Alex Christy kept up the Media Research Center’s Trump-fueled war on Harvard University by whining in a May 29 post that a TV host defended the school:
CNN and PBS host Christiane Amanpour stopped by the Harvard Kennedy School on Wednesday to deliver what was billed as a commencement address, but was really just a plea for the graduates to find the courage to fight back against nameless forces—but understood to be President Trump and people who support him—who are pushing America into a 1984 or Mussolinian state of affairs.
Amanpour began by alluding to Trump’s battles with Harvard and suggested people who support Trump are simply against education: “I am delighted to be invited to the Kennedy School of Government, to Harvard, which is leading the struggle and scoring significant gains in this current battle for academic freedom, and make no doubt about it, make no mistake about it, academics, education are on the front lines in the current struggle between the two halves of America.”
Christy never explained why Harvard shouldn’t fight back against Trump and should just acquiesce to his partisan demands. Instead, he whined: “Comparing Trump’s America to Mussolini’s Italy. Now, that’s neither truthful nor neutral.”
The same day, intern Ashley Taylor complained that another TV host defended Harvard and called out Trump:
On Tuesday night, Chris Hayes found himself more closely resembling a conspiracy theorist than a journalist during his show, All In with Chris Hayes. Hayes, leaving out critical context around the federal decision to stop government funding from Harvard University, compared Trump to a communist Apparatchik, that is, someone who was blindly devoted to political ideologies– like a Soviet politician.
Of course, this rhetoric was only used to further highlight the presupposition that Trump was a dictator and autocrat, a view widely held by those on the left, like Hayes. The irony, however, is that if anyone is blinded from the truth by their own political ideologies, it was Hayes.
“The Trump administration is trying to put Harvard University, the nation’s oldest college, out of business,” he whined near the top of the show. Further bloviating about how the was “one area of just genuine American exceptionalism.”
In the segment, Hayes said that the real reason behind the federal funding being pulled was because Trump wanted to “control what your ideology is.”
Taylor went into Trump Regime Media mode: “The original letter from the U.S. Department of Education that Hayes referenced throughout his monologue laid 10 reforms they would like to see implemented at Harvard, all of which should not be controversial.” She finished with more MRC-style whining:
Hayes touted the conspiracy theory that the actual reason the Trump administration has done this was because Trump wants to make Americans “more amenable to political domination.”
It seems, according to Hayes, that cracking down on anti-Semitism is a form of political domination, and comparable to actions of Communist Party members.
Jorge Bonilla groused that non-right-wing media won’t hate Harvard as much as he does in a May 30 post:
In what appears to be a return to 2017 form, the media have reverted to desperately searching for Resistance figureheads in opposition to President Donald Trump that they may elevate and then desperately cling to. Case in point, ABC’s recent coverage of Harvard University.
Watch as White House correspondent Selina Wang bestows upon Harvard President Alan Garber the distinguished title of “face of the resistance;”
[…]There was much Resistance jubilation after an Obama-appointed judge ruled against the Trump administration on the matter of student visas. Irrational exuberance, even.
In many ways, “face of the Resistance” is the political equivalent of “world’s oldest person”: there’s nowhere to go after that but downhill. And the injunction against the Trump administration stripping Harvard’s ability to admit foreign students hasn’t even run its course yet.
But there is an urge to identify successful opposition against Trump. In the absence of political opposition, the media can fall back on institutional opposition. This is how ABC viewers heard an earful about a university president being “the face of the Resistance.
Mark Finkelstein used his own May 30 post to grumble that another person on TV wouldn’t adhere to the right-wing narrative on Harvard:
On today’s Morning Joe, MSNBC contributor regular Pablo Torre, a Harvard alum who comments on sports and politics, denied that Harvard is “merely a hotbed of liberalism.”
Torre’s one bit of evidence in support of his claim was that the basic economics course at Harvard used to be taught by an economic adviser to President Reagan. The course is now taught by someone who quit the GOP in protest against Trump, and is a global warmist who advocates carbon taxes.
In saying that Harvard is not “merely” a hotbed of liberalism, Torre apparently meant that the university is not exclusively liberal. And he’s right! After all, this 2022 survey found that a mere 80% of the faculty described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only 1% of respondents stated they are “conservative,” and no respondents identified as “very conservative.”
And even those lopsided numbers likely understate the imbalance, as they encompass all professors, including the STEM faculty, which tends to harbor a few conservatives. Separate statistics are unavailable for Harvard’s Arts and Sciences faculty, but it’s fair to assume that where politics and related subjects are taught, conservatives are scarcer than Charlie Kirk fans at a Harvard College Democrats party.
Finkelstein closed with a quote from William F. Buckley denigrating Harvard. Gotta stay on the narrative, eh, Mark?