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IT’S DEAD JIM, AND NOT A MINUTE TOO SOON:  USAID formally shut down and incorporated into State Department.

NOT REALLY A NEW INSIGHT, BUT INDISPUTABLY TRUE:

A great explanation for white wokeness I heard: upper-middle-class whites desperately want to express sneering, classist contempt, and lower-class whites are the only socially acceptable target.

— Hunter Ash (@ArtemisConsort) July 4, 2025

NPR’s radical “domestic extremism correspondent” Odette Yousef took an insane angle on the Trump Administration’s efforts to punish Harvard University for failing to protect Jewish students from anti-semitism on campus – twisting it into Trump trying to halt the arc of racial justice. The online transcript of Tuesday’s NPR’s flagship news program All Things Considered featured this headline: “Federal pressure on Harvard over antisemitism echoes conservative attacks on higher ed.” That gets Ivy League universities off the hook for letting pro-Hamas radicals run rampant since Hamas’s massacre at an Israeli music festival.  Host Ari Shapiro explained that the Trump administration has informed Harvard University it had violated the Civil Rights Act, claiming the university has been "deliberately indifferent" to harassment directed at Jews on campus. Shapiro invited on NPR's domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef, not to talk about the actually extremist pro-Hamas encampments that sprouted up on progressive elite campuses, but the Trump administration for doing something about it. Yousef pretended there was significant anti-Muslim bias at Harvard. ODETTE YOUSEF: Well, many of the examples it cites of campus hostility towards Jewish and Israeli students, Ari, actually come from Harvard's own investigation. Harvard convened task forces to look at antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias at the school. Those reports came out in April. And so the administration is using information that the university found to punish the university. It also only focuses on antisemitism, so it doesn't show concern about findings of hostility toward Muslim, Palestinian or Arab students on campus. She slotted Trump’s move against Harvard as just another ignorant conservative move against elite education. YOUSEF: ….And so this is where the question comes in, Ari, of what's really the goal here, and it's useful to put it in a larger historical context of attacks on higher education. Yousef found a Trinity College professor who supports DEI on campus and sees conservatives as a long-standing racist threat to education. YOUSEF: I spoke with Isaac Kamola about this. He teaches political science at Trinity College in Hartford. He says it goes back to the mid-20th century. Access to higher ed really expanded. Colleges were accepting more women, people of color, first generation and low-income students, people studying under the GI Bill. And in turn, that led to new areas of study, like Black studies and gender studies. ISAAC KAMOLA: Starting in the 1980s, you get a massive backlash against those kinds of shifts by those who want to reproduce hierarchy, that want to reproduce this vision of America as a white nation - as a white Christian nation - that want to push back against the directions of racial justice that the society was going in in general and higher education played a large role in. YOUSEF: So universities, Ari, kind of became the vanguard in the pursuit of inclusive democracy. And Kamola says, you know, conservative attacks on universities are really like a counter-revolution fighting against that. We’re quite a long way from the question of Harvard violating the civil rights of Jewish students. YOUSEF: Well, Kamola says antisemitism is a real and serious issue, but he sees the administration using it for other goals, namely rolling back civil rights -- or DEI, as we hear more often now -- and rolling back inclusive democracy…. Next, a clip from Jonathan Jacoby of the Nexus Project tortured language to suggest that tolerating anti-semitism was actually part of fighting anti-semitism. JONATHAN JACOBY: Living as a free people in an open society is essentially unprecedented in Jewish history. And it's kept us safe, and our relationships with other Americans have kept us safe. And so standing against the weaponization of antisemitism to undermine democracy is part of standing against antisemitism. Yousef encapsulated Jacoby’s argument in her own words, that “singling out Jewish people as uniquely deserving of safety could feed conspiracy narratives, and it could lead to Jews being scapegoated for damage ultimately done to America's higher education system.” That’s the same twisted argument leftist Yale University professor Jason Stanley used on tax-funded PBS in March, before high-tailing it to Canada to flee Trump’s fascism.