Veritas et Victoria: Harvard Stands Tall

Harvard provides us an example of courage,. resilience, resistance; Trump threatens to strike back.

By William Kristol The Bulwark

On Friday, the Trump administration moved to cut off federal funding for programs at Harvard University.

On Monday, Harvard fought back, rejecting the administration’s demands to intrude in unprecedented ways in the operations of the university, and going to court to stop the administration’s efforts.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump suggested, “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”

On Wednesday, CNN reported that the Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status, per Trump’s instruction.

Also on Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security sent Harvard a letter threatening to block foreign students who might wish to attend Harvard from obtaining student visas, unless Harvard submits information on all of its international students’ disciplinary records and possible participation in political protests.

So the Trump administration’s attack against Harvard continues and intensifies. Its assault on private institutions that remain beyond their control, on the institutions of civil society that retain their independence, continues and intensifies.

And, of course, this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, of the Trump administration’s attack on the private sector, on civil society, on a free society. I’ve heard from reliable sources that the administration is planning to launch next week a first wave of attacks on think tanks and philanthropies it dislikes by moving to revoke their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.

In recent years, leading political figures have eloquently sounded the alarm in response to far more limited encroachments on our freedoms. They’ve saidthis:

“If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we no longer live in a free society. That’s what this is all about.”

“If we are going to respect rule of law, the apparatus of the federal government cannot and should not be used as a partisan tool to bludgeon your enemies.”

“What’s become fully apparent is a culture throughout the federal government . . . that basically use the government as an instrument of political activity, to target your political opponents, to make life difficult for people saying things you don’t like . . . I believe that all that comes from the top . . . These are things you typically see in the third world.”

These remarks were made, respectively, by then-Sens. JD Vance, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. Needless to say, they come from the Before Times—from what now seems a very distant past, the lost world of the Republican party before Trump. They come from a world where Republicans believed in, or at least professed to believe in, limited government and the rule of law. They come from a time when some Republicans really did cherish the fact that we lived under a free government in a free society.

That Republican party isn’t returning anytime soon. The Trump administration controls the executive branch and, for now, the Republican party in Congress. And we don’t have time for nostalgia for bygone times.

What these quotations can do, though, is remind us of the urgency of creating and strengthening the broadest possible coalition in defense of freedom.

It will be a coalition in defense of freedom. But to succeed it can’t only play defense. It’s of course very important to defend the guardrails that still exist. But it’s just as urgent to go on the counter-offensive against freedom’s enemies.

So: Containment, yes. But containment in the service of rollback. Resistance, yes. But resistance that opens a path to a broad political offensive against the authoritarians, that opens a path to victory over the enemies of a free society.

Harvard’s official motto is the Latin word veritas, or truth. It’s a good motto. But perhaps just as relevant today is one of Harvard’s unofficial mottos. It’s a mock-Latin aphorism, “Illegitimi non carborundum.” It means “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

Good advice for these times.

William Kristol is editor-at-large for The Bulwark, an excellent source of content from a variety of writers and podcaster. To subscribe to their newsletters, go here or learn more about their podcasts at Bulwark Podcast FAQ.

Image: Wikipedia.