With all due respect to our surviving friends in the Grateful Dead, things are actually shakin’ on Shakedown Street, because it seems that our elite leadership, for whatever reason, does not get that when you try to make a deal with the unappeaseable, your agreement is subject to change. However, there is some good news on that front.
Harvard University’s President Alan M. Garber told his faculty last week that the news report stating the university had signed a $500 million deal with the Trump White House was not true. This is good news, because such a deal would likely include the following:
Faculty groups identified several concessions they would see as particular areas of concern — including ceding control of faculty hiring and student admissions decisions, appointing a third-party monitor, or sharing extensive data about students and employees with the federal government.
I covered this recently right here on First Draft, about how the Ivy League universities seem to be unaware of the concept of a mob shakedown. My prescription is bingeing The Sopranos followed by a dose of Goodfellas, and then if that’s not enough, read just about any true-life account of what happens with people who think they can appease mobsters.
If you are a university president, or a senior partner at a law firm, or a CEO at a company, it might be helpful to read this Vanity Fair piece by Sam Tanenhaus. President Semi-Sentient Rotting Carrot’s leadership style was formed by deep immersion in the world of New York organized crime and corrupt real estate. Shaking people down is m.o., and no amount of thinking you are a very smart elite leader who is beneath such nonsense will help you avoid it.
Of course, the Paper of Record, aka The New York Times, is demonstrating a level of cluelessness (debatable if it’s cluelessness or intentional) that we have grown to expect on this issue.
One of the few media outlets that still clings to basic standards of factchecking goes out of its way to celebrate & amplify one of the many conservative agitprop shops that shit on those standards every day. Great work everyone.
In this soft-focus profile of the “conservative news outlet,” a description seemingly designed to drive Adrastos up the wall, the Times gives us this little slice of delusion:
The Trump administration has made fighting antisemitism a central plank in its education agenda and vowed to punish institutions that it says have allowed antisemitism to proliferate. Many of Dr. Marschall’s targets have landed on a list of 60 schools that officials have said they are investigating. (Princeton did not comment on the complaint or the investigation.)
Dr. Marschall considers the government’s attention to his complaints another victory for the conservative newspaper he edits, Campus Reform, and its longtime mission to expose what he calls leftist bias and abuse on college campuses around the country.
Again, none of this is “conservative,” no matter how hard the deep thinkers at The Old Gray Lady want you to think it is, as everything that Adrastos pointed out three years ago at the previous link still remains. But the idea that ANY of this has a bit to do with anti-Semitism is grotesque, and the Times claiming that it does is yet another reason why these disgusting psychos have gone from fringe to mainstream. The call is coming from inside the house, and the fact that they published this is ironic, because they’ve given the far-right cover for roughly 10 years now.
The idea that the Trump White House is so focused on anti-Semitism is pretty easy to take apart. I’ll also add that he really doesn’t seem to care much about other types of equality, of course.
I feel like this is an intentional strategy by the administration to create real division. By ignoring other forms of bigotry, even if this were a sincere combat of anti-Semitism, it sets up a preferred minority. This could create animus toward Jewish people, or at least the illusion of animus. Anyone who speaks up against this, even if they are Jewish, would be labeled anti-Semitic, and if the university doesn’t crack down hard on them, then Trump the mobster would inflict additional demands. Also, given that “anti-Semitism” has been broadly defined as being against Netanyahu and the Likud party, as the genocide in Gaza worsens, this would benefit the divide-and-conquer strategy of the Trump administration.
In any event, the news out of Harvard is actually a good thing, and let’s hope it stays that way.
The last word goes to The Grateful Dead, of course.