Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Fascinating story about a little known Japanese gent that journeyed from Shinto and Bushido to Christianity and ultimately Judaism, saving many Jews from the pogroms the Gestapo sought to impose in Japan:

The Japanese Abraham

Jewish Commentary

by Meir Y. Soloveichik

There’s a bestselling book by the psychologist Robert Cialdini titled Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. In one point in this largely non-Jewish book, we are shown a photograph from 1941 of two rabbis from Eastern Europe who found themselves in front of the Japanese foreign ministry in Tokyo. They were two of the leaders from a group of thousands of yeshiva students who had been given transit visas by the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania. His name was Chiune Sugihara. The visas allowed the students to flee across Europe and Asia and land in Kobe, Japan. Two of them were my maternal grandparents, Rabbi Shmuel Dovid and Nachama Warshavchik.

Germany was, of course, then allied with Japan. Cialdini writes, “The Nazis had sent Josef Meisinger, a colonel in the Gestapo known as ‘the Butcher of Warsaw’ for ordering the execution of 16,000 Poles, to Tokyo. Upon his arrival in April 1941, Meisinger began pressing for a policy of brutality toward the Jews under Japan’s rule—a policy he stated he would gladly help design and enact. Uncertain at first of how to respond and wanting to hear all sides, high-ranking members of Japan’s military government called upon the Jewish refugee community to send two leaders to a meeting that would influence their future significantly.”

Two rabbis came down from Kobe to Tokyo, and, in what must have seemed a surreal moment, met with the Japanese generals. The rabbis received an utterly unanswerable question: Tell us, why do the Nazis hate you so much? One of the rabbis was frozen, terrified, but the second, Shimon Kalisch, known as the Amshinover Rebbe, remained calm. Cialdini writes:

Rabbi Kalisch’s knowledge of human nature had equipped him to deliver the most impressive persuasive communication I have encountered in over thirty years of studying the process: “Because,” he said calmly, “we are Asian, like you.”
The older rabbi’s response had a powerful effect on the Japanese officers. After a silence, they conferred among themselves and announced a recess. When they returned, the most senior military official rose and granted the reassurance the rabbis had hoped to bring home to their community: “Go back to your people. Tell them we will provide for their safety and peace. You have nothing to fear while in Japanese territory.” And so it was.
The photograph featured in Cialdini’s book is (at least in my Kindle version) incomplete, cut off; in the original, there is a Japanese gentleman standing to one side of Rabbi Kalisch. This man’s name is Setsuzo Kotsuji, and his tale is told in his extraordinary 1962 autobiography, From Tokyo To Jerusalem, which is entirely out of print. Kotsuji’s obscurity is an enormous shame, because the book is much more than a memoir. It is, in a certain sense, a religious classic, the story of a man raised in the religion of his ancestors who turned to the Jewish faith while still retaining a deep respect for his own Japanese past. These elements merged together to form one of the great heroic personalities of the 20th century.

Kotsuji was truly an Asian Jew: From Tokyo to Jerusalem is not published under the name Setsuzo Kotsuji, but rather Abraham Kotsuji, the name he would ultimately adopt in converting to Judaism. This is apt, as one of the mesmerizing themes of the book is how his own life mirrors that of Abraham, and how his heroism allows for the Abrahamic journeys of so many others to come to fruition. Discovering Kotsuji’s story has given me a better understanding of my own Abrahamic familial identity.

Setsuzo Kotsuji was born in Kyoto in 1899 to a family that was bound up with the Shinto faith and with the Kamo Shinto shrine of Kyoto, where for many generations his own family had served as priests. “I was raised,” he tells us, “in that ancient religion of Shinto, a religion existing already at the dawn of the history of Japan.” He adds that the “Kotsuji family, according to tradition, dates back to 678 A.D., when the Kamo shrine in the Kamo section of Kyoto was dedicated.” By his generation, the Kotsujis were no longer priests, but his father did dedicate himself, and then train his son Setsuzo, to perform for the family one of the major rites of Shinto, the “lighting of the sacred fire.”

Writing about himself in third person, he describes one of the earliest and elemental memories of his life:

The first of these images is symbolic and prophetic. The baby Setschan is perhaps four. He sees two flickering lights—whether they are oil lamps or candles he cannot tell. He hears a voice reciting words unintelligible to his small mind, but it’s recognizable as the voice of his father. The image is a pair of oil lamps, wavering on the Shinto altar, and the voice is the short prayer of evening. The image will haunt Setschan for the rest of his life. He needs merely recall it to invoke a mood of solemnity, of awe, a deep religious feeling which neither teacher nor preacher could ever have taught him.
What this means is that even as Kotsuji would ultimately embrace a different faith, the experience of Shinto as a child, and his reverence for the past, would continue to guide him on his journey. The same can be said, he tells us, for the moral code he encountered in his community and his family: Bushido. This is “the way of the samurai,” and Kotsuji insists it is misunderstood as relating merely to military matters, for it is actually a code of honor and chivalry. Bushido is far more than a code of war,” he writes. “It is difficult not to love and respect the man who adheres to the genuine Bushido code.”

This, then, is the early life of Setsuzo Kotsuji. But suddenly an Abrahamic element introduced itself. Though Abraham was called by God at the age of 75, the rabbinic tradition describes how his own religious journey to monotheism began through his own questioning as a child. The same can be said for Kotsuji. He happened to come upon a Bible in a bookstore and started to read. He was, he tells us in his memoir, confused by its description of a single God creating the world, but then, he writes, one passage in particular suddenly moved him.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” What God? I asked myself. What does the combination “Lord God” mean in the second chapter?… I skipped a few pages, turning at random, and stopped without plan or design at Chapter 12. There my eyes fell upon the words, “Now the Lord said unto Abram. Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land I will shew thee. And will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee. I will bless those that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
At that moment something great and deep took hold of my empty mind. I knew almost nothing about Israel and her destiny, nothing of the history of the Jewish people. Yet the pages of the book I read to that point seemed to culminate in this great call…. I did not understand it exactly, and I was not sure precisely what was meant by the blessing. Yet the notion of Abraham breaking away from his home to go on a journey from which he could not return, as the chosen instrument of the Lord, inspired me and moved me deeply.
Thus did Setsuzo Kotsuji discover the beginnings of the Jewish people, when Abram is asked in Mesopotamia to journey to a faraway land, to a holy land. While this Bible he had discovered contained both Jewish and Christian scripture, he was drawn particularly to the texts of the Old Testament, because “there was something familiar about it to my young Japanese mind.”

One of the most striking aspects of Kotsuji’s memoir is the fact that he was particularly inspired by the section of the Hebrew book that many modern Jews, let alone non-Jews, find irrelevant. That is Leviticus, which describes the ritual to be performed in the Tabernacle, and ultimately the Temple in Jerusalem. The rituals involve an altar, incense, and the kindling of the oil lamps in the temple candelabra. It is therefore not surprising, given his own past, that the book struck him. “Leviticus,” he writes, “reminded me of Shinto,” adding that in Shinto, “there is a distinction made between holy and unclean, equivalent to the Hebraic kodesh and tame. It is not an exaggeration to say that the religion is a kind of Hebrew Shinto.”

In discovering this Hebrew faith, he knew he wished to embrace it. Weeping, he told his mother that he could not participate in Shinto rituals because he found what he called “the Shinto of Israel.” While his mother had never heard of “Israel,” her response was striking. “Well,” she said, “whatever the name and whatever the religion I have faith in your good nature. You cannot grow up to be a bad man.” His father responded likewise. His mother told him: “Your father admits that you are doing well these days. He thinks it may be due to the book you are so eagerly reading. He says that if this is so, it must be an excellent book, and the religion in it is good. And if God is only One, he would have it only that way. You may go ahead with your new faith, only remember your ancestors, and be proud of your great heritage.”

This, in turn, had an impact on Setsuzo for the rest of his life: “My parting from the Shinto ritual was a grave loss for both her and my father; yet out of love for me they found the goodness to make it a peaceful one, one which did not rupture our relationship. Their intelligent attitude left me forever with a good feeling about Shinto.”

Kostsuji originally embraced Christianity, the only biblically based faith he found in Japan. In 1916, he went to Kyoto, where he studied in an American Presbyterian college for seven years. There he learned English, Latin, German, and Greek—but not the language of the people with whom he had been for so long fascinated. He then journeyed to Hokkaido, the northernmost of the four islands of Japan, and met and married a woman of the Christian community there, Mineko Iwane.

As a Christian, Kotsuji embraced the role of a minister of the Gospel in Gifu, a town in central Japan, but his ultimate dreams led him to America, where he felt he could find someone qualified to teach him Hebrew. And here another amazing parallel to the original Abraham emerges. The original covenantal Abraham, as we know, had a covenantal partner, Sarah; and Kotsuji’s own wife Mineko sought to support his journey with her one source of wealth: exquisite kimonos that her father had given her through the years. He describes the conversation with his wife:

I will sell my kimonos.
No, I said, I can’t allow you to give up anything  so important to you.
Did Abraham’s wife carry many kimonos with her when she followed her husband from Ur? she demanded.
No, I admitted.
Then I will follow the example of Sarah, she said.
Thus, just as Abram in Genesis went with Sarai his wife far away from his father’s home in Mesopotamia to the other end of the known earth, Setsuzo and Mineko went far away from the land of their forefathers.

In 1927, they sailed for San Francisco, where he first learned of Judaism existing in communal form. “To me, this simple fact was a stirring piece of news,” he writes. “It was confirmation that the religion of the Old Testament was alive, was immediate, and was practiced in some measure at least as it had been thousands of years before.” He then went on to Auburn Theological Seminary in New York. Hebrew was not part of the required curriculum, so he had to take that as an addition, or as he put it, “I resolved to study my Hebrew from eight at night until two in the morning.”

He finished all Auburn had to offer in a year and a half, and then chose to study with a Semitics scholar at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. He learned to drive and bought an old Oldsmobile for forty bucks. It could barely move, and driving with his wife through Gallup, New Mexico—known in American musical lore as one of the places you can stop if you want to “get your kicks on Route 66”—with only 16 cents left to their name, the car died on the main street. And then, as with Abraham, a miracle occurred:

Despair in my heart, I looked around and saw that I had been vouchsafed a miracle. The car had given up the ghost directly in front of a Japanese restaurant. During the several days we spent in Gallup, waiting for money to come from a friend in Berkeley, the townspeople received us cordially and took good care of us. If they still live, my gratitude goes out to Mr. Yoshimi and Mr. Hayashi, of Gallup.
Thus were they saved by two Japanese Americans living in Gallup, and another biblical parallel was made manifest. For if there is any element that appears in the biblical tale of Abraham’s family, it is that angels, literal angels or human messengers of the Divine, present themselves at various moments to help figures on their journey.

In Berkeley, Kotsuji finished his thesis on Semitics. He and his wife returned to Japan in 1931 and taught Old Testament and Semitic languages at Ayoma Gakuin University in Tokyo. Soon, however, he was struck with typhoid, which led him to lose his job. In 1934, he founded his own institute in Tokyo, the Institute of Biblical Research. In 1937, he published what was the first Hebrew grammar in Japanese and set the stage for his becoming the greatest Hebrew authority in Japan—or in a certain sense, the only Hebrew authority in Japan.

Then, at the end of the 1930s, he was offered a job by a man by the name of Yosuke Matsuoka, who was the head of the South Manchuria Railway. Knowing that there was a substantial Jewish presence in Manchuria, Matsuoka felt he needed a guide to Jewish issues. Of course, Kotsuji didn’t know any Jews at the time, but in Manchuria he actually found himself among a vibrant Jewish community. Soon after, however, he lost his job, when Yosuke Matsuoka became the foreign minister of wartime Japan; because Matsuoka had hired him, he writes, he was bound by tradition to depart as well. Again, we might have thought this would have been a professional setback for Kotsuji, but the fact that he had gotten to know the future foreign minister of Japan would prove providential.

Kotsuji moved to Kamakura, a town in Tokyo Bay. It was then that he heard of the arrival of the Jews in Kobe: Jews who, having received the visas from Sugihara in Kovno in the beginning of the 1940s, suddenly found themselves on an Abrahamic journey of their own. They, too, had been called to leave their home and to make their way across the ends of the earth to a place Providence had prepared. Jews who had never been anywhere in their lives boarded the trans-Siberian railway, crossed Europe and Asia to Vladivostok, and then for three days took a ferry across the Sea of Japan.

We have to imagine what it was for these Jewish rabbinical students and rabbis to discover Japan, how different from Poland it was. And perhaps one difference stood out above all: In Japan, trains left and arrived on schedule. The ferry arrived at the coastal city of Tsuruga on Friday afternoon, with the Sabbath only several hours away. As Marvin Tokayer describes in his book The Fugu Plan, the Amshinover Rebbe refused to board. Tokayer tells us of one of the Jews who had come to greet him: “Rebbe,” he said, “you needn’t worry about not being safely in Kobe by 5:23. Japanese trains are extremely punctual. We will arrive at 4:15, in plenty of time.” Tokayer adds, “The old man had no experience with Japanese trains, but he had had a great deal of experience with Polish trains.” They never went anywhere on time.

As the train began pulling out at exactly the time for which departure had been called, the Rebbe changed his mind:

With more hope in his heart than confidence, he stepped aboard the train as it inched forward. As if suddenly released from an invisible force, the refugees raced for the train, jumping through the doors, scrambling through the windows, clinging to the railings as it slowly gathered momentum. By the time the final car had passed the end of the platform, even the slowest had managed to get aboard. The engineer shook his head in amazement at the customs of these strange foreigners and accelerated to normal departure speed.
Thus did these Jews arrive in Kobe. But they faced a terrible problem. Sugihara’s visas were transit visas, officially given for those traveling to Curaçao (in the Eastern Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela) as an ultimate destination. But these transit visas would expire after 10 days. Of course, they had nowhere to go. Thus it was that in desperation these Jews, arriving in Japan, turned to a Japanese person who had had experience with Jews.

Kotsuji tells us that “the Kobe Jewish committee had heard of me through my work in Manchuria…was it possible, they asked, for me to intervene.” To represent foreigners in Japan was at this point dangerous. But in perhaps the most important passage in his memoir, one that reveals profoundly who this remarkable man was, Kotsuji tells us his two sources of inspiration in deciding to take action. First, the Bushido, the samurai moral code his parents had taught him; and second, the Hebrew Bible: “There is a Bushido saying which goes ‘it is cowardice not to do, seeing one ought’; running way from the trouble went against the grain of my youthful samurai trained notions of honor. Further supporting me were words of the Old Testament: ‘the grass withereth, but the word of God shall stand forever.’”

We must pause to ponder the passage, to marvel at the merging of two different cultures and traditions in this act of heroism, the small boy merging with the profound moral adult.

Kotsuji went to the foreign ministry and met everyone, but in vain. Then he met his former boss, the foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, and said, “Now I have come to the minister himself, to tell him of my sorrow.” Matsuoka asked to meet for lunch, far away from the foreign ministry. During this meeting, he advised Kotsuji that if he really wanted to extend the Jewish visitors’ visas, he should seek instead the approval of local authorities in Kobe, the police there. Thus, for a period of several months, Kotsuji became the most unusual of commuters, traveling from the Tokyo suburbs every 10 days, wining and dining the local officials. In so doing, he became an intimate of the Eastern European Jews who had arrived there. As he tells us, “I traveled from Kamakura to Kobe—a trip of twelve hours—once or twice a week….The police became most cooperative. They allowed the refugees to open a Talmud Torah [a Jewish school] and were as helpful as they dared to be.”

Thus did Kotsuji help ensure the well-being of my grandparents and so many others, until, later in the year, when they were moved by Japan to occupied Shanghai. Throughout, he tended to their needs, including when the lay leaders of the Jewish community were telephoned in Tokyo and asked to send some of their most prominent figures to meet with the department of military affairs. Incredibly, Kotsuji then chose to publish a book in Japan during the war, a book responding to Nazi calumnies against the Jews. He titled his book The True Character of the Jewish People—which led to much hardship and great risk to his life during the war.

At the end of the 1950s, he chose to convert to Judaism, journeying to Jerusalem to do so:

Some of my Jewish friends questioned my decision. Why adopt a religion which is so likely to bring troubles and sorrow? My response was that I would come to Judaism with joy and pride. From my suffering for the Jewish cause, my attachment to Judaism had grown and grown, and with it had grown my affection for the Jewish people. My unshaken belief in One God lived together in my heart with the love of his people. It seemed only natural for me to become one of them.
Kotsuji was circumcised when he was almost 60, taking the Jewish name of Abraham. As documented by David Mandelbaum in his book From Lublin to Shanghai, after his conversion, Kotsuji was welcomed as a Jew by one of the most famous rabbis in Israel, whom he had first met in Kobe, Chaim Shmuelevitz. Then Kotsuji delivered a speech in Hebrew, the Hebrew he loved, citing Ruth: “My people shall be your people, and your God my God.”

When he passed away 50 years ago, Kotsuji was buried on a mountain in Jerusalem, known as Har HaMenuchot. On another mountain in Jerusalem lies the grave of my grandfather, who after the war went from Shanghai to America and then Israel. Both of them—Kotsuji and my grandfather—had made journeys of faith around the world, journeys from their original home, just like the original Abraham. And just like the original Abraham, both their journeys ended in the Holy Land. And the intersection of these Abrahamic journeys had a direct effect on my own life.

Here we have a man raised to honor his ancestral heritage but who cherished the scripture of Israel; a man who knew Japanese and Hebrew; a man who loved Abraham’s journey and suddenly found Jews on a miraculous journey of their own; a man inspired to act by the combination of samurai sayings and Semitic scripture; a man who paved his own unique path and suddenly was providentially positioned to help thousands of others in one precise moment.

Do I not owe Kotsuji the gratitude, as a descendant of those Jews, to include him in the picture that is my own life, my own sense of self? If Kotsuji is cut out of the picture of Cialdini’s book, if he is largely unknown, does that not make me all the more obligated to include him in the picture that is my own family history?

The story of Kotsuji, interestingly, has been recently more publicized in Japan than in America, thanks to the gifted Japanese actor Jundai Yamada, who recently wrote a book about him. And in 2022, a member of the Israeli Knesset traveled to Japan to bestow a letter of recognition upon Kotsuji’s then 91-year-old daughter.

But we in America need to remember Kotsuji again, especially in the difficult time facing the Jewish people, when the anti-Semitism that Kotsuji stood against is rearing its ugly head around the world. We also know that Kotsuji would have seen, in the Jewish resiliency and unity now reflected in the Holy Land, in Israel, and around the world, what he called in his book the “true character of the Jewish people.” Thanks to his book, I will remember Abraham Kotsuji, a beacon of moral clarity in a dark time, illustrating how, then as now, we Jews remember who stood against anti-Semitism, who stood with us at difficult moments.

It is reported that when Setsuzo Kotsuji passed away he recognized the complexity of his story by leaving this final statement to his family: “Perhaps in a hundred years, someone will understand me.” It is now 50 years since his death. Let us seek to understand, and commemorate Kotsuji’s life with gratitude and reverence.

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https://www.commentary.org/articles/meir-soloveichik/setsuzo-kotsuji-japanese-abraham/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=SocialSnap

Our righteous former SOS approves of this unique form of carbon remediation:

https://babylonbee.com/news/john-kerry-praises-haiti-cannibals-for-efforts-to-reduce-carbon-footprint

To be noted is that this article is from 2021.

Kerry is a treasonous fukk.

Missed that. I’ll have to see if I can find it in my feed and figure why it got reposted today.

And of course Lurch will never see the inside of a courtroom for this, or all his other, betrayals:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/iran-foreign-minister-john-kerry-javad-zarif-israel?fbclid=IwAR2FyZhEOyzxNh_y2LVC-R8dVJZJdgmMBCLN6RpP4_bEXCquMEujn8lQvMA

… is on double secret probation or something that has the DOJ ignoring FOIA requests:

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/11/doj-keeps-plan-secret-for-bidens-election-executive-order/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Top5&mkt_tok=ODI0LU1IVC0zMDQAAAGR4aEpRNq5bYRzQzlpqWcY4lNXfdMWbY0LwN1BM8vqBLnRaVjr1NoTDNQMwPjBK948tvoXRcii5qQn0PeO91CCM-RfSkWDJKb_s_qamQtoCulNhLE

So, ah, what all goes in this thread? Inquiring neurodivergent wants to know….

America Enters the Samizdat Era
Thanking fellow honorees Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Miranda Devine, and explaining why an American Samizdat Prize is both great and scary
MATT TAIBBI
MAR 7, 2024

I began studying in Leningrad, in the waning days of the Soviet Union, beginning in the fall of 1989. I was 19 years old, more interested in girls than politics, and thought of life behind the Iron Curtain as more novelty than terror. There was little visible suffering or hardship. The once-mighty Soviet government was already a ghost ship and the closest thing to repression I saw was a farsovshik or black-market dealer shoved into a cop car near my school’s subway station.

Not until much later, after I’d heard years of stories from Russians who’d lived through harder times, did I start to understand the brutal system whose end I got to witness. Parents of friends talked about going on vacations and trying to guess who was the snitch on the “Intourist” bus (the ratio was one party snoop for every four or five travelers), or making sure to be out of earshot of the old lady sitting na lavochke (on the bench outside the apartment building) before sharing a dangerous opinion, or the stress of sharing a kommunalka, or communal apartment, with a politically orthodox family. The bloodiest period of Soviet totalitarianism ended in the fifties, but the habits remained long after, including the advanced system of alternative media that ultimately broke the state: samizdat.

Tonight, along with Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, I’ll be accepting the inaugural Samizdat Prize, given by the RealClear Media Fund. Samizdat is a bit of a play on words, since like a lot of politically oppressive groups the Soviets had a mania for reducing beautiful language to state-acceptable ugly compound words (GosPlan, GULAG, etc.), so in place of GosIzdat (State-Publish, the official publisher) dissidents created Sam- or “Self” Izdat: “Self-Publish.”

Ten years ago PBS did a feature that quoted a Russian radio personality calling Samizdat the “precursor to the Internet.” Sadly this is no longer accurate. Even a decade ago Internet platforms were mechanical wonders brimming with anarchic energy whose ability to transport ideas to millions virally and across borders made episodes like the Arab Spring possible. Governments rightly trembled before the destabilizing potential of tools like Twitter, whose founders as recently as 2012 defiantly insisted they would remain “neutral” on content control, seeing themselves as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.”

As writers like former CIA analyst Martin Gurri began noticing long before the election of Donald Trump, the Internet gave ordinary people access to information in ways that before had never been allowed. The inevitable result was that populations all over the world began to see more clearly the warts of leaders and governments that had previously been covered up, thanks to tight control over the flow of information. It also made communication and organization of dissident movements much easier. We started to see this with Occupy and the Tea Party in the United States, and the aforementioned Arab Spring, but the election of Donald Trump was the Rubicon-crossing event for information overlords.

I had the privilege (misfortune?) of seeing how presidential campaign journalism worked before the Internet took over. Politicians needed the mainstream press to reach high office. Sitting among the traveling press on campaigns of people like John Kerry and Barack Obama, I heard how campaign reporters talked, how they thought of their jobs. They were fiercely protective of their gatekeeping role, which gave them enormous power. If reporters didn’t think a candidate was good enough for them — if he was too “kooky” like Ron Paul, too “elfin” like Dennis Kucinich, or too “lazy” as just a handful of influential reporters decided about Fred Thompson — the “Boys on the Bus” would snort and trade cutting remarks in riffing sessions before and after events. Campaigns would be elevated or die in these moments. I thought it was crazy, and said so in print, which made me a pariah, and I never thought it would end.

Then Trump came along and destroyed the whole system with one stroke, getting elected in spite of the blunt disapproval of media. His single Twitter account allowed him to bypass the press and speak to people directly. When that worked, and similar episodes like Brexit caused panic abroad, governments decided to take the anarchic potential of the Internet and turn it on its head. What was something like the “Self-publish” culture of the Soviet Union suddenly became, as we saw in the Twitter Files, an instrument of surveillance and social control.

Jay, Miranda, and I all share a connection to the same story. When Miranda published her blockbuster New York Post exposé of October 14, 2020, “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” Internet platforms Twitter and Facebook experimented for the first time with disappearing a major political story in the middle of an election year. Not only did both platforms suppress the story, but as I later found in internal correspondence, Twitter used tools previously reserved for child pornography to prevent individuals from sharing the story in direct messages — the digital version of a Cheka agent intercepting that copy of a Solzhenitsyn or Voinovich story before one person could hand it to another.

Meanwhile, when Dr. Bhattacharya conducted an experiment on his own initiative proving that the WHO had massively overstated the infection mortality rate of Covid-19, and later organized against lockdown policies he and many others felt were both ineffective and dangerous, the result was digital suppression — not because he was incorrect, but because his message was politically undesirable. Along with Bari Weiss, one of the first things I saw when Elon Musk opened Twitter’s internal files was a page showing Jay had been placed on a “trends blacklist.” This was just before we discovered that the platforms were in regular contact about content with agents of the American versions of the KGB or NKVD in the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, State, and Defense, among others.

The Internet, in other words, was being transformed from a system for exchanging forbidden or dissenting ideas, like Samizdat, to a system for imposing top-down control over information and narrative, a GozIzdat. Worse, while the Soviets had to rely on primitive surveillance technologies, like the mandatory registration of typewriters, the Internet offered breathtaking new surveillance capability, allowing authorities to detect thoughtcrime by algorithm and instantaneously disenfranchise those on the wrong side of the information paradigm, stripping them of the ability to raise money or conduct business or communicate at all.

Like Jay and Miranda I’m sure, I’m honored to be chosen for the Samizdat prize, but also a little horrified that such an award is now necessary. People with dissenting ideas will now have to find alternative ways to distribute. As was the case in the Soviet Union, official news will be unpopular in America because the public will know in advance that it is full of untruths and false narratives — but that won’t translate into instant popularity for true reporting or great satire or comedy, because the reach of these things can be artificially suppressed.

We’re going to need to find new ways of getting the truth to each other, and it’s not clear yet how those networks will work, if they will at all. It may come down to handing each other mimeographed papers in subway tunnels, as they did in Soviet times. We haven’t built that informational underground yet, but no matter what, the first steps will necessarily involve raising awareness that there’s a problem at all. That’s why prizes like this are important, and the agitation and resistance of people like Jay and Miranda and so many others right now are so crucial. We don’t want our speech freedoms to go gentle into that good night; we want them to go kicking and screaming, or better yet, not go at all.

The good news? As the Soviets proved, lies don’t have staying power, but even passed hand to hand, truth and good art do. The more the Soviets tried to clamp down, the more power they gave to books and stories like Master and Margarita or A Circle of Friends. As depressing as things sometimes look now, those who would suppress speech have the real problem. Imagine the problem of stopping the truth in the digital age? There will always be people who’ll try, but history shows — they never succeed for long.

https://www.racket.news/p/america-enters-the-samizdat-era

Swiss company creates robot able to navigate terrain on its own at speeds up to 4.5 mph:

https://singularityhub.com/2024/03/14/watch-an-ai-robot-dog-rock-an-agility-course-its-never-seen-before/

For some reason those most likely call out real or imagined “Islamophobia” are blind full blown Christian persecution:

https://pjmedia.com/raymond-ibrahim/2024/03/13/hungary-calls-out-western-hypocrisy-on-christian-persecution-n4927288

Currently enduring far fewer regulations imposed on the health industry by Obamacare, Biden seeks to eliminate this workaround, impacting a half million Americans along the way:

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/biden-short-term-health-plans-rule-creates-gaps-coverage#introduction

23 states and DC support the Biden side of the argument in Missouri v. Biden:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/23-democrat-states-district-columbia-file-amicus-briefs/?fbclid=IwAR0Ai7JkNWxx3eet_35nBjHG2vCKkmBH4JuPSAuaiiEoFGHNA0ku5MCruY8

Shameful, unconstitutional behavior.

This quote (found at the links) make a point I hadn’t considered: what would have happened to rural souther blacks that emigrated north during the Gilded Age if the US had loose immigration standards, with the imputation being industrialists in northern cities would have hired Europeans if they could have. It’s an interesting thought exercise:

2015 Nobel Prize winner in Economics for his analysis on consumption, poverty, and welfare, and the person to coin the term ‘deaths of despair’ with his wife (also an economist), Sir Angus Deaton has now changed his tune on immigration and believes it’s creating great inequality:

https://twitter.com/USTechWorkers/status/1767051094008664476/photo/1

https://x.com/USTechWorkers/status/1767051094008664476?s=20

This one bears watching:

https://www.thefp.com/p/exclusive-female-athletes-sue-ncaa-transwomen?fbclid=IwAR3EoEaGbC1kX8CV4vBaB23-6k_SBJC3PI5H7zzcslyTjIYLYkDDHn2oxhg

The squatter buster. This gent has made a business out of legally removing squatters from homes; states it’s a growing national crisis:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/handyman-turned-squatter-hunter-atlanta-squatter-crisis-terrorist-act-calls-national-guard

Britches are likely being soiled in certain quarters:

https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2024/03/13/confirmed-minority-voters-shifting-to-gop-in-large-numbers-n4927263

Hey, with upper admin so focussed on proper pronoun use and suppressing unpopular speech they need a little help with incidental things ... like ensuring student safety. I see one student quoted her is named Rebekah, which leaves me wondering if there is an antiseptic element in play here:

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/03/parents-of-students-at-uc-berkeley-hire-private-security-to-patrol-campus/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=parents-of-students-at-uc-berkeley-hire-private-security-to-patrol-campus

Those of us that have done a lot of riding can imagine how hairy this could be: 21K ft enduro ride on a single jug Yamaha:

https://gearjunkie.com/motors/adv-motorcycle-altitude-world-record

WV Secretary of State & candidate for governor lays it all out re electoral interference, “progressive” orgs that underwrite it, and the federal government—including spooks—that stole the last election:

The secretary of state has tightened election security in West Virginia and condemned federal intelligence agencies’ election meddling.
Author M.D. Kittle profile
M.D. KITTLE

Ensuring the integrity of West Virginia’s elections is part of Mac Warner’s job, but the secretary of state has been just as zealous about protecting national elections from unfair meddling.

Now in his second term as the Mountain State’s top election official, Warner has cleaned up West Virginia’s bloated voter rolls and severed the state’s ties with leftist-linked voter roll groups. Even political opponents have credited Warner, who is running for governor as a Republican, with being “vigilant” to make West Virginia elections “very secure.”

Warner, 69, has also crusaded against federal intelligence agencies’ meddling in the controversial 2020 presidential election — an election the conservative unabashedly asserts was “stolen by the CIA.” Such statements have earned him the ire of corporate media outlets, which, as dutiful public-relations agents for the Democrat Party, have dubbed the secretary of state an “election denier.”

“Secretary Warner’s work on election integrity and security has set the example for what is needed right now across this entire country,” Ret. Lt. General Michael Flynn, war hero and former national security adviser for President Donald Trump, said in endorsing Warner in West Virginia’s 2024 GOP primary race for governor. Flynn, in case you’re scoring along at home, had his life and reputation ripped apart by Democrats and their allies in the deep state and accomplice media as part of their Russia-collusion hoax. 

Calling Out the ‘Worst Election Interference’ in U.S. History

Warner has been the rare voice among his peers in vehemently calling out the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” Warner told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the February meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.

CISA, as The Federalist has extensively reported, was established in 2018 to ostensibly “protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats.” It moved into the nefarious business of information management by partnering with Big Tech to silence speech that it deemed to be “disinformation,” “misinformation,” or the Orwellian-sounding “malinformation.” CISA labored behind the scenes to censor those who questioned everything from the administration of the 2020 elections to the government’s iron-fisted handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Warner spoke out against the agency and the federal intelligence apparatus in late December during a West Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidates debate. He was, of course, vilified by the usual suspects for asserting the Covid-tainted 2020 election was “rigged.”

“The election was stolen,” Warner said, “and it was stolen by the CIA.”

To explain what he meant, Warner cited forming Acting CIA Director Michael Morell’s testimony under oath to the House Judiciary Committee that then-Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken had “reached out” to Morell after a damning story sourced to Hunter Biden’s laptop broke. Blinken’s outreach, Morell testified, “set in motion the events that led to the issuance of” a letter attempting to discredit the laptop story.

“Yes, [Morell] colluded with [now-Secretary of State] Antony Blinken to sell a lie to the American people two weeks before the election for the very purpose of throwing the presidential election,” Warner explained. “And the FBI covers it up. And Mark Zuckerberg pays $400 million to put his thumb on the scales. That’s not fair.”

Morrell told the Judiciary Committee that he pushed the letter, which was signed by 51 former intelligence officials, to help then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, “because I wanted him to win the election.” The letter, released not long before the 2020 general election, falsely claimed that the New York Post’s bombshell report exposing the damning contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop appeared to be “Russian disinformation.”

Warner also noted the unprecedented use of Zuckbucks — hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to leftist groups by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — to infiltrate swing state elections offices in 2020.

The West Virginia secretary of state has courageously spoken out against such alarming practices and other forms of election interference.

“Folks, this was the worst election interference in the history of the United States, when our own 3-letter agencies lied to the people of America with the expressed intent of throwing a presidential election. It doesn’t get any worse than that,” Warner said during a press conference last summer on the U.S. Capitol steps in support of the American Confidence in Elections Act. The legislative package “equips states with election integrity tools, implements key reforms in D.C., and protects political speech,” according to a press release from House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin Republican.

Cleanup at the State Level

Warner hasn’t just made election integrity a priority on the national scale. Since he was elected in 2016, West Virginia has cleaned up its voter rolls, removing more than 400,000 names of voters who died, moved, were convicted felons, or showed up multiple times in voter registration records, Warner told the West Virginia Record’s readers. When he entered office, Warner said, he heard from county clerks about the bloated voter rolls, including four counties where the number of registered voters was greater than the number of eligible voters who lived in those counties.

Last year, West Virginia joined a growing list of states in rejecting the controversial Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). The interstate voter list “maintenance” organization has come under fire for its mission creep voter registration efforts and its leftist leadership, including ERIC founder and Democrat operative David Becker. In his column for the West Virginia Record last June, Warner noted ERIC’s usefulness has “significantly decease[d].” Data-sharing agreements with bordering states will “prove more effective,” he wrote.

One of Warner’s opponents in the governor’s race praised the secretary of state’s leadership on securing the state’s elections.

“I believe that if every state would conduct their elections like we do here, we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” Moore Capito, son of U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, said during a December debate in which the moderator demanded the Republican candidates answer whether they believe the 2020 election was “stolen.”

Attorney and election law expert Cleta Mitchell called Warner a “national hero and a treasure.”

“He speaks the truth — he is a true patriot and I only wish we had 50 state election officials just like him,” Mitchell told The Federalist.

Warner appreciates the kind words, but he says he’s just doing his job.

“I just want good and fair elections,” he recently told The Federalist.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/12/how-west-virginias-mac-warner-is-fighting-the-worst-election-interference-in-u-s-history/?fbclid=IwAR1-KuphkD46KFaPCgEQGxjPrcwh57eJPNUpmWORkxduN-szThtUbaZtACk

Another piece that notes Trump seeking the National Guard, and shows Fani conspiring w/ Liz as they massaged J6 committee findings to cast Trump in the most negative light possible:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/new-report-fani-willis-conspired-liz-cheneys-faux/?fbclid=IwAR3-2nkCGuMM12X-DCBK88pNNeaNOIP0AXfWx4NrK8GkVasKoc3c8rtwzTc

Didja know the southern border is so porous that Isis is set up there? Our friends in the FBI get around to saying so out loud:

https://justthenews.com/government/security/fbi-director-wray-warns-southern-border-smuggling-network-isis-ties?utm_medium=social_media&utm_source=facebook_social_icon&utm_campaign=social_icons&fbclid=IwAR0mLjjOa6ylmi92BmLgupydnFuu1wBPVhVgmUsqjtRTtoG1uPl2gfSErYs

Pols across three parties sought to insert de rigueur language into the Irish constitution, but were soundly defeated. My guess is the pols will prove tone deaf to voter sentiments and instead will lament that insufficient communication addressing voter ignorance was the cause:

https://www.politico.eu/article/irish-voters-reject-bid-to-rewrite-constitutions-view-women-family/

Savage new Trump ad:

https://x.com/TeamTrump/status/1766547654887010692?s=20

I can’t attest for their accuracy of all shown here, but it’s some pretty darn interesting ways to frame this info:

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/ukraine-russian-war-infographics-data-visuals/#two-years

I follow The Hill though rarely post anything of theirs as I consider ‘em just another house organ of the Deep State, though to be fair they occasionally post an opinion piece expressing heterodox views. Between this item and one I posted earlier re higher ed I think I’m seeming an emerging election trend: finding some pet piece of orthodoxy and extrapolating wildly about how a Trump victory would cause the end of life as we know it where a given issue area is concerned.

In this instance the author conflates the horribly managed Covid series of boondoggles with the anti-vax movement, utterly ignoring the roles the media, government, regulators, et al played as they all hyped Covid, failing to note how that hype and mismanagement lead to today’s distrust of the players rather than Trump. Dimes to dollars we’ll se this structure replayed throughought this election season:

Trump's vaccine rhetoric sends chills through public health circles
The Hill News / by Nathaniel Weixel / Mar 9, 2024 at 12:10 PM

Public health advocates are watching in growing alarm as former President Trump increasingly embraces the anti-vaccine movement. 

"I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate," Trump said in a recent campaign rally in Richmond, Va.

It's a line Trump has repeated, and his campaign said he is only referring to school COVID-19 vaccine mandates — but that hasn’t eased fears that the GOP leader could accelerate already worrying trends of declining child vaccination. 

Trump “is an important voice. He has a big platform. And he uses that platform, in this case, to do harm. Because he's implying by saying that we shouldn't mandate vaccines, vaccines are in some ways ineffective or unsafe,” said Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. 

The ironic part, Offit noted, is that the Trump administration kickstarted Operation Warp Speed, which helped drug companies use a relatively new technology to make two very effective and safe COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has performed a complicated tap dance regarding COVID vaccines. He simultaneously wants to take credit for their speedy development but has also criticized their use and knocked his now former rivals for being too pro-vaccine.

In a post on Truth Social reacting to Biden's State of the Union speech on Thursday, Trump again claimed credit for the COVID-19 shots.

"You're welcome, Joe, nine month approval time vs. 12 years that it would have taken you!"

Every state and the District of Columbia requires children to get vaccinated against certain diseases before they start school, including measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and chickenpox. A plan to withhold federal funding would have widespread impact. 

“Like most states, Virginia requires MMR vaccine, chickenpox vaccine, polio, etc. So Trump would take millions in federal funds away from all Virginia public schools," former GOP Rep. Barbara Comstock (Va.) wrote in response to his campaign threat on X, formerly Twitter.

Since the public health emergency ended last May, no state requires students to get the COVID-19 vaccine, while 21 states have laws specifically banning schools from requiring COVID-19 shots.

Trump’s campaign says his comments only apply to states that mandate COVID-19 vaccines — making it essentially an empty threat.

“If you actually listen to the entire section, and also if you’ve been following his speeches for the past year, he’s talking about COVID vaccines in addition to masks in the same breath. This isn’t anything new,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email.

Experts say the politicization of vaccines has led to an increase in hesitancy and is sparking more outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles. 

There have been measles outbreaks in 15 states this year, most recently in Florida, where state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo did not recommend parents vaccinate their children or keep unvaccinated students home from school as a precaution. 

Instead, he sent a letter to parents advising them to make their own decisions about school attendance. 

Ladapo was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in 2021 and has since aligned himself with anti-vaccine sentiments, primarily about the COVID-19 shots. 

Ladapo told people not to get the most recent shot and has drawn sharp rebukes from the medical community — as well as federal health agencies — for claims that the shots alter human DNA, can potentially cause cancer, and are generally unsafe. 

Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said he worries that Trump is signaling he will empower more people like Ladapo if he wins reelection.

“I worry about any administration that doesn't follow good evidence and good science, that they will put more and more people like them in their administration,” Benjamin said.

“We know that Trump had some extraordinarily competent people [in his first term]. But we also know that he had some extraordinarily incompetent people, and that in many situations, some of the really incompetent people carried the day because they aligned with his philosophy,” Benjamin added.

Robert Blendon, a professor emeritus of health politics at the Harvard School of Public Health, said the experience in Florida and the comments from Trump are part of a much broader Republican backlash against public health expertise and government mandates that can be traced to anti-COVID policies.   

“It isn't that he's just going after these anti-vaccine votes,” Blendon said of Trump.

Trust in public health authorities has dropped precipitously among Republicans since 2021, and Blendon said Trump is a symbol of that. The anti-vaccine movement has never been associated with one particular political party, whereas the public health backlash is strongly Republican-centric. 

“That's made it very, very powerful,” Blendon said. “There are Republicans in the House and Senate, who when they're not investigating public health, want to cut back the budget ... so it has caught on within the Republican base very widely.” 

Whether it’s anti-vaccine specifically or anti-public health more broadly, the sentiment is growing. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of kindergartners whose parents opted them out of school-required vaccinations rose to the highest level yet during the 2022-2023 school year.   

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known vaccine skeptic who is running for president as an independent, has gained a major platform to spread misinformation and widely debunked claims about vaccines.   

He has falsely claimed vaccines cause autism, falsely declared the coronavirus shot is the world’s deadliest vaccine and questioned the safety of shots’ ingredients.

Offit, the vaccine expert, said he thinks public health officials could have done a better messaging job on the COVID-19 shots, and that by mandating vaccines they “inadvertently leaned into a Libertarian left hook.” 

Still, Offit said he is concerned about the increasing anti-science rhetoric from politicians like Trump. 

"I feel like we're on the edge of a precipice here ... you have the most contagious of the vaccine preventable diseases coming back to some extent, and with Donald Trump basically casting aspersions on vaccines, that's only going to worsen.”

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4517350-trump-vaccine-rhetoric-public-health/

Given the current climate, recent gaffes, and the beating higher ed has taken with a compliant administration in office, this piece looks at what might happen in higher ed should Trump win. It’s interesting for what is doesn’t say, mostly ‘cause were this gent to do a full court press on what all leaves higher ed exposed to legitimate complaint he’d be cancelled, but it is a bit more directly stated than is the norm:

If Trump Wins ...
His allies are preparing to overhaul higher education. The sector is woefully ill-prepared to defend itself.

By  Steven Brint
MARCH 6, 2024\

What if Donald Trump is re-elected as president? As unpleasant as it may be to contemplate, it’s an increasingly likely possibility that would be a disaster for higher education. Trump leads Biden, according to recent polling. And yet the sector’s response, so far, has been to sleepwalk into the election. It’s time for us to wake up.

For well over a year now, a small army of think-tankers, consultants, congressional aides, and campaign staffers have been at work crafting higher-education policies in anticipation of a Trump restoration. These efforts, if enacted into law, would radically change higher education in this country. Even more worrisome, Republican politicians have recently shown their skill at calling attention to campus problems that resonate strongly with the public. A Trump presidency with a Republican legislative majority could remake higher education as we’ve known it.

Given the stakes, it is time to look more closely at what Trump’s re-election could mean, and to be clear-eyed about the weaknesses a second Trump administration would exploit. Put simply, changes in academic leadership style will be necessary if the sector is to defend itself effectively.

The December 5 congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses offers a preview of what’s to come. When we pull ourselves away from the partisan melee and the fallout, including the resignation of two Ivy League presidents, we can see the outlines of a thus far one-sided battle. The maladroit responses of the presidents provided the necessary pretext for advancing the Republicans’ attempt to punish parts of the academic enterprise they disdain and to redirect university efforts along the lines they champion. But the right’s interest goes well beyond anything discussed by the three university presidents who were grilled by Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Consider Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind Republican attacks on critical race theory and anti-racism programs (and now a board member at New College of Florida). He sees universities as having succumbed to “race and sex narcissism” and as having turned their backs on the “pursuit of truth.” He dismisses the idea that universities can reform themselves: Administrators are too “weak,” he argues, and are thus prone to “emotional or social manipulation” by faculty activists. For Rufo, the way forward is to use state power to bring about what he sees as the necessary changes. Triumphant at the resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard University’s president, he wasted no time in announcing a “plagiarism hunting” fund aimed at exposing “the rot in the Ivy League.” But that’s just the beginning of what Rufo has in mind.

In a panel discussion last May at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Rufo laid out his agenda: (1) mobilization of the Department of Justice to investigate elite universities for admissions procedures that violate the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action; (2) penalties for universities where the department finds free expression to be curtailed by social-justice priorities; (3) the closing of certain departments, particularly ethnic and gender studies, where “ideological capture” is, he believes, most widespread; (4) new hiring procedures that emphasize the importance of a “multiplicity of perspectives”; and (5) termination of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. His ideal for undergraduate education is a “classically liberal” curriculum, focused on great works.

Rufo has also made clear that new accountability mechanisms will be required to achieve these ends. The locus of authority will be the agencies of government, including not only the Departments of Education and Justice (purged of people sympathetic to the social concerns of universities, of course), but also reformed regional accreditors whose criteria for re-accreditation would reflect the new priorities. Universities are highly dependent on the federal government for research and financial-aid funding. The threat of defunding is therefore a powerful instrument in the hands of those like Rufo who have big-stick sanctions in mind. Accreditation has been a recurring target of the right. On the campaign trail last year, Ron DeSantis called accrediting agencies “cartels” and promised an alternative system that would say, “We will not accredit you if you do DEI.” Trump has promised to “fire” accreditors, telling supporters, “Our secret weapon will be the college-accreditation system.”

The current accreditation system is a frequent target of Republican plans, but it is not the only one. Proposals for increasing the tax on university endowments, eliminating diversity statements in hiring and admissions, restricting international collaborations, and reducing regulations on for-profit and online colleges are also circulating in Washington. Plans to reduce the size and cost of our higher-education system are widespread. The Cato Institute’s 2022 higher-education handbook for policymakers, for example, argues that “the federal presence in higher education is ultimately self-defeating, fueling huge price inflation and overconsumption. The solution is to avoid the superficial thinking that all ‘education’ is good and to let people freely decide what education they need and how they will pay for it.”

On January 20, 2025, a newly elected Trump administration would assume the presidency armed with policies produced by a network of think tanks and research centers, including the Heritage Foundation, the Goldwater Institute, and Chris Rufo’s home base, the Manhattan Institute. Heritage has been instrumental in providing agendas for Republican politicians for more than 40 years. Its “Project 2025” brings together a coalition of over 100 conservative groups, including Turning Point USA, the National Association of Scholars, and Hillsdale College, and it has already released a nearly 900-page document, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” detailing the operations of federal agencies with the goal of coalescing “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Project 2025 is described as a “plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors” and as the “last opportunity to save our republic.” The precise details for how exactly to deconstruct higher education are murky, but they will almost certainly parallel those that are already circulating in the public domain.

These proposals are tied together by the now-familiar populist narrative that pits “unaccountable elites” against “ordinary Americans.” As Project 2025 explains, “Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge-fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high-school football game in Waco, Tex. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people.”

In a manner consistent with this framing, conservatives are determined to point their pitchforks at the most prestigious universities first, perhaps on the assumption that the rest of higher education will fall in line once the giants are humbled. As U.S. Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, chair of the Republican Study Committee, put it in a recorded call with business leaders, the hearing with the university presidents was just the first prong of attack. “The second step is the investigation, the subpoenas, gathering all of the documents and the records from these universities to prove the point,” Banks reportedly said. “That they’re not just allowing this behavior to occur, they’re fostering it and creating an unsafe environment for Jewish students on their campus because of it.” His third step? “Defund these universities by cracking down on not backing their student loans, taxing their endowments, and forcing the administration to actually conduct civil-rights investigations.” Rufo has spoken of directing the Departments of Justice and Education to “relentlessly degrade the status and prestige” of elite institutions. House investigations of several Ivy League universities are already underway.

As the criticisms of higher education have mounted, the weaknesses of its self-defense playbook have become evident.

In addition to the think-tank populists, Republicans in Congress will also have a say. Judging from the “College Cost Reduction Act,” introduced in January by Rep. Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who leads the House education committee, the congressional push will be directed toward three goals: capping the maximum loan amounts students can obtain, providing additional aid for low-income students who make consistent progress toward their degrees, and reforming accreditation by prioritizing student achievement and post-college employment measures. The anticipated additions to Pell Grants would be offset by penalizing colleges whose students fail to make timely loan repayments. The bill includes provisions that would incentivize colleges to close programs whose students are encumbered by loans they cannot repay and to expand programs whose students tend to fare well in the labor market in the years after graduation. In other words, the Foxx bill would place a heavy hand on the balance sheets against the arts, humanities, and softer social sciences.

And, of course, Trump will have his own ideas about what should be done. We can predict many of the priorities from those expressed in his last budget proposal to Congress. His administration called for a 7.8-percent cut from the Department of Education budget, with sharp reductions for public-service loan forgiveness. The National Institutes of Health budget was slated for a 7-percent cut; the National Science Foundation faced a 6-percent cut. Trump also attempted to eliminate all funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, something he repeatedly attempted — and was unable to achieve.

More recently, candidate Trump has offered two concrete, if far-fetched, policy proposals. The first is for an entirely new system of accreditation heavily weighted toward evaluating colleges on the basis of job placement, evidence of student learning, and curricula that focus on “the American tradition and Western civilization.” The second is for a federally funded tuition-free, open-access online university. He has christened this leviathan the “American Academy.” It would be funded primarily by taxes on existing universities’ endowments, with the focus, naturally, on the largest endowments.

Of course, not everything Republicans hope to achieve will be achievable. It will be a heavy lift to bring the regional accreditors into the Republican policy orbit, given that any national-level policy changes would require revision and reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, an endeavor that would not move quickly (if at all). And if Trump is re-elected, his American Academy seems doomed from the start — not only by its prohibitive cost but by how closely it resembles the late, unlamented Trump University, which closed its doors in 2010 and was forced to pay out $25 million to students it defrauded.

A second Trump administration would begin by distinguishing policy goals that could be enacted through executive orders from those that require congressional or state legislation. On the congressional side, it would not be difficult to find ambitious lawmakers eager to push legislation. Judging from their public statements, J.D. Vance, Tom Cotton, Dan Crenshaw, Elise Stefanik, and Virginia Foxx are already champing at the bit. White House and foundation policy shops will produce and distribute talking points. If history is any guide, these talking points will include cherry-picked data to provide a thin veneer of rationality. Those talking points will then be rehearsed doggedly in committee meetings and floor debates. Democrats would of course take to friendly airwaves to denounce the legislation, and rallies would be held on college campuses in opposition. But, in the end, if Republicans have the votes, some of the new policies would prevail.

Higher education has a playbook for self-defense, as we saw during the first Trump administration. And yet as the criticisms of higher education have mounted, the weaknesses of that playbook have become evident. The weaknesses include university presidents — particularly their reflexive reliance on policies and processes unconnected to deeply held values, their evasiveness in the face of tough questioning, and their failure to understand and respond to the demands of political theater. All of these attributes were on stark display during the December 5 antisemitism hearing. The transcript shows that Claudine Gay referenced Harvard policies and processes nearly 30 times while largely ignoring the results of these policies. She evaded answering pointed questions over a dozen times. Missing were compelling examples supporting her many references to her university’s “robust” disciplinary policies or illustrating how a vibrant culture of open expression actually exists on the Harvard campus. Instead, she relied on terse statements about her “deep commitment to free expression” and the importance of “preserving the security of our community.”

These bloodless responses made for a stark contrast to the emotionally charged language of her inquisitors. The hearing began with a short video showing hate-filled chanting and acts of intimidation. Representatives vividly described anti-Semitic actions on campus, including Jewish students being pushed, spat upon, and punched. Republicans passionately condemned the “moral rot” at the heart of the academic enterprise and the “poison fruits” of institutional culture. There were also many accusations of or references to murder, barbarism, and mania.

The message was clear: Republicans have learned to capitalize on dramatic events as a springboard to more far-reaching policy changes. Universities have been a punching bag on the right for decades, but rarely have so many cameras and notepads been present to record such a perfect representation of the Republican narrative.

Those who advance to top positions in universities are generally expert managers. Many also have the capacity to charm donors. They are less likely to be practiced politicians or to be deeply immersed in the intellectual life of their institutions. In part this is because of the division of labor between outward-facing presidents and inward-facing provosts and deans. It is also results from the development of separate administrative tracks where the high-stakes issues are finance and budgeting, regulatory bodies, conflict abatement, reputation management, and enrollment management — not the research and teaching mission.

It would be a mistake to call most of today’s university presidents academic leaders. They are managers of complex organizations whose product lines range from athletics to zoology. They are subject to pressure from state legislatures, donors, regulatory bodies, professional associations, faculty interest groups, parents, and prospective students. Given the complexity of the role, university boards have over time concluded that outstanding scholars rarely make outstanding university managers. When I examined the careers of university presidents several years ago as part of research for a book (Two Cheers for Higher Education), I found that only about half of the top 50 research universities and a sprinkling of liberal-arts colleges recruited presidents who had excelled as scientists and scholars. The rest hired candidates with modest academic careers, candidates who had worked their way up through the administrative bureaucracy without ever professing, or candidates whose careers had been spent in political life or business.

At the nation’s largest and most-selective universities there is a playbook for how to handle nearly every situation a president encounters, including data breaches, athletics scandals, and student suicides. Because of the many units a president presides over, and the diversity of the constituency for each, such playbooks are necessary. Presidents learn to speak publicly only about the recognitions their faculties and students obtain. Prizes, graduations, and record-breaking fund-raising campaigns deserve speeches. Everything else is not for public consumption. When controversies arise, presidents put together task forces. They consult legal counsel before acting; they defer to counsel when resources or reputations may be at risk. They learn what is expected at ceremonial occasions and how to perform these duties. They are briefed on how to interact with legislators and how to deflect uncomfortable questions. They learn to promise to look into matters without necessarily intending to do so. They have speechwriters to write their speeches, assistants to troubleshoot and mollify, and deans and department chairs to interact with the faculty and students. Most of the time this managerial approach works. But when it comes to combating a well-organized political party determined to degrade academic institutions, managerialism invites disaster. If the presidential playbook isn’t thoroughly revised, higher education will face a diminished future should Trump and Republicans regain power in 2025.
What, then, can be done to avoid this unhappy outcome?

First, universities will need to decide which of the policies that are currently under attack should be preserved or strengthened and which may require reform — or abandonment. Republicans have attacked university endowments, science funding, the teaching of critical race theory, diversity policies, and academic-freedom protections. Some of these commitments will be easy to defend. How can the U.S. compete effectively without robust academic R&D? Congress has so far agreed, but the case must continue to be made effectively.

Other policies will require better defenses than have been offered thus far. Diversity policies are at the top of this list. The idea that the civic mission of universities centers on the racial and gender diversity of faculty and student bodies is relatively new. It became a fixture of liberal thinking only two decades ago when the first diversity statements were required and as DEI offices began to catch on. The decline of Republican support for higher education shares this timeline. Diversity, equity, and inclusion caught on with campus leaders after affirmative action was hamstrung by the courts. On some campuses, it has proved to be a poor substitute because it is forced into the pretense that all diversity matters even when university practices belie the claim. The Israel-Hamas conflict and the December 5 congressional hearings exposed the subterfuge.

As an antidote to the attacks on DEI, presidents can begin to extol again the broader civic mission of universities. That broader vision includes research that provides far-seeing insight into the world we inhabit; studies that help solve a wide range of community problems; the development of new technologies to bring jobs and new wealth to states and regions; lectures and performances that bring cultural enrichment to local communities; and the cultivation of future leaders from among the undergraduate and graduate student bodies.
DEI policies are part of this package, but only part. And because they are controversial, they should be defended with concrete evidence of their effectiveness. Do DEI offices have measurable effects on the sense of belonging or the level of achievement of students from underrepresented groups? Have they helped to retain diverse faculty? If so, how large are these effects? And what costs, if any, have the offices incurred in terms of campus free speech? It is surprising that studies like this are in such short supply.

It is tempting to think that elite institutions should begin to focus again on recruiting distinguished scholars and scientists for leadership roles (as opposed to those who have lesser academic records but lengthier management experience). After all, excellent scholars might be more likely to speak with knowledge and conviction about the intellectual and educational accomplishments of their institutions, having contributed to those accomplishments themselves.

But what is more essential for presidents is the ability to recognize when they are actors in a political arena and to have the presence of mind to meet such moments. If a member of Congress asks for the percentage of conservative faculty members at Harvard, the right answer should come naturally. The right answer is not the one Claudine Gay gave: “I do not have that statistic. We don’t collect that data.” The right answer challenges the premise and is conveyed openly rather than at arm’s length: Academically talented conservatives usually prefer to go into business, legal, or medical careers, and Harvard would welcome qualified conservatives who wish to give up the higher salaries in those fields for the opportunity to research and teach at a world-class university.

Harvard is looking for a new president. One of the criteria should be the capacity to provide the public with straight talk and with concrete examples illustrating why their institutions make a difference and are worthy of public support. In the current environment, and given the stakes, the tight-lipped and evasive answers of today’s academic managers just won’t cut it.

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LEADERSHIP & GOVERNANCEPOLITICAL INFLUENCE & ACTIVISM

Steven Brint

Steven Brint is a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California at Riverside and the director of the Colleges & Universities 2000 Project.

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