Tuesday News Brief

Plus a rough cut reel in lieu of a travelogue

• So having written here just a couple days ago about how no foreign student risks learning much of anything about America at Harvard’s highly technocratic and progressive Kennedy School of Government, today I am pleased to see Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker take up the question, “Which Is Worse—Harvard or Trump?” Happily, he gets the right answer:

Readers of a certain mindset will smile inwardly when they hear that the college at the pinnacle of America’s higher education is also the place where the elite of America’s principal geopolitical adversary go to learn how to turn their country into the dominant superpower. Revolutionary Marxists committed to the ultimate destruction of Western civilization and American-led capitalism? At Harvard? Of course. Where else would they go?

The knowledge that America’s actual and potential enemies are among the biggest fans of Harvard and other elite U.S. colleges crystallizes many Americans’ conviction that our higher-education system has badly lost its way. . . Readers of this column know that I am not an enthusiast for many of President Trump’s policies or methods. . . But on higher education, I say bring it on. Mr. Trump is right to have identified the system as having corrupted our sense of national cohesion and purpose and right again to target Harvard as the symbolic and substantive summit of that system.

There’s much to dislike in his methodology here too—punishing Harvard by cutting off valuable scientific research funding is a dubious tactic. But I’m also sympathetic to the idea that structural reform is an omelette and some of these institutions are the necessary eggs.

The rot in many American universities is so deep and so extensive that a four-year presidency will be nowhere near enough to begin to reverse it through suasion, incentives and dialogue.

It almost sounds like Gerry has been listening to the Three Whisky Happy Hour!

• Tapper tapped-out? It turns out that the hyper-promoted Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson book on the Biden Dementia Cover Up, Original Sin, isn’t selling very well, despite the massive media blitz. What’s the world coming to when a mainstream media grandee can’t manipulate the masses into making his book into a monster best-seller? (And Tapper’s CNN ratings continue to sink into the swamp.)

Mark Judge raises a very good point over at Chronicles magazine: what if a conservative had written this book? It would have been ignored by the mainstream media. Case in point is Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino’s deeply reported book on the leftist machinations behind the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings circus, Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. Like the underlying story of unscrupulous behind the scenes scheming by leftist groups that was ignored by the mainstream media, this book was ignored, too, though it sold well among conservatives and generated over 2,500 positive reviews on Amazon.

Of course, the problem could be even simpler: Democrats don’t want to read about what Biden did to them, even if from the “trusted” CNN, and conservatives are in no mood to read an account of what they already knew about Biden.

• Finally, if you have three minutes, here’s a rough cut in lieu of a travelogue of my past few days: