Harvard Threatens To Euthanize Lab Animals

According to The Daily Beast,

Harvard academics have warned they will be forced to euthanize animals used for medical research because of Donald Trump’s $2.2 billion funding freeze.

This is disingenuous. According to this site,

Animals are typically killed once an experiment is over so that their tissues and organs can be examined, although it is not unusual for animals to be used in multiple experiments over many years.

If the lab animals are going to be euthanized no matter what, why the fuss? The answer is fairly clear, Harvard wants to portray the Trump administration as being cruel to animals, when the Harvard researchers are routinely cruel to animals no matter what, just as long as they get their money. Cutting off their money sounds like it would actually benefit future generations of lab animals.

But this is an indication of how seriously Harvard takes the current threats from the Trump administration. On top of threats to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status and its ability to enroll highly profitable foreign students, there are continuing questions about foreign funds:

The Trump administration is pressing Harvard University to turn over records on the money it receives from foreign sources going back a decade, the latest in a growing pressure campaign against the nation’s most prominent university.

American universities get billions in grants, contracts or gifts from foreign sources, which they must report semiannually to the government. In a Thursday letter to Harvard President Alan Garber, the U.S. Department of Education’s office of the General Counsel wrote that Harvard made “incomplete and inaccurate” disclosures between 2014 and 2019.

In light of all these threats, though, retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz suggests Harvard is taking them very seriously:

You may have expected Harvard's President Alan Garber, a man I know and admire, to be defiant in the face of such an onslaught, and while he is putting up a combative front, he seems to be preparing to negotiate a settlement.

That's something that legions of far-left academicians and advisers may find abhorrent. But it's the reality.

. . . Indeed, Garber has issued a bellicose response to Trump in the form of a letter, publicly refusing to compromise the academic independence of the institution, writing: 'No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.'

. . . But at the same time, Harvard has retained lawyers — Ballard Partners — who are close to Trump and his administration and have a history of arranging complex agreements.

. . . For all of Garber's maneuvering, he surely realizes that he is unlikely to emerge victorious from a long drawn-out courtroom confrontation with Trump. He also must know that the Trump administration would benefit politically from a courtroom fight with Harvard, regardless of the legal outcome which is anything but certain. So, instead, Harvard has sent a more subtle message to the Trump administration by retaining lawyers that he can work with.

. . . Well, reforming our corrupted academic elitist class and fighting antisemitic bigotry is not wrong. That is why I support a negotiated compromise. In fact, it is essential.

The truth is that many of the government's demands are quite reasonable and necessary.

As I've been pointing out, Trump's strategy has been to pull out multiple legs of any stool on which a problem sits. He's threatened Harvard's admission system, which is acknowledged to have discriminated against Jewish applicants for over a century, and if Harvard is forced to change it fundamentally, it could make Harvard and other selective universities unrecognizable -- and there could be ripple effects like reducing the incentive to send children to prep schools.

Most recently, in response to Monday's letter from Harvard President Garber, Trump has threatened Harvard's tax exempt status:

The Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which would be an extraordinary step of retaliation as the Trump administration seeks to turn up pressure on the university that has defied its demands to change its hiring and other practices.

A final decision on rescinding the university’s tax exemption is expected soon, the sources said.

This would be a direct blow to what figures like Ferdinand Lundberg claim is the main purpose of univeristy endowments -- to provide a tax-sheltered means for the very wealthy as members of boards of trustees to control corporations via the endowments' stock ownership. It should be no surprise that Penny Pritzker, sister of Illinois Gov J B Pritzker and billionaire member of the Pritzker family, is "senior fellow" of the Harvard Corporation, what would normally be characterized as chair of the board of trustees.

Removal of Harvard's tax-exempt status would simply remove the incentive for this sort of generational family wealth to donate stock to the Harvard endowment and exercise control over corporations without owning the stock outright. Many board members would resign, no longer having a need to serve, and donations would move to institutions that still had tax exemptions. It would effectively destroy Harvard's institutional influence overnight.

I'm not sure if Dershowitz understands the full implications of this particular threat to Harvard, but President Garber and "Senior Fellow" Pritzker certainly must. Their challenge will be to preserve what they can of Harvard as an institution. Solving the problem will require a lot more than threatening to euthanize lab animals.

Let's Look More Closely At Foreign Stiudents At Harvard

I've noted here that a feature of Trump's strategy is to take away multiple legs of any stool on which a problem sits. The Harvard problem -- which is shorthand for the uber-endowed prestigious university problem in general -- sits on multiple stools, each with multiple legs. The international student problem is one of those stools, and Trump is busily taking away several legs of that stool.

One leg of this stool is the cash cow that international students represent to US universities. According to Karin Fischer, who covers international education for the Chronicle of Higher Education,

Typically, international students and out-of-state students pay more than students who go to college in their own home states, sometimes two or three times as much. International students may also pay special fees for things like visa processing and English language exams. . . . about 80% of international students pay their own way, whether from their own families or by borrowing money.

. . . More than 80% of [undergraduate students] are saying that either their personal or family money, or money that they and their families are borrowing, is what they use as the primary source of funding. I mean, you look at some of these families; some of them are quite wealthy, and some of them are newly middle class. One of the big factors in the real growth of international students has been the boom in the Chinese middle class, for example.

It's also worth pointing out that most of these students aren't European. Europe has its own highly prestigious universities, and Harvard tends to be looked down on. The families Ms Fischer characterizes as "quite wealthy" are in the ruling class of third-world countries, for whom Harvard degrees are social status markers that accompany Rolls Royces, palaces, and private jets.

Harvard, like all other US universities, has come to rely on foreign students, because they're highly profitable. This is another leg of the stool that the Trump administration is threatening to take away -- not just grant money, but the ability to recruit high profit-margin international students at all:

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threatened to revoke Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, the latest broadside from the Trump administration against the Ivy League school.

Noem ordered the university to submit records on what she says is “illegal and violent activities” from international students by April 30, or Harvard would suffer the “immediate loss of Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification,” according to a DHS press release released late Wednesday. The certification program is what allows institutions to enroll foreign students.

My surmise -- I haven't seen direct accounts that describe this -- is that many of Harvard's international students are highly privileged in their home countries and expect to be catered to at Harvard. The ruling classses in their home countries, of which they are members, are likely Mahometan, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel. Because they represent major money to Harvard -- in addition to paying full fees, the families are likely major donors as well, to ensure the continued admission of their offspring -- Harvard treats them with kid gloves.

If Harvard is indulging these students to the extent of looking the other way over anti-Semitic demonstrations and harassment of Jewish students, the Trump administration has a right to step in. And if Harvard doesn't cooperate in reporting and working to minimize these problems, the Trump administration will simply withdraw Harvard's ability to enroll such students. That's just one leg of the stool.

But at the same link, there's a remarkably revealing figure:

International students currently make up roughly 27 percent of Harvard’s total enrollment, according to university data from the 2024-25 academic year.

Let's go back to Jerome Karabel's paradigm of Ivy admissions "baskets". This is saying that international students, who are typically just one "basket" among at least a couple dozen, including legacies, children of major donors, preppies, athletes, and DEI (however that category may yet be fudged) that have specific percentages allocated in each year's admissions process. Of all these "baskets", only a few are made up of applicants from US public schools competitively selected based on GPA, test scores, and extracurriculars, especially from Northeastern suburbs.

And the exact percentages of each have always been a closely held secret, while the Ivies assiduously cultivate the public perception that their admissions process is highly competitive and merit-based. Yet all of a sudden, we have a strong indication that one of the non-competitive "baskets", foreign students who buy their way in, is 27%. That's more than a quarter. We simply don't know what percentage each of the other non-competitive "baskets" represents.

But if we know that one non-competitive "basket" is 27%, then we only need to find one or more other "baskets" to make up another 23% and bring the total of applicants that aren't selected on a competitive basis up to half. My own experience suggests that the number of preppies at an Ivy, at least when I was an undergraduate, was non-trivial; I don't think 20% is unreasonable as an estimate, and it could well be more (UPDATE: this estimate is 35%.). The same applies to legacies. This leaves out athletes, children of major donors, and DEI, however this category may still be weaseled and fudged.

It's also worth noting that Ivy schools have programs like fencing, rowing, and lacrosse that aren't available in most public schools, which tips the balance for athletes toward other applicants with privileged backgrounds. I think it's not unreasonable at all to estimate that the number of "baskets" for admissions categories that favor applicants from highly privileged backgrounds outside any general competition, even if there's some overlap, covers well over half of an Ivy entering class.

Looking back, I could certainly see why I was so puzzled that so many of my Ivy classmates just didn't seem very smart, when the whole assumption under which I found myself in that admissions rat race was that I was competing against people who were supposed to be just as smart as I was. I'm sure the dean of freshmen to whom I took my perplexity knew much more than he felt able to explain to me. But if Trump pulls this particular leg out from under the stool, we may learn much more.

They Mean It With Harvard

Over the past several weeks, there's been growing tension between Harvard and the Trump administration, culminating as of yesterday in an additional discontinuance of $2.7 million in federal grants beyond an already frozen $2.2 billion. The Trump administration itemized its complaints last Friday in a letter to President Garber and the board chair, according to the Harvard Crimson:

[T]he Trump administration delivered a longer and more focused set of demands than the ones they had shared two weeks earlier, asking Harvard to derecognize pro-Palestine student groups, audit its academic programs for viewpoint diversity, and expel students involved in an altercation at a 2023 pro-Palestine protest on the Harvard Business School campus.

It also asked Harvard to reform its admissions process for international students to screen for students “supportive of terrorism and anti-Semitism” — and immediately report international students to federal authorities if they break University conduct policies.

. . . And it asked the University to submit quarterly updates, beginning in June 2025, certifying its compliance.

The full letter can be found here. On Monday, Harvard President Garber rejected the demands:

University President Alan M. Garber ’76 delivered a scathing rejection of what he described as “unprecedented demands being made by the federal government to control the Harvard community.”

It is not clear if the Friday letter prompted Harvard’s shift from embracing cautious dialogue with the Trump administration to outright rejection. But the new demands show how deeply President Donald Trump and his administration aim to shape the inner workings of Harvard.

Many of the Trump demands are what I would call "point solutions", meant to address particular grievances against the public manifestation of academic prejudice. For instance,

The letter’s language also seemed to invoke conservatives’ arguments that some academic disciplines — particularly fields that study race, gender, and sexuality — are activism, not scholarship.

. . . The letter asked Harvard to check faculty members’ scholarship for plagiarism and conduct plagiarism reviews in its hiring process.

. . . The Trump administration also instructed Harvard to pull recognition and funding from student organizations that promoted criminal actions or “anti-Semitic activity.”

But one of the Trump demands in particular goes to the beating heart of the Ivy League, what makes Harvard Harvard:

The letter also demanded Harvard cease any hiring or admissions decisions “based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

. . . The letter from federal officials also requested that the University submit data from its hiring and admissions processes. The data would include the race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized test scores of applicants and candidates.

It’s not clear whether the demands would actually require the University to change its admissions processes — which already must follow federal law. But the administration’s request for data suggests that they want Harvard to demonstrate its reforms are tangibly changing the makeup of its student body and employees.

It's generally acknowledged. for instance by Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah or Jerome Karabel in The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that the admissions process at selective US universities was developed as a means of limiting Jewish presence in student bodies without the explict use of Jewish quotas, and those techniques, developed a century ago, continue with only minor adjustments. In the words of a Harvard sociologist reviewing Karabel,

That is precisely what we see with the history of college admissions. The whole panoply of strategies for reducing the admission of Jews without creating an explicit quota survived. Admissions directors around the country will tell you why athletic preference, alumni offspring (“legacy”) preference, regional distribution, and well-roundedness (the new “character”) remain vital parts of the admission process. They will tell you that without these things, private donations would dry up. Karabel cites the size of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton’s endowments to debunk that assertion. They will tell you that the student body would be too “intellectual” (long the code word for Jewish), not broad enough.

As I've noted here now and then, admissions offices as a standard practice subdivide applicants into "baskets" or silos, many of which de-embhasize GPA or test scores, such as legacies; children of major donors, politicians, and celebrities; athletes; preppies; faculty children; foreign applicants, who pay full freight; and until very recently, explicit DEI candidates. The percentages of applicants in each silo have always been a closely guarded secret, but I think this is a key to why I was so severely puzzled when I arrived at an Ivy campus as a new freshman.

I'd been told that I had to shape my childhood and adolescence to meet the selective-university demands for the best and brightest -- so why, having finally achieved admission to this crème de la crème, had so many of my new classmates turned out to be such dingbats? And not just a few, a lot of them. Probably, looking back, most of them. A lot of the admissions silos had been deliberately designed to filter out the smartest applicants, the Jews, although it didn't hurt that this was increasingly filtering out Asians as well.

I strongly suspect that if universities are forced to disclose the relative sizes of the silos in their applicant pool, the results would be explosive, especially among potential applicants from the middle class. If you attack the century-old admissions hustle at Harvard, you're pulling out one of the legs on the stool that makes the ruling class the ruling class. John MacGhilionn gets the Harvard mystique partly wrong at the Spectator:

For well over a century, Harvard was considered the crown jewel of American education. Presidents came from its halls, and Nobel laureates filled its lecture rooms. It was the kind of place that turned ambition into achievement and ambition into legacy. It symbolized something enduring: excellence, discipline, and elite leadership. The very name carried an air of unimpeachable credibility.

Those days are gone. Long gone.

More precisely, those days never were. Certain applicants in certain silos were in fact evaluated competitively based on grades, SATs, and extracurriculars, but this was probably never even a majority of applicants. All the others simply hitchhiked on the prestige of the ones in the competitive silos, but the point of the game was to be sure the duller scions of other preferred groups could get in as well.

And think about it for a moment: the level of education Harvard offers its students certainly has to be maintained at a certain mediocre level so as not to challenge the dullards. This is nothing new, either. And Trump is pulling out multiple legs of each stool on which these problems sit.

Why Didn't They Have A Trans Guy On The All-Women Crew?

What's pestered me about this whole Blue Origin all-women space flight is that the crew is obviously a DEI administrator's dream: one Asian, one Hispanic, two blacks, and two whites. Leave aside the Hispanic is Jeff Bezos's girlfriend, or two blacks is 33% of the "crew", when blacks are 14% of tbhe population, we get an appreciation of Bezos's current mindset: no matter he's purged most of the liberals from the Washington Post editorial board, he's still stuck someplace in 2022.

So why wasn't there a trans guy among the women? In fact, if Bezos's aim was to pick women who were prominent in media, why not go with Dylan Mulvaney? After all, according to People, all the ladies saw this as an opportunity to act like drag queens themselves:

"Who would not get glam before the flight?!" said Sánchez, whose fiancé Jeff Bezos, founded the spaceflight company in 2000. "We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule!"

"Will the lashes stay on? I’m curious," asked King, to which Sánchez, 55, replied, "Mine are glued on. They’re good."

Perry, 40, added: "Space is going to finally be glam. Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the 'ass' in astronaut."

. . . Getting dolled up is more than just about looking good for the group of women too. "I think it’s so important for people to see us like that," said Nguyen, who in February teamed up with e.l.f. Cosmetics for its empowering film series Show Your(s)e.l.f. "This dichotomy of engineer and scientist, and then beauty and fashion. We contain multitudes. Women are multitudes. I’m going to be wearing lipstick."

Fashion, along with safety, of course, is also top of mind for the ladies, especially Perry whose first thought was, "What am I going to wear?"

Isn't this the sort of female superficiality that drag queens eagerly limn? So why not have a real drag queen along for the ride? Yahoo News reports more on the real reason for the flight:

Though Blue Origin and its most famous flyers repeatedly promoted the 11-minute journey as a push to get a diverse mix of young people interested in the sciences and achieving their dreams — Perry, for her part, told Elle Magazine for a pre-launch cover story that she hoped the trip would "inspire a whole new generation and make space and science glam" — nothing about the flight was particularly scientific or boundary-pushing. . . . And while two of the flight's crewmembers do have backgrounds in STEM, as Amanda Hess noted in The New York Times, the crew's "central mission" wasn't to conduct science but "to experience weightlessness, view the Earth from above, and livestream it."

"They are like payload specialists," Hess wrote, "with a specialty in marketing private rockets."

One thing that puzzles me is that, possibly driven by Musk's example, Jeff Bezos had been developing a public profile as more of a mensch lately, especially in attempting to drive the Washington Post toward the center. The Blue Origin stunt has wiped that whole slate clean. According to The Guardian,

[T]he flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man. (The fact that the rocket itself looks so phallic does not help to lessen the flight’s message that the surest way for women to raise themselves in the world is to attach themselves to a man.)

There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur whose past work with Nasa makes her something closer to an actual astronaut. But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness.

. . . It is not misogynist to say that these women do not have their priorities in order. Rather, it is misogynist of them to so forcefully associate womanhood with cosmetics and looks, rather than with any of the more noble and human aspirations to which space travel might acquaint them – curiosity, inquiry, discovery, exploration, a sense of their own mortality, an apprehension of the divine. These women, who have placed themselves as representatives for all women with their promotion of the flight – positioning themselves as aspirational models of femininity – have presented a profoundly antifeminist vision of what womankind’s future is: dependent on men, confined to triviality, and deeply, deeply silly.

So again, why wasn't there a trans guy, or at least a drag queen, on the flight? Trans guys in sports, for instance, have been seen as anti-feminist, males showing the physical inferiority of women by beating them and sometimes injuring them badly in the bargain. A trans guy or a drag queen would be just the thing to focus the vanity and superficiality of the women.

And poor Bezos showed how vulnerable he himself was to women's superficial appeal as he tried to celebrate with his girlfriend at the end of the flight:

Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos face-planted onto the Texas desert as he ran up to greet his fiancée Lauren Sanchez and the all-female crew when they returned to Earth on Monday morning.

The livestream of the historic launch caught the moment Bezos, 61, fell face first to the ground as he went around the windows of the capsule carrying his fiancée.

He needs to fire his publicist. It'll take him years to dig himself out of this disaster.

The Peculiar Demographics Of Tesla Vandals

DOJ publishes drivers license photo of Jamison Wagner, the suspect in firebombing of GOP office in New Mexico and Tesla dealership, in which he's wearing blue lipstick. He's also a member of "500 Queer Scientists" https://t.co/3el4iQjJkk https://t.co/X4LzUpkXX4 https://t.co/EpUtEiOc4G pic.twitter.com/c6t3Co3UFM

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) April 14, 2025

Last month I posted on the odd circumstance that four perps recently arrested for vandalizing Tesla dealerships were trans-identifying males. Just yesterday, it turned out that the guy arrested for firebombiong both a Republican office and a Tesla dealership in Albuquerque, NM wasan't trans, but he did identify as queer, and his drivers license photo shows him wearing blue lipstick. So trans- and queer-identifying males atill seem to make up a key demographic of the anti-Tesla agitators.

Another demographic appears to be affluent whites who claim more conventional socioeconomic privilege, which puts me in mind of David Brooks's bobos, members of the bourgeois bohemian managerial class. For instance,

A millionaire fitness coach has been identified as the woman who keyed a Tesla during a parking lot confrontation.

Kamelia Enzler, 55, is facing charges of Malicious Mischief in the Third Degree after she was filmed vandalizing another driver's Tesla Model Y on March 20 at the Issaquah Commons shopping center, according to police.

. . . Enzler is married to Jeff Enzler, the lead software engineer at DocuSign, where he has worked for 12 years.

The couple lives in a $1.5million home in Bellevue, a stunning suburb of Seattle famed for its greenery and lakes. They bought the property for $280,000 in 1998, according to public records and have since made a fortune on the home.

Enzler has deleted her Linked In and social media accounts, but, according to public records, she owns a fitness company called IPEAK FITNESS.

Then there s the case of Jim Pelis, Regional Sales Director for Armor Code, who was caught on film keying a Tesla in the parking lot of a New Hampshire luxury hotel:

The Tesla owner recorded the moment police approach the vandal, who was wearing bright orange pants, and another man and confronted them.

'I don’t know what happened,' the orange panted menace is heard saying.

'You didn’t key that Tesla?' the officer asked.

'No,' the vandal replied. Tesla cars have been hit by a spate of attacks in recent weeks over company boss Elon Musk's work with the Trump Administration.

But the likely liberal was unable to find the courage to defend his destructive convictions when confronted.

The officer then informed the men the vandalism had been recorded.

In affluent Doylestown, PA, a Lexus owner keyed a Tesla parked next to him at Planet Fitness:

A Doylestown area man is facing charges after authorities alleged that he scratched what appears to be a swastika on a Tesla SUV parked outside a gym earlier this week.

Chadd Ritenbaugh, 55, of Buckingham, was identified after he checked into the Planet Fitness gym using his membership card following the alleged vandalism of a car parked in the gym’s lot, according to a probable cause affidavit.

. . . Central Bucks Regional Police alleged that the Tesla owner returned home after working out at the gym and noticed fresh scratch marks on her vehicle.

She reviewed footage from the car’s camera system that showed a man park his Lexus beside her car shortly before 9:30 a.m. Monday. The affidavit said he then ducked behind his vehicle and appeared to scratch into the side of the Tesla.

What's intriguing is that in almost all the vandalism cases, either at dealers or with individual Tesla cars, the perps are caught on film, quickly identified, and arrested. They're either blithely unaware of the extent of security camera surveillance -- in the case of Teslas, on the cars themselves -- or they somehow think they either won't be caught or won't be prosecuted. Yet if they're affluent themselves, they may well have security cameras at their own homes or businesses.

Elon Musk recently announced a plan for a Hollywood Tesla charging station designed to appeal to the same upscale managerial class, but the bobos aren't having it, at least so far:

Elon Musk is reportedly planning to open a 24-hour Tesla diner in Hollywood, which will include a drive-in theater charging station. Leftists are having a meltdown in response, including turning their ire on a prominent restaurant owner who said Musk’s plan is “exciting.”

The establishment is meant to be a place where Tesla drivers can engage in leisure activities while stopping to charge their electric vehicles, according to a report by ABC 7 News. Musk is moving forward with his plans even as Tesla facilities have become the target of massive protests and domestic terrorism attacks.

While an official opening date has not been announced, Musk is reportedly trying to recruit high-profile chefs to provide food at his 24-hour Tesla diner. The leftist outrage against Musk and anyone who dares to support his latest idea has been swift.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the angry bobos who key Tesla owners' cars resent them as traitors to their class -- and they're so angry that they seem to have lost situational awareness that if they themselves have security cameras, so will other members of their class, especially the ones who have Teslas.

(For a time during the BLM riots, one of our neighbors put one of those big BLM signs in their front yard. I very briefly mulled removing it in the dead of night until I almost immediately recognized that given the neighborhood, the act wuld be recorded on half a dozen cameras. The real estate agent finally removed it when the place went on the market. This is the sort of thing that the Tesla vandals, members of the sophisticated class though they may be, don't seem to think about.)

Yesterday, I noted that Franklin Foer at The Atlantic characterized the bobos as Trump's "class enemies". In this class war, the bobos clearly have an ally among the hard core sexual deviants, trans and queer, together campaigning against renegade bobos who drive Teslas. They're doing this at a level of hysterical rage that disregards the ease with which they can be identified and prosecuted.

Why the rage? Why the alliance? I think it has to do with the fact that both classes deeply fear a loss of privilege, with the trans and queer faction recognizing that the rules of public decorum are changing. People are tiring of guys in dresses wearing blue lipsrick, and the vibes won't tolerate it much longer.

What's Going On In Trump 2.0?

Just recently, I discovered that as of this past January 25, Spirit Airlines had updated its dress code. Somehow I don't think it's a coincidence that this came within days of Trump's inauguration. According to ABC News,

Spirit Airlines has revised its "contract of carriage" to include updated guidelines for passenger conduct and attire, including a detailed dress code prohibiting provocative or inappropriate clothing.

. . . Outlined in Section 4.3 of the contract, the airline’s policy now explicitly states that passengers must not wear "see-through clothing; not adequately covered; exposed breasts, buttocks, or other private parts."

. . . The new dress code is part of broader rules governing passenger behavior under the "Conduct/Condition" section.

These new rules include, in part,

• Disorderly, abusive, or violent behavior that creates an unreasonable risk of offense or annoyance to others.
• Intoxication or drug use.
• Offensive odors, unless caused by a disability.

One benefit of retirement is that I haven't had to fly anywhere, for any reason, in nearly a decade, and back when I did fly a lot, the budget carrier was Southwest. Southwest is now one of the major carriers and no longer has policies like open seating, and it looks like Spirit has taken its place, but apparently even more so. Every now and then I'll hear a jab from someone like Gutfeld about how bad it is to fly Spirit, but I've never had to do this.

So I did some web searching. I wondered specifically whether people thought flying Spirit was unpleasant because they had to travel with half-naked, offensive, drunk, drug-addled, or smelly passengers, but I saw no mention of that. The most recent discussions focus on the extra charges, narrow seats, and late and canceled flights, but they mention the new dress and conduct rules without comment.

This contrasts with the near-universal recommendations from even Amtrak fans on YouTube that prospective customers not book Amtrak coach seats, because their fellow passengers will be half-naked, offensive, drunk, drug-addled, or smelly, like, er, passengers on Greyhound, which is the same market as Amtrak coach. And by the way, Amtrak is always late and cancels trains. But that's also the same lowest-price travel tier as Spirit. The Amtrak fans do mention that the coach seats are wider than on Spirit, but this only confirms the market they're discussing.

So I'm wondering if the media discussions are deliberately finessing the passenger-conduct problem when they talk about the Spirit dress code. Apparently it's OK to mention the extra charges, narrow seats, and late or canceled flights, but not the more delicate question of the passengers. Except all of a sudden, Spirit has decided the passengers are the big problem it wants to address. This may, of course, be a sensitive matter becsuse it's class-based. The low-fare passengers are also low class.

Just today I found another class-based discusion, this time at The Atlantic, Trump Has Found His Class Enemy, by Franklin Foer. Foer sounds the alarm on the new administration:

Its goal isn’t just to shatter a few institutions. It intends to crush the power and authority of whole professions, to severely weaken, if not purge, a social class.

The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy.

. . . Not so long ago, the upper-middle-class Americans who exemplify the PMC would have filled the ranks of both parties. But beginning in the 1990s, professionals began migrating in large numbers to the Democrats. Many affluent people with a cosmopolitan outlook were repelled by the GOP’s social stances and drawn to the economic moderation of politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Doesn't this sound a lot like the views of Foer's colleague at The Atlantic, David Brooks, who in his 2000 Bobos in Paradise announced that in the postwar era, the Ivy League via the SATs had become a true meritocracy? The bobos, bourgeois bohemians with a cosmopolitan outlook, had broken the Jewish quotas and arrived. But even Brooks himself has moved on:

Back in 2000, I wrote a book called "Bobos In Paradise," and I noticed a whole code of conduct, and it had replaced the old WASP code. And it was basically people with '60s values and '90s money who thought it was gauche to spend money on a yacht but supercool to spend money on a $20,000 AGA stove.

. . . So the book I wrote in 2000 was largely quite positive. And one of the things I said in there was that anybody can join the Bobos. You go to college, you get a degree, and you're in. That turned out to be the most naive sentence I've ever written. . . . they've taken over the Democratic Party, and the working class has tended to leave left-wing parties.

It sounds like Brooks and Foer need to get together with Laurene Powell Jobs, their boss, and work things out so they're on the same page. Foer sees the bobos taking over the Democrats, and it's good, while Brooks sees the same thing, and it's bad. But at bottom, both see a class realignment, and that must certainly be correct. I'm intrigued, though, that Foer just this morning insists that the bobos are still meritocratic, "the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy", something Brooks would no longer say.

Let's look at what I think is one paradigm of Trump 2.0, the woman fencer who refused to compete against a male in a fencing tournament, the word Foer uses, which I've covered here, especially yesterday. In theory, a sports tournament is meritocratic, the best contestant wins. Except that the bobos have simply changed the definition of woman so that a man identifying as a woman can compete in the women's category and, with greater size, muscle strength, and testosterone, has a much greater chance of defeating a woman, when in fact he would be only a mediocre competitor in a men's competition.

The official fencing authority, controlled by the bobos, insists that the woman must compete against the male and disqualifies the woman for refusing to compete. This is the opposite of meritocracy. But there's also something in that sort of behavior that's deeply related to the impunity of Spirit Airlines or Amtrak coach passengers who've felt, or in the case of Amtrak, still feel, that their fellow passengers are a captive audience on which they can force themselves, half-naked, offensive, drunk, drug-addled, and smelly.

In the case of fencing, the Trump administration is reestablishing true meritocratic standards. In the case of Spirit Airlines, It seems to me that rthe simple outcome of the election is forcing a basic realignment of public decorum that goes beyond social class. In fact, neither issue is really class-based, something Foer completely misses.

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.