It Looks Like Krafft-Ebing Started The Craziness

I woke up this morning for some reason with the name Krafft-Ebing hangng in my thoughts like a tune that won't go away. I don't think I'd thought of that name in years. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), an Austrian psychiatrist, was a pioneer of the modern notion of sexuality, so in the context of recent events, it probably shouldn't be a surprise that he'd pop up that way. Let's just do a quick review of recent news stories. On Monday,

Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the former Democratic aide best known for being filmed on the receiving end of a backdoor sex romp in a Senate hearing room in 2023, is finally speaking out about the scandal that cost him his job and prompted him to flee the country.

The Washington Free Beacon exclusively reported in February that Maese-Czeropski had moved to Australia to launch a new career as an independent sex worker who posts pornographic photos and videos on the internet. This week the disgraced Democrat, who was a legislative aide to Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.) when he was busted for (allegedly) being sodomized in the Hart Senate Office Building, spilled his guts in an interview with Gay Sydney News.

On Tuesday:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Tuesday appeared strongly inclined to support the right of religious parents to excuse their children from a Maryland school district’s use of LGBTQ+ storybooks in its elementary schools.

. . . The storybooks currently in use in pre-K and elementary grades are Born Ready; Intersection Allies; Love, Violet; Prince & Knight; and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding—all feature LGBTQ+ characters and themes.

At least one justice appeared to bring copies of the books to the bench, and several quoted passages during the argument. Alito had a bit of a skirmish with Justice Sonia Sotomayor over Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, which tells the story of a young girl who expresses some reservations about her uncle marrying another man before coming around.

. . . [Jusrice Amy Coney] Barrett suggested the school district was going beyond teaching respect for LGBTQ+ students and families with books that were “validating the other world view here, the one that is different from the [religious parents] by saying no, no, no, this is right.”

When [counsel for the school district Alan] Shoenfeld said the goal of the program was teaching “mutual respect,” Barrett asked, “So it was part of the curriculum to teach them that boys can be girls … or that your pronouns can change depending on how you feel one day to the next?”

Two weeks ago, Nashville police released their final report on the 2023 Covenant School shooting:

Nashville police have released their final report on the Covenant School massacre – a targeted March 2023 attack on a Christian school by a transgender shooter who killed three third-graders and three adults.

Rather than a highly anticipated manifesto, the report found that killer Audrey Hale left behind numerous notebooks, art books and computer documents about her plans to commit the attack and gain notoriety, partly inspired by the Columbine school shooting in 1999.

Hale, the 28-year-old attacker and biological female, began "fantasizing" about and researching mass shootings as far back as 2017, according to investigators. A year later, she wrote "detailed fantasies" about shooting up the Isaac T. Creswell Middle Magnet School for the Arts, killing her father and killing her psychiatrist.

. . . "In short, the motive determined over the course of the investigation was notoriety," according to investigators. "Even though numerous disappointments in relationships, career aspirations, and independence fueled her depression, and even though this depression made her highly suicidal, this doesn’t explain the attack. As Hale wrote on several occasions, if suicide was her goal then she would have simply killed herself."

. . . "Most disturbingly, she wanted the things she left behind to be shared with the world so she could inspire and teach others who were ‘mentally disordered’ like her to plan and commit an attack of their own," investigators wrote.

Last month,

A 42-year-old transgender woman who allegedly threw Molotov cocktails at vehicles and spray-painted “Nazi cars” at a Colorado Tesla dealership lives with her mother due to “emotional problems” and calls herself “baby” online.

Lucy Grace Nelson, also known as Justin Thomas Nelson, is accused of hurling incendiary devices at a Tesla dealership in Loveland, Northern Colorado, and vandalizing the business and vehicles on multiple occasions with graffiti “offensive and hateful in nature,” police said.

. . . Nelson, who is listed as female on her driver’s license and Loveland Police’s booking sheet, has since been handed a federal charge of malicious destruction, and freed on a $100,000 cash bond.

Federal authorities who have taken over the prosecution refused to confirm whether Nelson is charged as a male or female, despite requests by The Post to clarify.

On Monday, I speculated that there's a powerful exhibitionist impulse common to the people who vandalize Teslas or firebomb Tesla dealerships, since it's been well publicized that Tesla cars have cameras that automatically record suspicious activity, but beyond that, common sense says that these days, doorbell and security cameras are ubiquitous. More and more crimes are solved with camera footage. That these people know they're filmed in the act isn't a bug for them, it's a feature. They want notoriety.

So does the Montgomery County, MD School District in the latest bizarro replay of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which itself was a publicity stunt. A poster on X said,

In 2025, an attorney for a government school district is able to make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court defending exposing children as young as three years old to books about sexuality. Imagine going back in time to any point—even just a few years ago—and explaining that this is considered a serious argument.

Isn't this in fact exhibitionism masquerading as virtue signaling? But let's go back to the mindset that produced this almost 150 years ago:

The modern notion of sexuality took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll. This modernisation of sexuality was closely linked to the recognition of sexual diversity, as it was articulated in the medical–psychiatric understanding of what, at that time, was labelled as perversion. . . . Against this background both Krafft-Ebing and Moll articulated a new perspective, not only on perversion, but also on sexuality in general. Krafft-Ebing initiated and Moll elaborated a shift from a psychiatric perspective in which deviant sexuality was explained as a derived, episodic and more or less singular symptom of a more fundamental mental disorder, to a consideration of perversion as an integral part of a more general, autonomous and continuous sexual instinct.

So perversion isn't that, it's just the natural expression of the continuous sexual instinct. So why does it have to be associated with notoriety? If it's all OK, why the apparent need to get attention by making it and the proponents transgreswive? Asssuming it's all copacetic among consenting adults, why does it nevertheless have to go on public display for adults and children who don't consent to it? Why do its proponents seem to want to associate it with violence like mass killing and arson, and why do they see the need to let it all hang out in public?

How is it anything but disordered?

A Harvard Student Says Trump's Harvard Is A Straw Man

I'm going back to Harvard, because as usual, the media, alt, legacy, or otherwise. is playing its annual game of extending spring break into Memorial Day, at which point they can check out for summer vacation. The two big stories this week are "Who will be the next pope?" and "Is Trump trying to ease Hegseth out?" which don't have answers and don't require mental effort -- and that comes after a weekend of evergreen bromides saying nice things about Easter. Things likely won't pick up until October.

But I found a piece at the Harvard Crimson that illustrates how Ivy students are insidiously brainwashed into believing the system that's selected them is good because, after all, it selected them in a highly selective, meritoratic process. This is also at the heart of David Brooks's endorsement of the Ivies in Bobos in Paradise. The system is meritocratic because, after all, it selected David Brooks. Just look at him! The Ivy student body is a self-licking lollipop.

As a student here, the charges of pervasive antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and racial bias at Harvard seem ridiculous. But to the average consumer of conservative media, far removed from our campus, these charges are as true as the sky is blue.

. . . As a Jewish student myself, I’ve never been personally attacked for my identity. To me, it seems that this popular perception of Harvard comes mostly from a few confrontations between vocal pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protestors.

Extrapolating that an entire university is antisemitic from these moments is akin to claiming that because David E. Duke is a Trump voter, all Trump voters are racist — it just doesn’t make sense.

Last week I discussed the position of Alan Dershowitz and Jerome Karabel, which is pretty universally acknowledged, that the Ivy admissions system was developed over a few decades beginning in the early 1900s to institutionalize a Jewish quota without overtly screening for Jewish-sounding surnames or aquiline features in application photos. Instead, it established geographical diversity preferences for applicants in the Rocky Mountain and prairie regions or applicants from upper-crust private secondary schools, which were themselves socially conscious in their admissions procedures.

Preferences for legacies, the children of alumni, had an equivalent effect of creating a pre-screened sample with a limited population of Jewish applicants. A more recent group, international students, had a serendipitous quality of also not being very Jewish -- not a whole lot of Jews left in Europe, and not a whole lot of Jews outside Israel anywhere else.

All of these preferences created groups of applicants who were unlikely to be too Jewish, leaving only a limited group of public-school students from the Northeastern suburbs who were selected on meritocraic criteria, test scores, grades, extracurriculars, and general precocity. Some of these -- maybe a lot of them -- would be Jewish, but the other admissions preferences would balance them out. Oddly, Henry F Haidar, author of the Crimson piece, never mentions the admissions process that created a student body with an unspoken Jewish quota built right into it that characterizes Harvard and other prestigious universities. How can it be anti-Semitic? It admitted him, after all!

The idea that Harvard is meritocratic pervades Haidar's argument:

Finally, Republicans are up in arms over the idea that taxpayers are subsidizing massively wealthy colleges and their teaching. After all, why should Joe from Topeka, Kansas, pay for the education of entitled Hamas-Loving-Flag-Burning-Communists?

The problem with this argument is that much of Harvard’s impacted federal research funding takes the form of competitive grants: It just so happens that Harvard affiliates win many of these for their cutting-edge research.

It's all competitive! And It's Harvard! It must be good! If he's lucky, Henry Haidar will have this kicked out of him within a few years of getting his diploma, but that's not guaranteed. Dude, the race is not always to the swift, OK?

In the process of writing last week's posts, I speculated on the relative size of the unlimited-Jews applicant pool allowed in the Ivy admissions system. those from Northeastern suburban public schools. I still haven't found a specific percentage for this category, but I did find that at Harvard, the international students make up 27% of the studemt body, while applicants from upper-crust "independent schools" make up an astonishing 35%. The same source puts the percentage of legacies at 16%.

If we add up just these categories, international students, preppies, and legacies, we get 78% of the admissions pool that is not competitively selected -- but this leaves out the slots reserved for children of major donors, celebrities, and politicians, as well as athletes and DEI. This means that applicants selected exclusively on the basis of academic achievement, test scores, and extracurriculars number at best about 20% of an Ivy entering class, and almost certainly less. But this is the basis on which the Ivies claim their cachet of merit and excellence.

Thinking about this in one way or another for many years, I've kept coming back to the "battle royal" episode in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man:

The narrator . . . recalls being invited to give his high school graduation speech at a gathering of the town's leading white citizens. When he arrived, he discovered that he was to provide part of the evening's entertainment for a roomful of drunken white men as a contestant, along with nine of his classmates, in a blindfolded boxing match (a "battle royal") before giving his speech. . . . After enduring these humiliating experiences, the narrator is finally permitted to give his speech and receives his prize: a calfskin briefcase that contains a scholarship to the local college for Negroes (a term Ellison preferred over "blacks").

That night, the narrator dreams that he is at the circus with his grandfather. . . . His grandfather orders him to open the briefcase and read the message contained in an official envelope stamped with the state seal. Opening the envelope, the narrator finds that each envelope contains yet another envelope. In the last envelope, instead of the scholarship, he finds an engraved document with the message: "To Whom It May Concern: Keep This Nigger-Boy Running."

Poor Henry Haidar. It's going to be a long, strange trip if he ever starts it.

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.