I have already mentioned here once today the public’s growing discomfort with the Trump Administration’s determined crack-down on illegal immigration, extending to mass deportations. That is one example of the very effective Catch-22 tactic the political Left regularly uses to ratchet policies, society and culture in an extreme direction with the assumption that undoing the damage will be practically impossible, making a very dubious development a fait accompli.

Another example of this phenomenon–it’s certainly clever and effective, just destructive and unethical—has been the Democrat’s deliberate expansion the federal government, the federal workforce and unaccountable bureaucracies. When the incoming Trump administration, via DOGE, began dismantling large swathes of the bloat, the standard scream was that the process was going too fast, cutting too much, and not following established process. The critics knew, of course, based on history, experience, political reality and human nature, that anything but rapid, meat-axe cuts across the board would result in no meaningful reductions at all. Expansion of the Federal government is a leftist strategy that diminishes personal liberty and government accountability—and it is also usually a fait accompli. Again, to his credit, President Trump has refused to play along with the game.

Now the New York Times has, believe it or not, recruited a Harvard sophomore to write a sophomoric op-ed attackingTrump’s desperately-needed efforts to push colleges and universities away from ideological indoctrination and toward a balanced curriculum where students are taught how to think rather than what to think. It’s called, “At Harvard and Elsewhere, the New Campus Orthodoxy Is Even More Stifling.” [I’m out of gift links. In two days I replace this link with one that avoids the paywall.]

Alex Bronzini-Vender writes (note that a hyphenated name almost always means that an individual was raised in a painfully woke household),

Under federal pressure, Harvard and other universities around the country now police academic inquiry according to murkier standards of fairness. The goal, it seems, is to avoid offending anyone, anywhere, across an ever-expanding matrix of identities and standpoints. Rather than dismantling the excesses of the woke era, the new Trump-friendly programs and policies simply repurposed them to serve a different ideological agenda. The result is a new orthodoxy even more stifling than the last.

Got it. See, stopping embedded and mandatory sensitivity trainings, “safe spaces,” speech policing and inclusion statements that make conservative ideas and viewpoints unwelcome on campus is just speech suppression of a different kind!

In a climate of uncertainty and anxiety, students tiptoe around the issue, afraid of saying the wrong thing. Faculty do, too. The day after President Trump’s inauguration, Harvard Medical School canceled an optional guest lecture for “Essentials of the Profession,” a required course for all first-year medical and dental students. The lecture was to be delivered by Barry S. Levy, a Tufts scholar who studies the health effects of war. A subsequent panel featuring Gazan patients receiving treatment for their wartime injuries in Boston was also scrapped. Administrators who had approved both events now said they were inappropriate for a topic that “continues to inflame passions.” The statement continued, “It is our aim to ensure that H.M.S. provides a constructive, nonpolarized educational environment for students of all backgrounds and beliefs.” But if the bar for acceptable speech is that it’s not polarizing, then speech has no guaranteed place on campus.

The kid using that as a prime example of what he is complaining about is telling. There is no reason or justification for a medical school to be politicized. How is the Hamas-Isreal war in any way an appropriate framework for a required course for all first-year medical and dental students? Ah, but cancelling it once such a flagrant propaganda session has been scheduled is “stifling.”

Here, though, was the best example of the Left’s Catch-22 at work. “Mr. Trump actually demanded that the university undergo an audit of ‘viewpoint diversity’ among faculty and hire additional professors as needed to fill in any gaps,” the author writes, “which is to say, give preference to applicants who have the right (in this case, conservative) politics. Wasn’t that the thing universities were supposed to stop doing?”

Oh, I see! Since the Left has taken over the faculties of virtually all elite universities (a new Buckley Institute report found that 27 departments at Yale University appear to employ no Republican professors—that’s a lot more than a “gap.”), there is no going back. Game over. Balancing the faculty is like affirmative action, and that’s verboten. It’s a trap!

Catch-22!

…except there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution or law forbidding universities and colleges from using viewpoint discrimination as a factor in hiring to repair an unbalanced faculty that is incapable of objective and open-minded pedagogy. So the ethical response, as usual, is to fix the problem, and battle the resistance and the disingenuous arguments by those with a totalitarian agenda.

As I read the Trump demands on academia, the objective is genuinely to ameliorate the suffocating partisan indoctrination on campuses, not to replace it with conservative bias. As I read Bronzini-Vender ( Why can’t I ever find a bronzini vendor when I’m out of bronzinis?) he is both a product of Leftist indoctrination and a fan of its methods and results.

Smoking gun #1: He appeals to anti-Trump professor Steven Levitsky, who says that the Administration’s efforts are “a tragic and very effective use of the previous decade’s standards around what we call ‘safe spaces’ and ‘wokeness.’” Levitsky is one-half of the partisan hack tag-team that has been a go-to authority for the Big Lie that Trump violates “democratic norms.” Somehow Levitsky never found fault with Democrats stomping on crucial democratic norms, like having a cognitively functional President and having an open nominating process prior to picking a Presidential candidate.

Smoking Gun #2: This one came at the very end of the essay, and if it had come at the start, I wouldn’t have read the rest. It is signature significance. The Harvard student writes,

[I]n early October, during a White House “Roundtable on Antifa,” Mr. Trump explained his administration’s approach more pithily: “We took the freedom of speech away.”

As you can tell from this video clip,

…the President was indulging in his penchant for inflammatory phrasing by implicitly mocking the position that flag-burning is protected speech and not incitement as conduct. His remarks had nothing to do with Harvard, campus speech, academic freedom or higher education.

Naturally the Times editors saw fit to permit the deliberate misinformation and deceit. The Harvard sophomore clearly has a job waiting for him in the Axis media when he graduates.

ADDED: Relevant link [Pointer: Other Bill]