https://tilakdoshi.substack.com/p/trumps-attack-on-harvard-could-be
Excerpt: A parody video widely shared on X on June 1st had this to say of Harvard university:
Ever wish your child was a full-blown liberal idiot? Desperate to turn them into a Jew hating extremist who’d rather burn a flag than think for themselves? Well Harvard University has the answer. For the low, low price of half a million dollars we will transform your kid into the kind of zealot who sets bags of shit on fire in the street, screaming about whatever CNN’s whining about today. Our elite programme guarantees they’ll swap reason for rage and facts for feelings faster than you can say protest permit.
But, beyond the parody, the escalating confrontation between the Trump administration and Harvard University, the bastion of elite academia, has laid bare a deeper culture war over the direction of American higher education. This clash is not only about gender and sex discrimination under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), allegations of antisemitism and of undue influence exerted by unreported financial ‘donations’ from China and other countries. It is fundamentally a reckoning with the Gramscian capture of institutions like Harvard by a globalist agenda propped up by government funding and a web of NGOs seed-funded by Leftist billionaire foundations.
A key plank of the globalist agenda is rooted in Malthusian climate alarmism. This pseudo-scientific hobgoblin has long served as a cudgel to demonise fossil fuels and impose a vision of ‘Net Zero’ that prioritises ideological certainty over pragmatic trade-offs in energy policy. The Trump administration’s aggressive actions against Harvard’s politicised administration include freezing $3 billion in federal grants, revoking Harvard’s ability to enrol international students and threatening its tax-exempt status.
This may, as a welcome collateral effect, disrupt the university’s key role in the Church of Climate, forcing it to align instead with the Trumpian vision of American energy dominance and a rejection of the constraints of the Paris Agreement. The Trump-Harvard standoff could mark a turning point in dismantling the climate-industrial complex’s grip on academia.
By granting intellectual heft to NGO activism, Harvard acts as the ‘Jesuit front’ to the Church of Climate. Like the Jesuits who furthered the Catholic Church’s cause in education and missionary work, Harvard’s professoriate leads the ‘climate crisis’, propagating the faith far and wide in the West and the developing world.
To be fair, the university boasts many fine minds and scholars of integrity, but the institution – like most of the ‘woke’ institutions of higher learning in the West – brooks few sceptics in its ranks, if any. Professors lose funding and influence as soon as they fall out of step with the ‘scientific consensus’ on climate or on any of the other liberal causes pursued by the Leftist higher education establishment.
Harvard’s Climate Alarmist Ecosystem
Harvard’s sprawling network of schools and institutes — most notably the Centre for International Development (CID), the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability and the Harvard University Centre for the Environment (HUCE) — has positioned itself as a global leader in climate change research and policy formulation. These entities, often in lockstep with environmental NGOs like the Environmental Defence Fund and the World Resources Institute, have churned out studies, policy prescriptions and advocacy that align with the ‘Net Zero by 2050’ mantra enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
CID’s Climate Policy Accelerator Workshop, co-sponsored with the Radcliffe Institute, funds projects emphasising ‘climate justice‘, a term used to cloak redistributive policies and brazen boondoggles in moralistic garb. HUCE supports research grants and fellowships that promote narratives of catastrophic climate change. These efforts are amplified through partnerships with NGOs, such as the Planetary Health Alliance, which collaborates with global bodies like the WHO to push climate-health narratives using ‘fear porn’ techniques of the kind that accompanied the Covid hysteria.
