoring the fact that he is a well-known Trump hater.
Apparently she couldn’t find a university leader or judge who thinks the president is doing the right thing.
Bumiller also reads minds, as when she claims that “the fight with Harvard … is one that President Trump and Stephen Miller, a powerful White House aide, want to have.”
She doesn’t cite a source for how she knows that, but she doesn’t need sources. See, all Times writers can read Trump’s mind and divine his motive, which is always malevolent.
Still, Bumiller is onto something when she makes this observation: “A high-profile court battle would give the White House a platform to continue arguing that the left has become synonymous with antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech.”
‘We like it, so do it’
She’s correct, though with one error: A court battle with Harvard isn’t necessary to prove that.
There is zero doubt that the left is a font of “antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech.”
It’s a font of anti-Americanism, too.
Harvard is just one of many examples. Columbia, Penn, Yale, Cornell, Brown, Cal Berkeley, Michigan and scores of other schools are guilty of the same transgressions.
More broadly, the entire process of Democrats forming a resistance is especially strange now.
Trump and Republicans won sweeping victories in the election where they spelled out what they intended to do.
By being so specific about so many things, winning meant voters were giving them a mandate: We like it, so do it.
Now that the victors are doing it, outrage on the left is erupting, as if the president is an interloper springing surprises on a nation of victims.
Nonsense. In fact, it’s just another bit of media misinformation to depict Trump’s moves as coming out of nowhere.
Just because the Times and other leftist media intensely dislike him doesn’t make his actions illegitimate.
The larger problem for the resisters is that they have no coherent agenda of their own — and not much of a following. Trump’s rapid success at sealing the border after Joe Biden left it open for four years cemented his reputation for action and keeping his word.
Similarly, the decision by the media and some Dems to go ballistic over radical foreigners who align with terror groups having their green cards and visas revoked is another political loser.
Allowing men in women’s sports is also wildly unpopular, but the Dems are going down with that ship, too.
Inaction and silence
In that sense, the Harvard case is instructive. Biden and congressional Dems said little and did nothing as disgraceful episodes of antisemitism roiled many campuses.
Their inaction and silence were especially outrageous given the horror of Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,250 people, including more Jews than on any single day since the Holocaust.
Most of the dead were civilians, as were the majority of the 250 hostages taken back to the hellholes of Gaza. Incredibly, 556 days later, 59 are still being held, with just 24 thought to be alive.
The defenders of this death cult shamed Harvard and other universities with their protests, calling for the elimination of Israel and harassing Jewish students. For Harvard to now claim the government has no right to penalize it compounds the injustice.
There is, of course, an easy solution. Harvard can reject all federal funds, as some schools, including Hillsdale College, do, and free itself from Washington.
The one thing it cannot do is have it both ways. If it takes federal money, it has to play by federal rules.
The trade-off is so simple that even Harvard should be able to understand it.
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