How do you know you’re on the wrong side of a political argument in a populist era?
That’s just what journalist Matthew Yglesias did Thursday on his widely read Substack Slow Boring. Yglesias, a Harvard graduate who went on to write for numerous prestige outlets and eventually co-found Vox, says that while he’s not rich enough to make a head-turning donation (his blog generates seven figures annually), he begrudgingly forked over $500 to his alma mater in defiance of Trump.
“The way to respond to a bully is to stand up to him,” he writes, “and the way to respond to a strongman is to make his targets stronger.”
Of course, it’s no surprise that someone who has benefited from access to America’s elite institutions his entire life — before attending Harvard, Yglesias attended The Dalton School, an elite private high school in New York City — would feel personally threatened by the recent crackdown on the Ivy League. It wouldn’t naturally occur to such a person that Trump’s rough treatment of Harvard is in response to decades of bullying in the other direction.
Harvard, like most elite academic institutions in recent decades, has been captured by hard-Left ideologues who bully non-conformists through institutional power with merciless glee. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, citing Harvard’s hostility to unsanctioned speech, lack of due process in administrative disciplinary proceedings, and rampant self-censorship and intimidation, placed Harvard dead last in its 2025 college free speech rankings — for the second consecutive year. Bullies like Harvard don’t let their targets defend themselves, but instead make them live under the constant threat of ostracism, sabotage, and retribution. Trump is giving Harvard an overdue dose of their own medicine. Forgive us for not shedding a tear.
Harvard economist Roland Fryer could tell Yglesias a thing or two about the bullying environment at Harvard in which non-conformists have had to operate in recent years. Fryer, who at 30 became the youngest black professor ever to be awarded tenure, published a peer-reviewed paper in 2016 that challenged progressive orthodoxy in regard to racial bias in police shootings. The backlash on campus, including threats of violence, was so intense that he hired armed guards to protect him and his family.
A few years later, he was suspended for accusations of sexual misconduct, which he has denied.
Of his work on police bias, Fryer later said, “I let the data talk, and I don’t care what it says. I’m willing to tell the truth. I don’t care about the personal cost.”
That’s what staring down a bully looks and sounds like.
Harvard’s bullying extends to its handling of rampant antisemitism. Despite the release of an internal report that described a “scathing” environment for Jewish students in which antisemitism had infiltrated coursework, social life, and faculty hiring, The Harvard Law Review just presented its Fellowship Award to a pair of protesters charged with assaulting a Jewish student in 2023. The pair covered the victim with keffiyehs and shouted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” as he attempted to wrest himself free. And now, thanks to Harvard, both are $65,000 richer.
Harvard’s lawless bullying of Asian applicants also begs to be beaten back. The university’s refusal to comply with the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against race-based admissions by accepting 56% of African American applicants versus 13% of Asians in the top academic decile in 2025 violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. In addition to being illegal, Americans hate this sort of thing.
Indeed, as a matter of politics, Trump can continue to thank his lucky stars for delivering him such inept opponents. Baiting progressives at Harvard into a national political brawl — and threatening to redirect its funding toward trade schools — is easy pickings.
That’s because politics is, as they say, the art of addition, not subtraction — and certainly not division. There’s a reason every elected official in America has at one time or another been photographed wearing a hard hat. The object is to appeal to the widest pool of supporters as possible.
Harvard is America’s quintessentially elitist institution. Only the tiniest sliver of America can relate to people associated with the school, which means they don’t get much slack when it comes to law-breaking.
And Americans are correct in assuming that Harvard is important but non-essential. The government can and will seek other vendors for the medical research and educational programs Harvard supplied until this week, when the government announced it would sever the longstanding business relationship. America has no shortage of top-tier universities that comply with federal law from which it can draw these important services.
The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol, the arch-neoconservative-turned Resistance fighter who, like Yglesias, has leveraged access to elite institutions his entire life, posted a link to Yglesias’s article on X with the caption “Exact same here.” The son of Irving Kristol and product of the Collegiate School for Boys and Harvard, has renounced most of his previously held beliefs in the Trump era to preserve acceptance in elite society. His endorsement of Yglesias’s article was “chef’s kiss” perfect.
If the public perceives the spat as being between the enforcers of Civil Rights law and institutional elites lawlessly bullying Americans into submitting to its militant orthodoxy, I can tell you with utter certainty who will prevail in the court of public opinion.
We are all Harvard now, Yglesias and co. would have you believe. But we aren’t. And thank God for that.
