David Brooks Calls For The Bobos To Rise Up!

In an illustration of Glenn Reynolds's thought processes, he posts a link to Matt Taibbi's substack, which is behind a paywall, that contains another link to a David Brooks column in the New York Times, which is also behind a paywall. All the Times will let me see beyond the paywall is Brooks's title, "What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal."

Anyone who's able to get past both paywalls just like that is probably subscribed to a good deal else besides The New York Times and Matt Taibbi's substack -- for starters, maybe The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal, which means they're likely paying hundreds of dollars a year, or maybe expensing it, to get material that's not worth that kind of money. And at least it used to be blogger etiquette not to link to items behind paywalls. But that's Glenn Reynolds and Salem Media these days.

Taibbi quotes a single paragraph from Brooks:

We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place. . . [that] this is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.

Taibbi himself comments,

It’s hard to convey the scale of the comedy in this article, which received a lot of attention. Brooks lifts the opening from Genesis (“In the beginning there was agony”) and the ending from the Communist Manifesto (see below). In between lay a call for “mass civic uprising” which spends much of its time trying to figure out where to find the “civic” part, after drafting corporate lawyers, university administrators, “corporate executives,” reporters, and — what other kinds of people live in America? It’s either the funniest revolutionary manifesto ever, or the most touching. You be the judge:

So, if it's "received a lot of attention", maybe I can find more free bits and pieces elsewhere. I did a web search on "David Brooks normal rebellion" and got not a whole lot, but at the Daily Kos I found an additional two paragraphs:

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault. In their book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan looked at hundreds of nonviolent uprisings. These movements used many different tools at their disposal — lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance.

The writer there says, "he is... IMO... on the spot with this." Mediaite has a more play-by-play sort of summary:

Conservative [sic] New York Times columnist David Brooks has called for a mass uprising to oppose President Donald Trump, going so far as to quote The Communist Manifesto.

In a blistering piece published on Thursday, Brooks wrote that modern civilization is buttressed by several pillars, including “Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities.”

He went on to say that Trump threatens all of these because the president is only interested in the acquisition of power “for its own sake” and is engaged in “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men.”

Noting that Trump has targeted law firms, government agencies, NATO, and global trade, Brooks said these various efforts are part of a singular mission to reverse the “civilizational order.”

. . . Brooks went on to defend universities, which he has criticized for their progressivism.

Nonetheless, he said, “I have seen it over and over: A kid comes on campus as a freshman, inquisitive but unformed. By senior year, there is something impressive about her. She is awakened, cultured, a critical thinker. The universities have performed their magic once again.”

He added that the civic uprising should “have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism — one that offers a positive vision.”

In closing, he quotes Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

“I’m really not a movement guy,” he wrote. “I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

In one instance here, Brooks unintentionally undermines his own point. In an effort at pronoun probity, he says of a college freshman, "By senior year, there is something impressive about her. She is awakened, cultured, a critical thinker." According to the Pew Research Center,

College enrollment among young Americans has been declining gradually over the past decade. In 2022, the total number of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college was down by approximately 1.2 million from its peak in 2011.

Most of the decline is due to fewer young men pursuing college. About 1 million fewer young men are in college but only 0.2 million fewer young women. As a result, men make up 44% of young college students today, down from 47% in 2011, according to newly released U.S. Census Bureau data.

This shift is driven entirely by the falling share of men who are students at four-year colleges. Today, men represent only 42% of students ages 18 to 24 at four-year schools, down from 47% in 2011.

So college enrollment is declining -- wait. Doesn't that mean fewer bobos overall? But of those who are going to four-year colleges now, only 42% are men, which has implications for who will join Brooks's not normal uprising -- mostly women. Women with four-year degrees.

It's also plain that Brooks sees this not as the proletarian revolution that Marx and Engels envisioned, but a revoluton of the bourgeois bohemian class he hinmself invented in Bobos in Paradise: lawyers (especially white shoe types), MBAs, nonprofit administrators, university administrators, legacy media columnists and reporters, scientists, and civil servants. Of these, most will be women. But think about it for a mement. Who are the revolutionary vanguard of the bobo uprising?

Of course. The refined and educated managers, scientists, and civil servants who've been keying Teslas while taking their daily neighborhod strolls from their homes and condos. What they're doing, of course, is damaging the environmentally friendly Teslas that are pricey assets owned by members of their own class. Might it not be more strategic to key, say, gas-guzzling Toyotas? That's what Brooks seems to think Trump voters drive. Nobody's proposed that yet.

Actually, I can only begin to imagine what Toyota owners might do to a non-profit administrator toff who wandered into their neighborhood to key their cars. I'm not sure that sort of revolutionary tactic will take hold anytime soon.

Brooks calls for lawsuits, which we're getting, bizarre as they may be. But he also wants to see "mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance", which we're so far not seeing. What we do see is bobos keying Teslas that are owned by other bobos. Brooks is at least right that this uprising, whatever else it may be, is not normal.

The Demographic Pattern Of Tesla Vandals Continues

Minnesota state employee Dylan Bryan Adams, 33, was allegedly caught on camera keying multiple Teslas.
pic.twitter.com/s5GlRbkhqo

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) April 19, 2025

A week ago, I noted a pecullair demographic pattern among the great majority of perpetrators alleged to have damaged Tesla vehicles or sabotaged Tesla dealerships in protest of Elon Musk's involvement with the Trump administration, namely that they tend either to be members of the "bobo" managerial-professional class, or they tend to be transsexual or queer-identifying males.

In that post, I cited one member of the 500 Queer Scientists organization and three prosperous members of the bourgeois bohemian class. A month ago, on March 21, I cited four trans-identifying males charged with arson against Tesla dealerships in Oregon, Colorado, and South Carolina. The bobos consistently vandalize individual Tesla vehicles, while the trans guys consistently set dealerships on fire.

Three new cases last week oddly demonstrated this consistency in demographic makesup. On April 18, video was released of 33-year-old Dylan Bryan Adams, who was charged with doing $20,000 of damage to multiple Teslas, keying them while walking his dog. Adams is a fiscal amalyst for the State of Minnesota. According to this site, the salary range for a Fiscal Analyst I is $77,876 - $140,177 per year. The "ideal candidate" has a master’s degree in public policy or administration; experience with quantitative research and analysis, fiscal management practices, policy development, and program evaluation; familiarity with the legislative budget process; and knowledge of state government finance and policy issues.

On April 19, the New York Post reported that a Brooklyn psychologist and family therapist, Natasha Cohen, was "accused of leaving a brick scrawled with a swastika and the word “Nazi” on a parked Tesla".

Cohen, 46, has a private practice, working with children, adolescents and their families for more than two decades.

She has advanced training in maternal mental health, according to an online profile, and currently sells different therapy worksheets and resources online for parents of children with ADHD, body dysmorphia issues, and anxiety.

. . . Cohen, who also goes by Carrie, was spotted outside her luxury Kensington apartment building on Tuesday, wearing sunglasses and an oversized hoodie.

She tried ducking Post cameras as she and her teen son shuffled inside the building — where apartments are priced between $780,000 and $1.1 million and feature spacious patios and private backyards.

These two, given their advanced education and income levels, definitely qualify as bobos in the managerial-professional class. A third individual, who appears to be trans but isn't characterized as such in news reports, has been charged with throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Tesla dealership in Kansas City, Missouri. Owen McIntire was on spring break from UMass Boston, where he was arrested on Friday.

Two Cybertrucks and two charging stations were damaged by the fire. The FBI said that the trucks are valued at $105,485 and $107,485, and the charging stations at $550 each.

McIntire had flown home to Kansas City from Boston on March 16 and had returned to Boston on a flight on March 23. UMass Boston's spring break is from March 16 through the 23, according to the academic calendar on its website.

While the media reports of McIntire's arrest don't characterize him as trans, commenters on social media have been quick to suggest this is the case based on his appearance.

On one hand, there's apparent reason for trans people to resent Trump's policies, although Musk himself hasn't specifically associated himself with any such policy stances. According to Newsweek,

Immigration attorneys across the northern border are reporting an exodus of sorts of U.S. nationals seeking asylum in Canada, including a high number of transgender and non-binary Americans.

. . . A number of immigration attorneys in Canada are reporting being overloaded by U.S. nationals, including transgender individuals, who are seeking guidance on whether purported government persecution can be legally claimed as grounds for asylum.

. . . "The concerns I hear from transgender Americans include fear of being unable to access gender-affirming care; fear of being detained by immigration enforcement at the border due to the 'X' marker on their identity documents; increased violence stemming from rising transphobia; [and] anxiety that the U.S. may implement martial law, leading to further violations of their rights," [immigration attorney Yameena] Ansari said.

On the other hand, it's quite a step from being anxious about the potential effect of Trump trans policies to throwing Molotov cocktails at Tesla dealerships, especially when Musk himself seems to show no specific animosity toward trans people, and Tesla dealers still less. In fact, as businesspeople, their instinct would be to avoid unnecessary controversy. Why go out of your way to offend trans people, when one could walk into your dealership tomorrow wanting to buy a Cybertruck?

There's also the continuing conuncdrum that I've already pointed out. The bobos who are arrested for keying or otherwise vandalizing Tesla vehicles are high-income, often highly educated, presumably intelligent people, who must under ordinary circumstances be aware that their actions will be recorded on ubiquitous doorbell and security cameras, even if they aren't aware of the cameras on the Teslas themselves. Yet rhey recklessly expose themselves to potential felony charges that could end their jobs and careers.

In fact, it appears that every one of the Tesla vandals and dealership arsonists arrested up to now has been identified either by the cameras on board the cars or nearby security cameras. Yet the impulse to go on keying Teslas and firebombing dealerships continues unabated.

And the videos clearly identifying them committing these acts go viral: here's Dylan Bryan Adams of Minnesota keying multiple Teslas while walking his dog. There must be some powerful exhibitionistic impulse at work here that simply cancels out ordinary prudence. Deep down it seems as though all these people want to get caught and want to become household names, at least for 15 minutes. There's something deeply out of whack here -- but don't forget that one of these folks is a psychotherapist.

I'll bet she doesn't lose a single client, and in fact, even more will want to sign up with her now. Bobos in paradise.

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.