Like Donald Trump, the Media Research Center hates Harvard University — likely because no MRC employee has ever attended there as far as we know. In late 2023 and early 2024, it was cheering attacks on then-Harvard president Claudine Gay for failing to sufficiently crack down on pro-Palestinian protests on campus, which caused accusations of plagiarism to surface:
- Morning Joe’s Geist Slams Harvard Prez’s Weak Statement On Student Support Of Hamas
- Networks SILENT On Harvard President’s Plagiarism Scandal
- CBS Cheers Deranged Harvard Faculty Rescuing President From Anti-Semitism Charges
- Politico’s Martin FLUNKS at Mocking Free Beacon Report on Harvard Boss’s Plagiarism
- CNN’s Egan: Harvard Pres. Didn’t Steal Ideas, Was Simply ‘Copying Other People’s Writings’
- Joy Reid: Claudine Gay Was Ousted So White Dudes Can Run Harvard Again
- NYT’s Mara Gay: Harvard President Claudine Gay Victimized by Right-Wing Racist Attack
- Nets Bemoan ‘Conservative Attacks,’ ‘Plagiarism Accusations’ Drove Harvard Prez Out
- AP’s Hysterical Take on Harvard Ouster: ‘Conservative Weapon Against Colleges: Plagiarism’
In fact, Gay was very much the target of a right-wing crusade to oust her — the MRC was simply mad that this truth was pointed out.
Now, Trump is using the power of the presidency to try and destroy Harvard, the MRC is totally behind that as well. Mark Finkelstein grumbled that the gambit was identified in a May 23 post:
On today’s Morning Joe, [Jonathan] Lemire couldn’t stifle a chuckle as he mentioned the claim by the Trump administration explaining its decision to revoke Harvard’s right to enroll foreign students: “The DOJ also accused the university of coordinating [chuckles] with the Chinese Communist Party.”
Liberals always presume that when you connect liberals to communists, it’s automatically conspiracy garbage.
Well, that’s because it usually is — remember the Red Scare? Finkelstein copy-and-pasted part of a letter sent to Harvard by right-wing congressmen that appears not to back up the claims being made.
Alex Christy complained in a post the next day:
On Friday, ABC’s Selina Wang reported for World News Tonight the latest developments between the Trump Administration and Harvard. The latest battle is over Trump’s move to ban the school from enrolling foreign students, but based on Wang’s reports, someone might assume that Harvard is the only university in the country. At the same time, on NBC Nightly News, Andrea Mitchell echoed Harvard’s claim that the move was an assault on the First Amendment while providing precious little from the Trump perspective.
Finkelstein cheered an old attack on a different Ivy League school in a May 28 post:
On the Wednesday edition of MSNBC’s Way Too Early, Princeton professor and MSNBC contributor Eddie Glaude Jr. said that President Trump’s moves on Harvard are:
“The culmination of a longstanding assault on the part of the right on critical spaces that cultivate, shall we say, a disposition of skepticism and suspicion towards authority. We could take this back to the 1930s. We could take it to the 1950s. Just think about William Buckley’s [1951 book] God and Man at Yale. There was this worry that colleges were distorting and disfiguring the characters of folks who were walking on that campus by really drowning them, soaking them, kind of socializing them in the ideology of secularism and communism.”
At NewsBusters, we take Glaude’s claim, flawed as it was, as a badge of honor. William F. Buckley was the uncle of L. Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, our parent organization, and the great-uncle of MRC’s new president, David Bozell.
While Glaude said that WFB was worried that Yale was indoctrinating students in secularism and communism, he didn’t dispute Buckley’s assertion—because he couldn’t! Buckley wasn’t “assaulting” Yale: he was exposing it. And Trump is now doing the same regarding Harvard and other elite institutions.
Finkelstein offered no evidence that anything Buckley wrote was actually true instead of merely creating a foundation of right-wing anti-intellectualism that the MRC peddles to this day.
Tim Graham whined in a May 29 post that PolitiFact called out Trump’s false claim that the federal government doesn’t know what foreign students attend Harvard:
PolitiFact also suggest Trump was “False” because the “State Department issues visas. To apply for a student visa, a person must fill out a form and schedule an interview. As part of the application process, students must provide biographical and employment information, including information about their relatives, and answer security questions, including about their criminal records.”
Since they’re Democrat-friendly, these journalists have zero suspicions that the Biden administration was lax on violent criminal immigrants coming into the country, and so the Trump people are vigilantly assuming something might have fallen through the cracks.
Graham also lashed out at an immigration law expert PolitiFact cited because he allegedly donated to Democrats. He offerrd no evidence that anything the expert said was false or biased.