"And so I don't have any doubt in my mind that what we're doing is, is, is the right course of action. It's defensible intellectually. And certainly I think it is actually a minimal and very restrained response to a long standing problem.... You know, I would certainly like to see much more dramatic action. I would like to see, you know, if, if, if they, if they are anticipating this as a, as a shock, I could easily imagine, you know, 10 times, 20 times, you know, 50 times more dramatic action that is, you know, within the realm of possibility.... We'll see... One thing I've learned is that you, you want to keep the, the, the larger ideas close to the chest and you wanna work incrementally up to them. And so we're doing some A/B testing, we're doing some prototyping. And as those things gain traction, I think it'll open up new lines of action. But what we're doing is really a counter-revolution. It's a revolution against revolution. And so I think we are the responsible party in this. But responsible doesn't mean weak. It doesn't mean self-effacing, it doesn't mean playing nice. I think that actually we are a counter radical force in American life that paradoxically has to use what many see as radical techniques."
Says Christopher Rufo at the end of today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast — "The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges."
What "50 times more dramatic action" do you think he has in mind? Criminal prosecution?
That quote is from the end of the interview. At the beginning, Rufo establishes his left-wing credibility:
"I grew up, my kind of formative political education was from my family in Italy, and
my family in Italy is all unreconstructed communists. So my first exposure to like political literature was in my aunt's house in Rome and, you know, browsing through her collected works of Lenin. And so, you know, I grew up very committed to left-wing politics, you know, getting out of high school, wanting to be in politics, going to Georgetown in DC for that reason. But the kind of ideals that I had built up in my head as a young person through my own study and experience and conversations, once they made contact with the reality of left-wing politics in elite university milieu, everything just shattered."
Listen to the whole interview. My link goes to Podscribe, which gives you audio and a transcript. It's worth thinking about the radicalism and restraint of the counter-revolutionary Rufo. He apparently has great influence over Trump.
(I wanted to write "He has Trump's ear," and I'm delicate enough not to have said that in the previous paragraph but not delicate enough to refrain from writing this sentence about the problematic metaphor.)
Posts
62 comments:
If Lenin were dropped right into the middle of the current U.S. political scene, which party's members do you supposed he would he deem to be the proletariat?
Universities are clogged with Jew hate, Israel hate, mis-infomration about the history of the land Israel has occupied two thousand years prior to the Syrian-Palestinian occupation.
Student visas should be revoked if you're 30+ year old Hamas hate-mongering activist.
Kōhei Saitō explains the absolute necessity of this agenda in the Columbia Marxism Seminars.
Interesting that he went to Georgetown; nominally a Jesuit school. Maybe at Georgetown he learned how to think; not what to think. That's what Creighton did for me. I was a liberal in undergrad and law school.
It's become the age of the citizen activist, and I'm all for it, since our politicians mostly don't seem up to it.
The CEO of Harley-Davidson got run off yesterday for his Royal Wokeness. Sales are down over 50% since he started spouting this nonsense, and, like Rufo, Robbie Starbuck has been on the case, has gotten the corporate function to drop all DEI crap from their charter, and now has gotten the CEO dismissed.
Accountability that translates directly to profits can be a very effective tactic, indeed. Shareholders aren't in it for the purple hair tint, apparently.
Two of the most destructive forces in a civilization are poor resource management and elite overproduction, and we've got both. Although the US was founded on an egalitarian footing intended to leave the British class system behind it wasn't able to do so entirely, and we simply substituted educational attainment for birthright nobility as a sorting mechanism.
The universities used to produce elite thinking, but they don't anymore. But social and cultural sorting haven't caught up yet to the reality that the caliber of your average American college graduate today is as far removed from their predecessors as Pluto is from the Sun. They're producing a remarkably sub-standard product for 1000x the price, and that product enters a world where they don't understand why anything works the way it does but still demand respect.
This is an unsustainable system, and probably has something to do with the increasing optimism about AI.
The amount of money spent by universities on DEI and general woke stuff is staggering.
It's just a large circle jerk, producing nothing of value, and it shows how worthless higher education is now.
It's not lenin, its Gramsci who has influenced this nonsense. He is much admired by Obama and his comrades.
Progressive principles of Diversity refers to class-disordered ideologies, not limited to racism. DEI is the systemic, institutional practice of Diversity, a wicked solution. That said, diversity of individuals, minority of one. #HateLovesAbortion
"The universities used to produce elite thinking, but they don't anymore."
Rather, they produce graduates with nondischargeable debt, while they live high off the proceeds.
I appreciate your endorsement of the episode and will check it out. The title: "The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges," with its ideological warning label and partisan use of "attack," isn't a promising invite itself.
Rufo has long been quite open about his tactics and copying the Left. It frustrates them greatly.
If I may I will use your "elite overproduction", a great phrase.
Elite overproduction eventually leads to the Charge of the Light Brigade.
elite(n.)
"a choice or select body, the best part," 1823, from French élite "selection, choice," from Old French eslite (12c.), fem. past participle of elire, elisre "pick out, choose," from Latin eligere "choose" (see election). Borrowed in Middle English as "chosen person" (late 14c.),
The ambiguity of spectrum politics in past, present, and progressive Europe and its adoption in American liberalism, a not so novel modern religion.
Explain that DEI is classical racism, which is all it is, and all it ever has been, and all it ever will be. Then fire everyone who espouses the least support of it, to decrease racism in the workplace.
Rufo establishes his left-wing credibility...It's worth thinking about the radicalism and restraint of the counter-revolutionary Rufo. He apparently has great influence over Trump
Trumpism is pervasively leftist in both ideology and practice, especially with its power-centric view, so this is no great surprise.
Defenestration is a good strategy.
"attack".
Wrong.
Faux-Elite loyal mob Tampon Tim-type democratics are pushing their far left loons to harass and attack Musk and Tesla owners. obey!
Cleaning up racism and gender BS is not an "attack" - it's what the American people voted for.
(fixed)
The Jesuits are half-communist, half WASP
Progressive leftist democrats - Mark - are you and your party.
DEI: the notion that a black from an upper-middle-class household is oppressed but a white kid from a poor rural home is privileged.
What does right and left even mean anymore?
The clearest meaning of right and left is in a spectrum from libertarian to authoritarian, respectively. Our Constitution was conservatively founded near the center of this spectrum.
Mark said...
Trumpism is pervasively leftist in both ideology and practice,
4/11/25, 9:01 AM
Wow. Here's a guy who really doesn't get it.
Defenestration
Some prefer machetes, others choose scalpels, a guillotine was forward-looking, and others second-story windows to relieve their "burden". What Hamas did to Fatah was break the glass ceiling.
That's the Only Way to Treat a Bureaucrat
Great podcast. And yes, we don need a counter-revolution. The problem with conservatives is they just like the status quo while the Left wants to move society in their direction. So we just get lurches to the Left, then a pause, then another lurch to the left.
We've gone from saying people are illegal aliens and worrying about the effect on American workers to saying "Migrants" and having IRS chiefs quit rather than give out the SS numbers for illegals.
Its gotten insane. The Democrats and liberal/left litterally do not care about the USA anymore. They'd rather live next to a foreigner from Wherever than a fellow American. And they'd rather help the foreigner than a fellow American.
ga6 said, "Elite overproduction eventually leads to the Charge of the Light Brigade."
Yep, and snobby 25yo liberal know-nothings with Ivy League MBA's are all Lord Cardigan passing the buck to Capt. Nolan.
How does hanging out at Zia Rufo’s house with family that happens to be a bunch of commies while reading Lenin establish left wing credibility?
2 things.
1) Yes, criminal prosecutions. Some of what has been going on easily falls under the category of “Conspiracy Against Civil Rights” or “Official Oppression Under Color of Law.” Some exemplary prosecutions for the worst offenders are very much in order, pour encourager les autres. Or as the Chinese say, kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.
2) Restore the dischargeability of student loans in bankruptcy after a reasonable waiting period, like 7 years, and make the schools go on the hook for half of it. This will be extremely popular with the public, and a constant pressure on the institutions to provide their students with marketable skills instead of cotton-candy wokery.
3) Institute a sliding scale that provides more support for majors with better job prospects and higher social utility. Want to be an engineer or mathematician? Great, you can borrow $100k per year. Accounting? $75k. Marketing? $50k. Sociology? $20k. Feminist genderqueer literary theory? Fuck you, pay for it yourself.
4) Limit overhead holdbacks from Federal grants to 10 or 15%. This is a torpedo aimed at bloated administrations in general and DEI in particular, and saves money to permit more useful research to be performed. It is an aikido move that will drive a big fat wedge between even the most leftist professors and the monstrously overstaffed college administrations.
That some stream of consciousness bullshit that I won't try to diagram.
Mark said...
Trumpism is pervasively leftist in both ideology and practice, especially with its power-centric view, so this is no great surprise.
4/11/25, 9:01 AM
********************************************
EXACTLY! THAT'S why Trump & team are shrinking & closing fed agencies, cutting fed spending, and devolving powers and responsibilities back to the states....
/sarc (in case you couldn't tell) :- )
"Altruistic" and "compassionate" liberals who run our universities have been running a scam for at least 30 years. The bloat and increase in unnecessary administrative positions, which has driven up cost and buried Millennials and Gen Z in massive debt is a sin. This while they hold massive endowments so some professor can take a six month sabbatical to to "research" about how ant colonies react to Mozart somewhere in Zimbabwe.
DEI also admits many kids that universities KNOW aren't going to finish out a four year degree. These kids run up debt Freshman and Sophomore year, flunk or drop out, and are stuck with the debt and no prestige. The Universities just wash their hands and take responsibility for NONE of it.
Then, they encourage these kids to go to grad school and go into further debt, which unless you're in education or a STEM program isn't going to do jack shit for you in the private sector job market.
Glad to see somebody is pushing back on the University DEI and other scams.
@Gusty Winds, Harvard plans to borrow $750 million after federal funding threats. Harvard has a $53.2 billion endowment.
To hell with what they're doing with our money, what are these universities doing with their money.
VA Lawyer Mark (mimicking Dumb Lefty Mark perfectly): " Trumpism is pervasively leftist in both ideology and practice, especially with its power-centric view, so this is no great surprise."
Now would be a perfect time to delete this moronic comment.
What "50 times more dramatic action" do you think he has in mind? Criminal prosecution?
Cutting off the money spigot.
ga6 said...
Elite overproduction eventually leads to the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Maybe in the 19th century but I doubt you'll ever get more than the Hissy Fit of the Juice Box Battalion these days. Which is a problem, because they'll never get cleaned out of the gene pool on the scale the did in the past.
"50 times more dramatic action" is difficult to quantify. My guess this is a warning/threat of what is to come. In order, more firings, then more budget cuts, then simple prosecutions, then RICO prosecutions.
Trump has a lot of people with similar mindsets around him this term. Consequently, it is only a matter of time before he is likely to tell the federal judiciary to piss off. 80+ injunctions and going strong many, if not most, of which blatantly and illegally usurp Article II power - unconscionable. No President can tolerate this. TDSers and John Roberts are too dense to see it.
The system of major research universities is a necessary adjunct to Corporate America, which is a worldwide enterprise. The reach and variety of this research is astounding. It feeds the creation of intangible assets which now comprise the bulk of Corporate America's assets. That this is now being held hostage at the instigation of small groups of Super-rich board members for political reasons proves that what is good for some board members' political interests is not good for the institutions' interests or that of the country.
Trump and his ilk are rude and crude. So are a lot of the donor and board member class.
ColoComment @ 10:33
Exactly but you missed the obverse . . . .
Biden permitting agencies to do whatever the f*** they wanted was pure, perfect libertarianism. /s
“The system of major research universities is a necessary adjunct to Corporate America, which is a worldwide enterprise. The reach and variety of this research is astounding. It feeds the creation of intangible assets which now comprise the bulk of Corporate America's assets.”
Sounds good. But the argument falls apart when you get down into the details of how the money is spent.
Rufo's a good writer, but he really screwed the pooch trying to reform New College of Florida, my alma mater. For the record, I was 100% behind reforming it (decades before the governor and certain questionably "conservative" talking heads noticed it): an elite private school turned public had descended into a bizarre radical leftist echo chamber of drug use, unbelievably extremist gender politics, and other nonsense. But missteps, stupidly ignoring meeting notice rules, and unnecessary provocations gave the enemies of change a lot of ammunition. He may seek some weird credibility by coming from a communist background, but it's unsurprisingly Italian communism, which is as impractical at implementing anything as all other Italian politics -- and I say this as an Italian-descent American. He should stick to writing. The reformers were bound to face resistance, but they didn't have to manufacture it.
"ga6 said...
If I may I will use your "elite overproduction", a great phrase.
Elite overproduction eventually leads to the Charge of the Light Brigade."
Elite overproduction eventually leads to the Charges of the E-Lite Brigade, as DOGE has shown.
Very simple --
a) No more than 15 percent of any federal "research" grant be allowed to go to any university "overhead"
b) Academic institution responsible for 50% of student-loan defaults.
It's true that we need research. We need STEM research to develop new technologies and medicines. But do we need research based in the social sciences? The social sciences developed and then called for DEI as a nationwide initiative. The social sciences called for replacing equality with equity. The social sciences are how the new eugenics has embedded itself by claiming that the social sciences can use genetics. Social scientists don't really understand anything; they may see things and report on them better than quick-think reporters. But their explanations change constantly over the years. And they aren't necessarilybetter than reporters. Look at the incredible floundering going on in the Dem party. "Why, why, why," they run about screaming. But it's obvious the country is swinging right while the rigid ideologues of the left can give no ground. But do you see sociologists, psychologists, demographers explaining either the trend to the right or the rigidity and fear-mongering of the left? No, because their 20th-century intellectual tools - Foucault, Gramsci, Said, Fanon, Ehrlich et al - are all out of date. And, BTW, notice that Althouse's attitudes correctly predicted the result in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election because, I can only suppose, they correlate with deep trends. But what deep trends? Sometimes I feel as blind as a Dem in 2024 when I consider Wisconsin.
Rufo's book on America's cultural revolution surprised me. It reads like a book included on a college course reading list. Very philosophically oriented expositions of Gramsci etc. That's real, of course, but the real action has been in the social sphere, as leftism became such a high status belief system that dopey arrogant rich people found it entirely logical to not just put Harris yard signs on the lawn, but to include the insulting fillip "obviously".
Well it's a problem when a country has a mandarin class. Mandarin classes naturally seek to perpetuate themselves and to expand their power. The US administrative state is a mandarin class.
"What "50 times more dramatic action" do you think he has in mind? Criminal prosecution?"
Almost every single university in the United States has been violating the civil rights of disfavored groups for the last 25 years at a minimum. Even when they lose class-action suits at SCOTUS level, they just change tactics and continue to violate the civil rights of these same groups of students. If I were Pam Bondi, I would be putting the full weight of the DoJ on making sure these colleges are race and sex blind when it comes to treatment of the student bodies. Continued discrimination does call for criminal prosecutions at some point, doesn't it?
@ Mr Hayden: What the Trump administration wants is to control what is taught, talked about and researched at American universities, private and public alike. It's a full scale onslaught on academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
The commentators on here blathering about wokism (as any university intro course would start out: let's define the concept — what, you can't?) prove the point, it's an ideological project, nothing else. If it succeeds, it will undermine the engine of American scientific and economic exceptionalism. American universities are the best in the world, but they need freedom, funding, and the ability to attract the best minds from across the world. This is all under threat, and a recovery once Trump is gone is not guaranteed.
“The system of major research universities is a necessary adjunct to Corporate America, which is a worldwide enterprise. The reach and variety of this research is astounding. It feeds the creation of intangible assets which now comprise the bulk of Corporate America's assets.”
Then perhaps "Corporate America" should fund it.
What do the "intangible assets" of DEI/Woke ideology provide Corporate America? And, again, why would anyone pay for that?
One man's "attack" can be another man's "defense." Trump would say that he's defending free speech and Jewish people.
Every single DEI/Woke/Marxist program is a secularized version old-timey Christianity. It's just that the modern practitioners are too ignorant of history to understand what they are doing.
See the many Catholic Popes and "Kill them all, God will know his own." See Henry VIII burning down and killing the Catholics in England so he could get a divorce and father a male heir. See the Conquistadors of the Spanish Empire raping and killing and stealing gold, and the USA's Manifest Destiny era of relocating the natives.
Political jerks will be jerks and bullies will be bullies. Some of them dress it up as DEI and others dress it as religion. The random ideology is a vehicle for bullies to persuade supporters.
wokism (as any university intro course would start out: let's define the concept — what, you can't?)
Woke refers to the sacralization (if not fetishization) of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual minorities. "Woke" demands that all specialties and endeavors (from Lit to Science to History to hiring) be reconfigured so its new paramount purpose is the rectification of historical injustice. Meaning more or less: From each according to his privilege, to each according to his stigma.
It is a sort of therapeutic identity-based Neo-Marxism.
--- What "50 times more dramatic action" do you think he has in mind?
F & E
Enigma, you fail to see the forest for the moss.
Rufo: "It's a revolution against revolution."
Since we had T-Rex earlier today, how about some Sweet?
Come on join the revolution, get yourself a constitution,
Come join the revolution now!
Come on act your age, it's a MAGA rampage,
Come on act your age, it's a MAGA rampage, now!
https://youtu.be/AdPpQRzcSk8?si=u9CQTjgb91aI6EAR
JSM
SAGOLDIE said...
"ColoComment @ 10:33
Exactly but you missed the obverse . . . .
Biden permitting agencies to do whatever the f*** they wanted was pure, perfect libertarianism. /s"
Nope. Try again.
50 times more dramatic action? Give the colleges some skin in the game. If your students take out big student loans, and fail out of school, the college is on the hook. If they take out big student loans, and fail to get a job that lets them pay it off, the college is on the hook. That is the more dramatic action I would like to see.
The prevailing picture of the last century has been that the left promotes change and the right accepts those changes. If Trump is learning from the left, good for him and good for the country. Notice that he's directing his intervention against the most dubious products of liberalism, and not fighting old battles.
If liberals or progressives or the left really do want to help the country rather than ruin it, where do they go from here once DEI, open borders, and climate change alarmism have been discredited?
Say New College was the pilot project. Then 50x would mean 50+ universities go through the same changes as New College. New College could recruit from the pool of those who got PhDs in the Humanities but weren't hired or were fired - who were cancelled one way or another. But I doubt if that pool is large enough to fill the Humanities departments in in 50 large universities so you couldn't just fire the whole current English department at Vassar and hire a new bunch that was truly educated in the Humanities. There are colleges like St. John's or Thomas Aquinas or Hillsdale which are turning out educated graduates but these are small colleges and universities. So how would you staff up?
Maybe they'd try to recall profs from the Time Before and s,o for instance, Althouse would be recalled to rebuild constitutional law at UW-Madison. But wouldn't a lot of the younger ones have been rotted away by their time under DEI?
Anyhow what I'm leading up to is that you can't push the river, even if you think you know where the river should be going. Each of us has to start now to rebuild the Humanities by rebuilding the Humanities within outselves in our own area. There's a whole section of Substack that used to be at Powerline where they are debating natural law and such; there's courses at Hillsdale on the Constitution and American History. I'm doing Andrew Marvell and it takes a long time to really understand a poet, even one you (think) you know and like; a long time to read the settler-colonial garbage that has replaced humane learning.
Take everything the Left abhors, from Kipling to Genesis, and give it to those wanting to learn valuable things.
Wildswan: the only way colleges and universities are going to hire non-leftists is if they are state schools and conservative trustees demand quotas. And that is very hard to enact. Decades of departments being taken over by increasingly political and radical professors created a diminishing likelihood for any natural return to real education. I know of more than one aspiring professor who pretended to be gay in order to be hired -- and this was decades ago. It's that bad.
We need to just start alternative institutions. Also, starve the DEI admin, which is being done. There's such a tiny pool of non-leftist, non-brainwashed graduate students in the hiring pool. But there are enough to offer serious students some alternatives.
Andrew Marvell is a brilliant choice to read to contemplate tumultuous political times. He certainly navigated them wisely, thus never losing his head -- though he may have been poisoned in the end.
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