Rethinking The Woman Fencer And The Trans Guy

When I first posted about this on Thursday, I looked at the available links, did what I could to read between the lines, and surmised, I think correctly, that women’s fencer Stephanie Turner had already gamed out her potential encounter with the trans male, to the extent of having a friend on hand to videotape it. But I still had the feeling I was missing something. In my post, I cited a link that quoted Ms Turner saying she'd already protested men posing as women fencers on other occasions.

But what about USA Fencing? What did they have planned in advance of the event? In my post, I had another link quoting Ms Turner saying, "I was not aware Mr. Sullivan was registered until the night before the tournament." I begsn to wonder if the whole encounter was in fact set up by USA Fencing, and Ms Turner was simply planning a response to a scenario that had already been planned -- to wit, she would encounter Mr Sullivan and either compete or be forced to concede -- and everyone on the USA Fencing side, Sullivan and the referee, already knew his lines as well.

Turner had deliberately avoided competing at tournaments where there would be an athlete she believed was transgender, she told Fox News. But in this case, she registered before her opponent.

After taking a knee, Turner’s opponent approached her, thinking she might be hurt, according to Turner and the video. The two then talked for a few seconds as a judge stepped out of the frame. While the competitors’ conversation cannot be heard clearly in the video, Turner said her opponent told her she had a right to compete.

“There is a policy that acknowledges me as a woman, so I am allowed to fence, and you will get black-carded,” Turner recalls her opponent said.

. . . Turner was disqualified from the day’s tournament because of her refusal to participate in the bout and “not related to any personal statement,” USA Fencing said. “A fencer is not permitted to refuse to fence another properly entered fencer for any reason. Under these rules, such a refusal results in disqualification and the corresponding sanctions.”

I'm starting to get the feeling that the whole situation was a setup. USA Fencing apparently anticipated that Turner, known for her opposition to trans men fencing women, wouldn't show up to the tournament, even thnough she'd registered, if she knew Sullivan was registered -- so USA Fencing had him register at the last minute, when they were sure Turner had already done so and would show up. (My guess is that somebody on the inside warned Turner this had happened, and Turner had the chance to get ready, calling her friend with the video camera.)

What feeds my suspicion is this link at Breitbart, which carries this post at X:

🤺Damien Lehfeldt, Chair of USA Fencing, has used his own social media to humiliate women who dare advocate for a sex-based category in women's fencing.

This private email exchange is one he shared to his IG when a woman wrote him in defense of female fencers after this article… https://t.co/QszxomnqZX pic.twitter.com/lUQVPQyYQa

— ICONS (@icons_women) April 3, 2025

The link contimues,

According to Reduxx, Lehfelt previously said “transgender women are women” when he posted an article to his blog, The Fencing Coach, and even told women to believe that giving male “athletes a sense of belonging and a will to live is more powerful than medals and competitive glory.”

The problem was that Turner had apparently been tipped off that Sullivan would be there, and she was ready with her own lines and a friend with a camera. And let's face it, she was savvy. The Cherry Blossom fencing tournamemnt took place on March 28-29. The encounter between Turner, Sullivan, and the referee that was recorded on videotape presumably took place at that time. However, the episode didn't hit CNN until April 4. Once that happened, there was apparently a quiet panic:

According to Fox News, Wagner College confirmed that Redmond Sullivan exited the [women's fencing] team more than a week following the viral controversy at the Cherry Blossom Open.

“Sullivan is shown to have competed for the Wagner women’s team in the foil competition in several meets during the first half of the 2024-25 season. Sullivan participated on the men’s team during the 2023-24 season, scoresheets from meets during the season showed,” Fox News reported.

Wagner College seems to have sensed the implications even before the Deparment of Education made them plain:

The Department of Education’s (DOE) newly formed Title IX team is launching an investigation into a USA Fencing incident after a female fencer was disqualified for refusing to compete against a transgender-identifying male.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the investigation during an interview on Fox News’s Faulkner Focus, the outlet reported.

. . . Department of Education spokeswoman Julie Hartman told the outlet that the University of Maryland [bears] “responsibility” for the incident because it hosted the event. She said Wagner College is also responsible because it previously rostered a transgender-identifying fencer.

“The nation watched as a female competitor bravely took a knee and forfeited an inherently unfair fencing match after discovering that her opponent was a male. No woman should have to recuse herself from a match that she trained diligently for because she fears for her safety. As a tournament host, University of Maryland has a responsibility to follow Title IX by not allowing males to compete in female competitions and occupy female-only intimate facilities,” Hartman told the outlet.

“Similarly, Wagner College has a responsibility to not allow males on female rosters. Unlike the Biden administration, which weaponized Title IX contrary to its meaning to deny female athletes their civil rights, the Trump Administration’s Department of Education and the Department of Justice’s Title IX Special Investigations Team will not allow recipients of federal funding to deny women’s equal opportunity protections under the law.”

During my brief academic career, one basic thing I learned was that administrators fear two things, although they're also scared of a great many others: losing federal funds and controversy. I suspect that the University of Maryland has also been quietly speaking with USA Fencing, which goes along with the other inquiries from Texas Attorney General Paxton and Senator Cruz. I would also suspect that USA Fencing's board of directors has also been quietly chatting with Damien Lehfeldt, its chair, whose term expires this year in any case.

As far as I can see, Ms Turner had a record of protesting trans men in fencing, USA Fencing tried to set her up in this encounter, she was a step ahead of them with a friend and a camera, and she was savvy with media as well. USA Fencing was completely outmaneuvered and now risks its relationships with the universities that host its functions.

Dire Wolves Are Nothing New

I first started seriously looking into dire wolves sometime last year, when the researchers on the Secret of Skinwalker Ranch show claimed to have found the skull of a recently deceased dire wolf in a creek on the ranch, and a guy in a park ranger-style outfit from a local museum sorta-kinda claimed it was authentic. Now, I view Skinwalker Ranch as pure entertainment, but out of curiosity, I looked up dire wolves to see how likely this would be. My main question was why only a single skull was ever found, when, according to Wikipedia,

It can be assumed that dire wolves lived in packs of relatives that were led by an alpha pair.

So if there are living dire wolves roaming the Utah mountains, they would be found in packs, their remains would be more common, and the packs woould be both visible and audible. So I dismissed the idea of a live dire wolf as having the same credibility as the rest of Skinwalker Ranch; it's fun entertainment. But before I dropped my research, I discovered that there have been numerous efforts to breed dogs to resemble dire wolves:

Healthy, long-lived giant companion dogs with a wild look delivered right to your front door!

We are the only certified American Dirus dog breeder in the world!

Working in strict accordance with DireWolf Dogs, Int'l standards and Dire Wolf Project morals and ethics, we adhere to all guidance from the founder of the breed, Lois Schwarz.

Any dire wolf that isn't bred by us is a fake, immoral and unethical! Accept no substitutes!

So what are we to make of the news that dire wolves, real ones, not artfully bred dogs, are back from extinction? Frankly, I think this is about as credible as the park ranger wannabe at Skinwalker Ranch announcing that the skull the boys found in the creek is a real dire wolf. Apparently the public consciousness harbors a dire wolf fascination that nobody was aware of.

My first question is why the revived dire wolves are white, when the public imagination, as shown in the web image of the "dire wolf" dog breed at the top of this post, is a more wolflike gray. According to Time,

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.

What part of the "deft genetic engineering" and rewriting "the genetic code of the common gray wolf" turned the new dire wolves white?

For instance, on the left is an artist's concept of a dire wolf from several years ago. Why does it look so different from Romulus and Remus in color, fur length, and bulkiness? I can't avoid thinking that the deft genetic engineers who came up with Romulus and Remus were working from a mental image just as much as the artist who came up with the dire wolf in the drawing -- they just had different ideas of a dire wolf, and as far as I can see, neither is more accurate than the other.

Johanna Berkman asks at The Free Press,

And yet the central question could not be hashtagged away: Are his [Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal Biosciences] three newly minted pups actual dire wolves? Or just a lookalike simulacrum?

Absolutely the former, insists the somewhat frenetic Lamm: “There’s never been an animal with this number of edits. There’s never been an animal with ancient DNA in it. The fact that we took a 72,000-year-old skull and a 13,000-year-old tooth and engineered puppies?”

But when I pressed him to answer his own question, he said, “Matt, do you want to go?” and turned to the also bearded Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer, who was with the dire wolves when they were born.

“It’s a dire wolf,” said James. “It is a dire wolf. It looks like a dire wolf. It has dire wolf DNA. There’s nobody in the world that has studied dire wolf genetics more than the people that you’re on this call with. And we have more data than anybody’s ever published on the dire wolf. And what we’ve done is taken the key core phenotypes and the associated genotypes of the dire wolf and then used that to edit a dire wolf. So, this animal looks and acts, and is a dire wolf. And it fills the same ecological niche.”

Wait a moment. There's never been an animal with this number of edits. An edit, I can attest as an editor, is a tweak on something. A human being is starting with a gene from a modern wolf and tweaking it. I've heard it explained that this is no different in principle from what ordinary breeders do -- they look for a trait and breed animals to emphasize it; it's just done in the lab.

Matt James says, "what we’ve done is taken the key core phenotypes" -- I remember from high school biology that a phenotype is simply what the animal looks like. But we've never seen what an actual ancient dire wolf looks like, have we? Up to Romulus and Remus, the best guess of the paleontologists was something more like the short-haired brown image just above. What made Matt James, editor in chief of Romulus and Remus, make swuch a different call?

For that matter, the dog breeders at the Dire Wolf Project are in effect editors as well, just using old-fashioned breeding to modify DNA instead of doing it in the lab. But their idea of a dire wolf seems different from either of the other images we have.

I'm actually with the people at the Dire Wolf Project: accept no substitutes.

"If I Don’t Do What My Bosses Tell Me To Do, I Get fired."

Actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump's agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense.

⬇️⬇️ https://t.co/ITFeGw0kUf pic.twitter.com/MO68aje1X2

— Sean Parnell (@SeanParnellATSD) April 11, 2025

The removal of Pituffik. Greenland Space Base commander Col. Susannah Meyers from her position was big news this morning:

Just days after Vice President JD Vance's March visit to Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, the installation commander sent out an email to the base distancing it from Vance’s criticism of Denmark and its oversight of the territory, Military.com has learned.

Col. Susan Meyers, the commander of the 821st Space Base Group who also oversees the Pentagon's northernmost military base, sent a March 31 message to all personnel at Pituffik seemingly aimed at generating unity among the airmen and Guardians, as well as the Canadians, Danes and Greenlanders who work there, following Vance's appearance. She wrote that she "spent the weekend thinking about Friday's visit -- the actions taken, the words spoken, and how it must have affected each of you."

"I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base," Meyers wrote in the email, which was communicated to Military.com.

The emailed remarks, confirmed as accurate to Military.com by the Space Force, mark a rare pushback within the ranks of the Trump administration's repeated criticism and critiques of NATO members and longtime allies. A source familiar with the email said it was sent to all base personnel, including those from Denmark and Greenland on the installation.

The implication of her remarks was that the Pituffik Space Base has a policy vision that differs from the White House and presumably the Department of Defense, and it was her obligation to express that vision. One question I have is why she didn't use words more or less equivalent to this in her letter of resignation from the Space Force instead of waiting over a week to get fired, which she must certainly have understood was what would happen.

This brought me to what seems to be a similar case, the resignation of Melanie Krause, the acting head of the Internal Revenue Service, from her position after only six weeks on the job:

The acting head of the Internal Revenue Service will resign in the wake of a deal struck on behalf of the agency that will see it share tax data on undocumented immigrants.

Melanie Krause, a commissioner at the IRS who is the third person to serve as its chief since the start of the year, will pack up her desk as part of the deferred resignation program offered by the Trump administration, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday.

. . . Krause decided to resign in an apparent protest of the Trump administration’s actions, sources told the Washington Post.

Well, at least she didn't send an e-mail to everyone at the IRS saying the concerns of the US administration didn't reflect the IRS. But Tom Knighton's Substack raises issues over her case that apply as well to Col Myers:

I find it interesting how many people would rather be without a job than do as they’re instructed by the Trump administration. Then they can go on and pretend to be the victim because they couldn’t do what their boss told them to do.

If I don’t do what my bosses tell me to do, I get fired.

. . . Yes, I find it a strange hill to choose to die on, also. Don’t get me wrong on that. Being upset over not being able to protect illegal immigrants’ tax records—if there are any for some of them—and quitting a high-paying job like that seems odd to me.

But everyone can see that. No one needs me to point it out to them.

The fact that there are so many people in the federal workforce who think they’re special, that they’re better than the rest of America, is something that needs to be pointed out.

Col Myers strikes me as the same sort of case. She's worked hard to become commander of a US base in Greenland, which she presumably recognizes is a projection of US power as a factor in its global security strategy, whatever the legal and diplomatic specifics of its presence on Greenland's soil. It's hard to think she wasn't -- or if she wasn't, she should have been -- aware of the consistent US strategic interest since the early 19th century in acquiring Greenland as a territory.

Recent recapitulations of US Gtreenland policy have often put it in the context of the Mexican War of 1846-1848, which was as controversial at the time as the Viet Nam War in the 1960s. A number of US Army officers, including then-Lieutenant U S Grant, were strongly opposed to the war, but they followed orders, carried out their duty, and neither resigned in protest nor made any other sort of public objection. Another well-known US general, Dwight Eisenhower, followed a common practice in the officer corps and simply didn't vote as long as he was in the Army. After all, what if he'd voted for Hoover or Landon or Willkie but had to obey orders from Roosevelt?

Tom Knighton thinks things have somehow changed, and he even ties it to the problem that so many federal workers don't actually do useful work:

They’re workers in a machine, and they’re just as replaceable or expendable as anyone else. Many of them are more so than the rest of us because there are just so many of them currently in place doing absolutely nothing.

This is worth ruminating over. If you're paid to come in to the office -- or, these days, not even to come in -- and do nothing identifiable in return, of course you must be entitled to a permanent job. Why else are they paying you? Did this possibly govern what seems to have been Col Myers's assumption that she could just stay in her position after sending that e-mail?

The Female Fencer Who Refused To Compete Against A Male

It looks as though USA Fencing stepped into a public relations disaster it could have avoided:

A female fencer was disqualified from a competition for refusing to compete against a transgender opponent, USA Fencing said in a statement to ABC News on Thursday.

The incident occurred last month at a USA Fencing-sanctioned regional tournament where fencer Stephanie Turner decided to remove her mask and take a knee instead of competing against Redmond Sullivan, a transgender woman.

Following the act of protest, the referee of the University of Maryland match -- which was not an NCAA tournament -- issued a black card to Turner, removing her from the competition.

USA Fencing's current transgender and non-binary athlete policy was enacted in 2023 and allows athletes to participate in sanctioned events "in a manner consistent with their gender identity/ expression, regardless of the gender associated with the sex they were assigned at birth."

While Ms Turner made extensive public statements explaining her position, neither Redmond Sullivan nor the University of Maryland, where the match took place, would comment:

ABC News has reached out to Redmond Sullivan for a comment. The University of Maryland declined to comment on the incident.

USA Fencing was notably squishy after the episode:

"We understand that the conversation on equity and inclusion pertaining to transgender participation in sport is evolving," USA Fencing said in a statement, adding that the organization "will always err on the side of inclusion, and we're committed to amending the policy as more relevant evidence-based research emerges, or as policy changes take effect in the wider Olympic & Paralympic movement."

In fact, it appears that USA Fencing walked into a situation it should have tried to avoid -- Ms Turner had already scripted her role:

“I knew what I had to do because USA Fencing had not been listening to women’s objections,” she recalled later on Fox News.

“I am a woman, and I have an athletic disadvantage to men,” she said, suggesting her opponent should compete in the mixed division.

. . . Turner had asked a friend to take the video of her protest and disqualification, she told Fox News. It drew widespread attention after being posted by the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, an advocacy group that opposes trans athletes.

It looks as though USA Fencing should have had an idea of what would happen. According to the first link above,

"As a woman fencing in a women's tournament, I do not believe men should fence in my category. I was not aware Mr. Sullivan was registered until the night before the tournament. I prayed about it and decided if Mr. Sullivan and I were to fence face-to-face, then I would peaceably protest by taking a knee," Turner said, misgendering Sullivan.

Turner said she has previously refused to fence in tournaments in which she knew a transgender athlete was going to compete, including the 2023 Summer Nationals.

“I want to thank God for trusting me with this mission to fight for female-exclusive sports and putting me in a place to effectively protest," Turner added.

As far as I can see, USA Fencing must have been aware that Sullivan was registered, was transgender, that Ms Turner was registered, had a history of protest, and would potentially compete against Mr Sullivan, and that if they were paired in particular, some controversy would result, which would be avoidable. And the result of the controversy was completely unnecessary for USA Fencing or universities where the tournaments take place:

USA Fencing is under investigation for "potential violations of Texas state law," according to a statement released Tuesday by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Paxton issued a Civil Investigative Demand, a legal tool used by government agencies to collect information, after the organization disqualified competitor Stephanie Turner when she took a knee last month to protest competing against transgender opponent Redmond Sullivan.

. . . “USA Fencing is on the wrong side of history and potentially the wrong side of the law due to violations of Texas consumer protection laws,” Paxton said in a press release. “USA Fencing’s policies are not only potentially illegal, but also deeply insulting to the young women like Stephanie Turner who have sacrificed so much and dedicated countless hours to compete and succeed in competitions. I will fight to stop these unfair policies, and I will never back down from defending the integrity of women’s sports.”

Paxton, of course, has just announced a primary campaign against sitting Republican Sen John Cornyn, and USA Fencing has set itself up to be the first target of his campaign. And Sen Cruz has now joined the fight:

Sen. Ted Cruz, who is the Chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, sent a letter – which was obtained exclusively by OutKick – demanding that the governing body retract that policy and cease allowing males to compete in women's fencing.

"It has come to my attention that USA Fencing is still permitting men to compete in women’s fencing in violation of federal law," Cruz wrote.

Although USA Fencing is an independent organization that does not receive federal funds, they are the National Governing Body (NGB) for fencing in the United States. According to Cruz, that means they must comply with federal law – notably, President Donald Trump's executive order that bans transgender athletes from women's sports – or risk losing their NGB status.

"To remain [the fencing NGB, USA Fencing] must comply with United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee rules and procedures, its statutory obligations to protect women, and President Trump’s recent Executive Order (EO) on Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports. If it does not, and instead continues to put women at risk, Congress may be forced to terminate USA Fencing’s NGB certification," the letter continues.

OutKick reached out to USA Fencing for comment on Cruz' letter. The NGB declined to comment specifically on the letter and, instead, a spokesperson pointed us to the statement that was previously released[.]

Nor do the universities that host USA Fencing tournaments want the additional excuse for the Trump administration to cut more of their funding. Organized sports and boards of trustees do not want controversy. I suspect heads will quietly roll in the wake of this -- but it was entirely foreseeable and avoidable by USA Fencing, which should have been aware of the situation it created for someone who was fully prepared to exploit it and in fact had a history of doing so.

Turner received a $5,000 sum and a "courage" award from a sports clothing vendor in the wake of the episode, but this pales in comparison to the damage she's done to USA Fencing, which may well turn out to be comparable to the damage Dylan Mulvaney did to Bud Light. The other smart player here was Redmond Sullivan, who seems to have recognized immediately how quickly he could have become a figure equivalent to Mulvaney or Lia Thomas and promptly disappeared from view. If he's really smart, he'll revert to a former name and detransition.

What I Learned From The Alumni Trustee Movement

Every now and then, calls appear for greater involvement of university alumni in governance and decisionmaking at their respective schools. I'm not entirely sure why alumni are especially qualified to do this, especially in light of the general decline in educational standards -- if the value of a four-year degree is decreasing, why should the university seek out the guidance of former students who are its own low-quality product?

After a lifetime, I'm able to ask that question now. I didn't ask that question 25 years or so ago, when I got involved in the alumni trustee movement at Dartmouth. I think the best argument I heard was in effect that membership on university boards is dominated by very wealthy donors who are representing largely plutocratic interests, and the selection process bypasses potential candidates who may represent other points of view.

In the case of Dartmouth, the unique history of its board offered a potential test case:

The system of alumni balloting to determine a nominee dates to the late nineteenth century. In 1876, Dartmouth's Board of Trustees resolved to fill some upcoming vacancies with alumni. Vacancies were rare at the time, however, and the number of alumni seated was small; most of the members of the Board were still elderly non-alumni clergymen who were seen as theologically and educationally conservative. In 1891, in what came to be known as "The 1891 Agreement", the Board of Trustees resolved to elect five trustees who had been nominated by the alumni of five years' standing. The nomination process would be handled by the Association of Alumni of Dartmouth College, of which every matriculated student becomes a member automatically upon graduation. Soon after the Board issued its 1891 resolution, five members resigned to open seats for the new nominees, and Dartmouth's first effective means of granting alumni influence on the composition of its Board was under way[.]

Not mentioned here is the circumstance that Dartmouth at the time was undergoing a financial crisis, and the board reached out to alumni for donations. The so-=called "alumni trustees" were estalished in return for the financial help, which was the essence of the "1891 Agreement". Throughout the 20th century, the nomination process for the alumni trustees was gradually modified, but until 1980, there was no effective dissagreement among trustees of any constituency.

Alumni trustees were nominated by a body called the Alumni Council, which appears always to have been an old boy network. In 1980, however, a San Diego urologist, Dr John Steel, successfully campaigned for nomination and election to the board as an alumni trustee via a previously unused petition process outside the old boy network. In yesterday's post, I referred to what I called called the Second Dartmouth Alumni Trustee Rebellion of the mid 2000s; the one initiated by Dr Steel was the first.

Steel certainly showed that this could be done, and the Second Rebellion could not have taken place without Steel's pathfinding example. I interviewed Steel for The Dartmouth Review about 2005. Steel was generally aligned with the Review's founders, and his campaign in 1980 was contemporary with the Review's founding. He appears to have been close to then-Dartmouth English professor, National Review senior editor, and founding Dartmouth Review faculty advisor Jeffrey Hart.

By Steel's own account, he was hardly an insurgent. He was a prosperous physician, so the much more wealthy charter trustees didn't see him as a threat, although he was fully aware that he flew commercial to board meetings, while the charter trustees had private jets. And Steel had personal qualities that made it easier for him to get along with everyone on the board. He saw there was a general consensus among members to do the best thing for the institution, and insofar as he exerted influence, it was as a member of the overall consensus.

It appears that after Steel, things settled down again, and there were no new petition candidates for alumni seats on the board until 2004, when Silicon Valley billionaire T J Rodgers ran for the alumni nomination as a petition candidate, only the second to do so after Steel. Rodgers was much more vocal, but I'm not sure if he had a definite program, and in any case, he was only one vote on the board, which operated by consensus.

But this provided an opening for two more petition candidates in 2005. That year, Todd Zywicki, an ambitious young law professor building his career, and Peter Robinson, a Jeffrey Hart protégé who'd become a Reagan White House speechwriter on Hart's influence, were nominated and elected. Robinson, a C-lister in the conservative movement ever since, claims to have written the line, "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" for Reagan's 1987 address at the Brandenburg Gate -- and that's it. That was his one accomplisment.

Zywicki did neither himself nor the alumni trustee movement any favors. He characterized himself as an insurgent candidate, and his style was characterized as "open and oppositional". Mattters came to a head in 2007 when he addressed a conservative conference, making the point that he was a member of the Dartmouth board, and opened himself to allegations that he violated board policy:

On November 26, [2007], The Dartmouth published a column called In Violation of a Trustee’s Duty, by Bill Montgomery of the Dartmouth Class of 1952. The article called for Todd Zywicki’s punishment or forced resignation as a member of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees because of remarks made by Zywicki while speaking at the 2007 Pope Center Conference.

According to Montgomery, Zywicki’s “most egregious statement” called former Dartmouth president James O. Freedman “a truly evil man.” As Zywicki explained in a powerful defense, this was not his own phrase but a quotation that he failed to attribute to Jeffrey Hart. Zywicki also apologized for its use as too excessive.

. . . Montgomery’s main argument for punitive actions against Zywicki suggests that Todd’s right to free speech ended when he became a Dartmouth trustee: “if he was only speaking for himself, he could speak as he pleased…when he became a member of the Dartmouth board, Zywicki accepted the obligation to follow board guidelines for conduct as clearly spelled out in the Statement on Governance and Trustee Responsibilities.”

While Zywicki wasn't removed from the board immediately, the trustees subsequently denied him a second term when his first term expired in 2009. A second controversy developed around another petition trustee, Stephen Smith, who was elected to the board in 2007. His term expired in 2011, and soon after its expiration,

Professor Stephen F. Smith, who teaches criminal law and criminal procedure at Notre Dame Law School, stands accused of a serious crime.

According to the South Bend Tribune, Professor Smith faces one count of domestic battery, a class D felony. He’s accused of striking and kicking his wife at their home, in an incident that allegedly took place back in June.

Professor Smith doesn’t fit the profile of the typical defendant in a domestic violence case. How many DV defendants have clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court? How many have graduated from Dartmouth College, where Smith served as a trustee, and the University of Virginia School of Law, where he once taught?

It appears that, like they did with Zywicki, the board did not approve a second term for Smith, and he was off the board by the time the violence took place. But there can be little question that the Second Dartmouth Alumni Trustee Rebellion of the mid-2000s simply didn't produce serious candidates, unlike the first one of 1980. The biggest problem was that grandstanding, ambitious board members like Zywicki and Smith simply didn't have personal styles or personal qualities that allowed them to work successfully with wealthy people who flew in private jets and made a point of staying out of the news.

I also suspect that none of the Second Rebellion candidates had much of an agenda beyond self-promotion. Again, this didn't play well with plutocrats who employed publicists to keep them out of the nees, not in it. A third factor was that Jeffrey Hart, the force behind both rebellions, and whose friends and protégés made up the candidate pools, was slipping into dementia in the 2000s -- by 2008, he endorsed Obama for president, and as a sometime contributor to The Dartmouth Review, I had the sense that the staff was covering for him.

At some point when the whole project had collapsed and both Zywicki and Smith were effectively in disgrace, somebody approached me to see if I'd run as a petition candidate. I couldn't decline fast enough.

When I first became interested in the project, I must not have remembered Ferdinand Lundberg, who if he'd been available would have told me that univeristy boards are the creatures of the very wealthy, who use them to control large blocks of stock via effective proxy ownership. A few ego-tripping alumni board members will be just a small irritant that can be slapped away. Best not to have bothered.

"The Reactionary Fringe Has Won."

This is in the pull quote from David Brooks's latest at The Atlantic. Yesterday it was apparently the new article for the day that The Atlantic deemed worthy of exempting from its paywall, so I skimmed it. Intending to discuss it in greater detail today, I found that it's back behind the paywall, and the task of starting a free trial so I could go back to it proved too daunting.

I think the gravamen of his argument is that there are polite Ivy Leaguers, who run the world, and impolite ones, who are trying to take over. He makes the point that just about everyone in the Trump cabinet has an Ivy degree, but they're terrible people like Pete Hegseth (Princeton), Bobby Kennedy (Harvard), and Scott Bessent (Yale). Brooks tries to tie both Trump and Elon Musk to Penn, but neither has degrees from Penn's College of Arts and Sciences, the traditionally Ivy style liberal-arts school there, but The Wharton School, the business school, instead.

He then goes to some length to tie the impolite, Trump-style Ivy Leaguers to, of all things, The Dartmouth Review. I know a thing or two, though hardly everything, about The Dartmouth Review, certainly more than David Brooks. I was a frequent contributor in the early to mid-2000s during what might be called the Second Dartmouth Alumni Trustee Rebellion, to the point that I was briefly approached to submit my name for nomination as an alumni trustee to serve on the Dartmouth board (I immediately and firmly declined).

I was an undergraduate well before the rise of The Dartmouth Review and its attendant controversies in 1980, and in fact, since I only wrote for them decades after that, I was unique as a contributor who wasn't a current or recent undergraduate. I was certainly familiar with the Review's reputation, built on episodes like the 1989 Dartmouth Review v. Dartmouth College case:

On February 24, 1988, the Review published an article entitled "Dartmouth's Dynamic Duo of Mediocrity", criticizing courses taught by two Dartmouth professors. One of those criticized was William Cole, a black professor in the music department. Apparently there is a history of ill will between Cole and the Review. Prior to publication of the February 24 article, Review members made two attempts to contact Cole by telephone to give him an opportunity to reply to the article. Cole hung up on the students the first time and allegedly became "abusive and insulting" during the second call.

. . . On February 25, 1988, the following events took place which gave rise to the disciplinary action against the individual plaintiffs. Plaintiffs Sutter, Baldwin, and Quilhot, and one other member of the Review staff approached Professor Cole after he had finished teaching a class to give him a copy of the editorial policy and to demand the apology in person. Plaintiff Quilhot held a camera, and plaintiff Sutter brought a tape recorder. There ensued an approximately five-minute altercation between the plaintiffs and Cole, during which Cole became extremely agitated. . . . Quilhot began taking pictures of Professor Cole, at which point Cole allegedly grabbed his arm and broke the camera flash. . . . Cole then noticed the tape recorder, and Sutter acknowledged he was taping the incident. Sutter complied with Cole's request that he stop taping. Plaintiffs then left the room.

The next day, on the complaint of Professor Cole, the Dartmouth Committee on Standards ("COS") charged the student plaintiffs with "harassment, violation of the right to privacy and disorderly conduct."

. . . The COS found plaintiffs guilty of the charges against them, and the following penalties were imposed: plaintiffs Sutter and Baldwin were suspended from classes until the fall of 1989, and plaintiff Quilhot was suspended from classes until the fall of 1988. The students appealed the COS decision to Dean Shanahan, who upheld the decision.

All of the student plaintiffs sued, and the judge eventually ruled in their favor. This is The Dartmouth Review Brooks has in mind that's now infested the Ivy League. But here's Brooks's problem. The film National Lampoon's Animal House was released in 1978, when the Review was hardly a glimmer in anyone's eye:

The film is about a trouble-making fraternity whose members challenge the authority of the dean of the fictional Faber College.

. . . it was inspired by stories written by Miller and published in National Lampoon, which were based on Ramis' experience in the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity at Washington University in St. Louis, Miller's Alpha Delta Phi experiences at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and producer Reitman's at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Miller, the Dartmouth alum, wrote the original stories on which the script was based, and when I first saw the film shortly after it was released, I instinctively felt it was about Dartmouth, well before anyone noted that Miller based his stories there. I thought Dean Wormer was the spitting image of Dean Thaddeus Seymour, who in fact spent the rest of his life insisting that he wasn't the model for Dean Wormer. According to the Wikipedia link,

In 2001, the United States Library of Congress deemed National Lampoon's Animal House "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Heck, I was in the ROTC at Dartmouth until they determined that I wasn't officer material. Faber College's Cadet Commander Douglas C. Neidermeyer was something straight out of Dartmouth ROTC. This is all to say that there were elements at Dartmouth, and probably elsewhere in the Ivy League, that long predated The Dartmouth Review. Just for starters, I think about the bon vivant writer Lucius Beebe, who managed to get himself thrown out of both Harvard and Yale, Tom Lehrer, a Harvard math prodigy better known as a writer of satirical songs, or for that metter, well-known Harvard dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, or Columbia dropouts like Whittaker Chambers or Jack Kerouac, or Princeton dropout F Scott Fitzgerald.

In fact, if pressed, I would relate Trump and his Ivy League cabinet to this strain of the Ivy League -- noting, however, that Bluto Blutarsky in Animal House might also be a putative Dartmouth undergraduate placed on double secret probation by Dean Wormer in the spirit of the 1989 Dartmouth Review plaintiffs -- except there's a better Trump archetype than anyone in the Ivy League, real or imagined, polite or otherwise.

This is the neo-noir anti-hero:

[N]eo-noir films are characterized by making audiences cheer for someone who very well may be the bad guy—cynical antiheroes abound.

These would include Jason Bourne in the eponymous franchise, or even more so, John Wick. Another would be the Batman depicted in The Dark Knight Rises. A recurring theme in several such films is that the anti-hero, like John Wick or Bruce Wayne, is retired, but for one reason or another, he's forced to resume his old role. But this in turn refers to the retired gunslingers in great Westerns like Shane or The Unforgiven, who are also driven by circumstances to return to their former roles as hired assassins.

Trump is turning out to be a very similar figure. He should have been, let's face it, a retired one-term president on the line of a Jimmy Carter or Poppy Bush. Whether this fits the true biographical circumstances, it's easy to imagine Trump, driven by the oppobrium and criminal cases against him, undergoing the sort of transformation that drove John Wick or Bruce Wayne to reprise his former role, but this time in an even more fearsome, Nietzschean way, in a sort of cynical realm beyond righteousness. Trump 2.0 owes something to Bruce Wayne or John Wick.

Trump is the reactionary fringe like Bluto Blutarsky is just a dreamy sophomore. He's a politico-cultural force of nature. This is not The Dartmouth Review, which Brooks belittles as producing Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza. Ingraham and D'Souza are not Bluto Blutarski. The Review, for that matter, was never Bluto Blutarsky, who came before it and will long outlast it. David Brooks isn't even any one of them.

The Guardian's Exclusive On The Signal Chat

The Guardian ran an "exclusive" yesterday that had nothing new on a two week old story but continued to get everything wrong:

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

. . . According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.

The mistake went unnoticed until last month when Waltz sought to add Hughes to the Signal group chat – but ended up adding Goldberg’s number to the 13 March message chain named “Houthi PC small group”, where several top US officials discussed plans for strikes against the Houthis.

The Guardian story then repeats Waltz's initial explanation that Goldberg’s number had somehow been “sucked” into his phone and seems to use the complex chain of contact updates outlined above to lend support to the story.

The problem is that the Guardian's version -- which appears to have been planted by Waltz allies within the White House -- simply doesn't fly. For starters, it implies that Signal is just a text messaging app:

Waltz also appears to have also engendered some sympathy from inside Trump’s orbit over the group chat because the White House had authorized the use of Signal, largely because there is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies, two people familiar with the matter said.

Previous administrations, including the Biden White House, did not develop an alternative platform to Signal, one of the people said. As a temporary solution, the Trump White House told officials to use Signal as they had done during the transition instead of regular text-message chains.

But there are other text messaging apps, inclulding WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, and Viber. The important thing about Signal is that it has a strong commercial-level security feature. According to techradar,

What sets Signal apart is its robust privacy features: it’s regarded as the benchmark for secure mobile communications. Which makes Signalgate all the more ironic, even though it has little to do with the app's technical security.

All messaages are encrypted on the sender's phone, transmitted over the web in encrypted form, and decrypted on the receiver's phone. But in order for the text to be decrypted, the app must be on the on the receiver's phone. As I noted a week ago, Signal would have had to be installed on Goldberg's phone, which would have involved:

• Downloading Signal to the phone and running the install program
• Registering a phone number and waiting for a verification code
• Entering the verification code and finishing the onboarding process
• Editing a user profile and notifying a chat admin of it.

There is no way this could have happened just by "including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number" into a text message mistakenly sent to Waltz by Brian Hughes. Goldberg, someone on Goldberg's staff, or possibly someone on Waltz's staff, would have had to have access to Goldberg's phone, installed Signal on it, registered the phone with Signal, verified it, and then created or edited a Signal user profile for Goldberg, notifying Waltz, or someone on Waltz's staff, that this was Goldberg's profile.

Then Waltz, or someone on Waltz's staff, would have had to add Goldberg's profile, knowing it was Goldberg, to the Houthi chat. There is no way around this -- after all, this is strong commercial-level security. At least two people had to be involved, likely more than two, and there are presumably audit trails of every action. This is, for instance, the level of security banks use in things like wire transfers.

The Guardian story indicates there was some sort of internal forensiuc investigtion at the White House. The Guardian's use of the term "forensic" suggests the investigation involved auditors qualified to investigate fraud. It's hard to imagine the technical details of how Signal is installed and a phone is registered and a specific user profile added to the chat on Signal itself weren't part of that forensic investigation.

It's also hard for anyone not to conclude that someone on Waltz's staff was fully aware of what was done and for what purpose, namely, to damage the Trump administration's image by leaking information to a hostile journalist. I'm inclined to believe just one point in the Guaridan story:

Trump briefly considered firing Waltz over the episode, more angered by the fact that Waltz had the number of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic – a magazine he despises – than the fact that the military operation discussion took place on an unclassified system such as Signal.

But Trump decided against firing him in large part because he did not want the Atlantic and the news media more broadly to have the satisfaction of forcing the ouster of a top cabinet official weeks into his second term.

Trump isn't stupid. Right now, he's keeping his friends close and his enemies closer. The Guardian story seems to come from Waltz and Waltz allies:

When Trump left the White House on Thursday, he was joined aboard Marine One by his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, his personnel chief, Sergio Gor, and Waltz, which aides took as a show of support for the embattled national security adviser.

Trump has learned important things about Waltz and Waltz's staff from this episode. Waltz, I think, is the stupid one here.