Charles Fain Lehman, Rafael Mangual, Tal Fortgang, and Jesse Arm discuss the attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, the Trump administration’s crackdown on Harvard University, and the best crew members to bring on a trip to space.
Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me today on our panel are Rafael Mangual, a crime policy researcher at the Manhattan Institute, Jesse Arm, who directs all things policy at the Manhattan Institute and Tal Fortgang, legal policy fellow and anti-civil terrorist at the Manhattan Institute. Gentlemen, thanks for being on. I want to take us right into the news of the day. Last weekend, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home was attacked in a firebombing, or attempted firebombing by 38-year-old Cody Balmer. Balmer police say was motivated by his belief that Shapiro was going to do terrible things to the people of Gaza. He was also out on bail and three days earlier his mother had failed to have him committed based on the standards in Pennsylvania. So really a whole rolling mess there in Pennsylvania that has, in my view, not gotten enough attention in the media, which is part of why wanted to talk about it today. But why don’t we start, Ralph, what’s your assessment situation? What do you make of this story? What does this story say about the broader environment?
Rafael Mangual: And it’s such a rich story, right? It’s kind of got a little bit of everything. mean, things that we’ve been talking about at Manhattan Institute forever. You’ve got a guy who was just recently arrested, released pretrial despite clearly being out of his mind. You have his mother trying to have him civilly committed. So we’ve been talking a lot about the problem of serious mental illness and the lack of fortitude on the part of states and cities around the country to actually take the steps needed to get crazy people off the street before they actually do something terrible. So you’ve got this kind of like criminal justice policy angle to play here. But I think the thing that most people are to find most outrageous is what you highlighted at the very end, is the media coverage of this. I mean, if this were a white supremacist burning down the house of say, Barack Obama or some prominent figure of color, this would be wall-to-wall coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week, nonstop for the next month. People would have their hair on fire.
The reaction would be completely different. I think the public is starting to see that, but it’s as if there’s really nothing you can do to get the media to claw back even a shred of its credibility. And it’s really something to watch.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, Jesse, where do you come in on this? I think the media angle is the right one. I’m curious about, you and I have talked a little bit about sort of how Shapiro is positioned in all this. He’s tried to frame himself as a leading moderate. He is America’s most visibly Jewish governor. Now he’s being arguably attacked for that. What’s he gonna do and what do you expect him to do and what are the sort of lines at play here?
Jesse Arm: I think this is an example of really just a cascading failure of the systems and norms that are meant to keep us safe. So you got a guy who ended up back on the streets, out on bail. This is a guy who assaulted his estranged wife, stomped on his 10-year-old son’s broken leg. His mother was calling police frantically trying to get him committed.
And he said he did it, right, because of what Shapiro, the governor of the Keystone State, is doing to the Palestinians.
Charles Fain Lehman: Which is very confusing.
Jesse Arm: I think it was Tal, or somebody who said to me, yeah, I think it was Tal, or somebody who said to me that was a completely inappropriate use of the Pennsylvania National Guard, sarcastically, of course. No, he did it, he targeted this guy because it’s a Jew. There are parallels here to the targeted attacks on Teslas around the country that the left has kind of created a permission structure to deem acceptable. Ditto, you know, the kind of hero worship for Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson. There’s a trend that’s going on here. And, you know, what do I expect Shapiro to do? Well, obviously he’s got a golden opportunity to do something, right? On three fronts. The civil commitment stuff, right? Involuntary commitment, make it easier to put people behind bars. We’ve got a mountain full of polling, most of it coming out of New York in the last few months that tell us this is something that people really want to see happen. Ditto bail rules. There’s currently a bipartisan piece of legislation that has passed the Pennsylvania Senate, which says they’ll strengthen the process by which people can get bail, get out on bail, goes after cashless bail.
And then finally, obviously, is he going to throw the book at anti-Semitic civil terrorists like this guy and like the ones who are, as Tal has pointed out frequently, blocking roads and engaging in other kind of disruptive tactics that are completely and totally against the law. Whether Shapiro will rise to the occasion and do that, I’m somewhat skeptical. This is a guy who has kind of passed the buck when he’s had opportunities to do so in the past on school choice, on energy policy, but the opportunity is there for the taking if he wants to differentiate himself from the 2028 crop.
Tal Fortgang: There’s something, there’s something so odd going on and it goes beyond a media, not quite a black out, but a little bit of a wet blanket on the story, which is that even leading elected Democrats have been loath to say something about this story. I’m no fan of the need for every public figure to go on social media and say, I condemn the most obviously condemnation worthy things in the world. But it is conspicuous when President Obama goes on social media on Monday. Why? To applaud Harvard for defying President Trump, a topic I’m sure we’ll talk about today, and says nothing about the Shapiro home being firebombed. When Kamala Harris, who passed up on Governor Shapiro as her vice presidential candidate during her truncated presidential run. Yet Shapiro campaigned for her. He spoke at her campaign events and she hasn’t said anything about this.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that’s interesting, but there’s something else too that I think you and Jesse picked up on, which is like, it’s not so much a blackout, right? The media’s covering this, where we’re seeing stories pop up. But what they’re not doing is what we know they would do if the shoe were on the other foot, which is to say that if this were a right-coded attack on some kind of progressive icon, they would be highlighting that this is part of a broader pattern of right-wing violence, when the reality is, is that the pattern’s actually on the other side. mean, know, Jesse already gave some examples, but you’ve got the congressional shooting, right, on the baseball practice. You’ve got, you know, the numerous violent attacks on Trump supporters who were attending rallies in the lead up to the 2016 election. You’ve got attacks on, you know, conservative family organizations that oppose abortion. You know, at what point… Yeah. There’s that.
Charles Fain Lehman: Several people actually tried to shoot the president. There was that.
Rafael Mangual: Right, so it’s like at what point does the media decide to look into a possible pattern of left-wing violence on right-coded institutions and individuals? And this is, you know, again, I think just emblematic of a broader failure on the part of the mainstream media to do its job. And it’s one of the reasons why it’s lost so much trust.
Jesse Arm: It’s actually a really strong opportunity for Shapiro to sort of be the differentiated voice on this. Here’s a guy who really was pretty good when the rally in his state happened and the president was nearly assassinated, took off a bullet, took off part of his ear. Corey, I’m forgetting the guy’s last name, Comperatore or whatever the gentleman’s last name was who was tragically murdered at that event. The governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, spoke very nicely about that.
But he doesn’t seem to want to seize upon the opportunities to differentiate himself from what he thinks his party wants to hear. Tal brought up him being passed over by Vice President Harris as the selection when he was kind of in many ways the obvious choice this past election cycle, almost surely because there’s a portion of the Democratic base that would have been deeply uncomfortable with having a Jewish Day School graduate who had done volunteer projects in Israel over the course of his childhood as the man on their ticket. Bill Maher asked Shapiro about that just a weeks ago on his show, and Shapiro really kind of dodged the question, said, I’m damn proud to be Jewish, and then immediately shifted to platitudes about how Shabbat dinner is just like Christmas Eve and Iftar.
And it’s sort of like in a moment, that kind of called for some clarity that Shapiro really had an opportunity to sort of come out and say, I’m not doing the Chuck Schumer-esque dance here where I wash myself of any meaningful Jewish identity absent uttering a few Yiddish words here and there. And really my whole religion is my progressive political program. He missed an opportunity to differentiate himself in the way he did when he spoke so eloquently about the man who was his constituent who was assassinated, you know, in the attempted assassination of the president just a few months back.
Charles Fain Lehman: I do, I do want to… Go ahead.
Tal Fortgang: Clarity is exactly the right word to pick up on. We talk about moral clarity a lot these days, but really conceptual clarity is a dividing line between Democrats and left-wingers who would like to social, cultural, political issues head on, and those who would rather distract and deflect and disassemble from the kinds of dangers that we really face. And this has come to a head again in this situation because the narrative that some kind of nebulous hate is what leads to the violence that we ought to care about, especially political violence. It’s motivated by hate, right, which isn’t a term that really tells us anything. That doesn’t really tell the whole story here.
It’s a kind of ideology activated by crazy people, right? People who are unstable, who can’t control their behaviors, who ought to have been incapacitated in one form or another because they present a danger to others. That combined with overheated ideological rhetoric and blind hatred for people who support Israel, for Jews, or for, you know, other minorities. That’s a very tangible and much more actionable kind of concept that we can think about pinpointing and addressing. And they don’t want to do that. I think Democrats and the American left would much rather focus on hate as the thing that we need to combat rather than like hate plus like the very small number of dangerous people who present a real threat to others.
Charles Fain Lehman: Who end up being the people who are actually activated. And I think that this, to something Ralph said, there is, I will be the one to emphasize, there is clearly a political violence problem not just on the left. People are happy to condemn some of the, Cesar Sayoc, the guy who sent pipe bombs to elected Democratic representatives, or the guy who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer. These are cases of prominent Democrats getting, being defended for good reason because they were victims of political violence. You know, I think to get into this concordatude point that Tal s making part of the wariness of talking to this particular instance is that this attack represents the desires of a constituency of the current left of the Democratic Party.
We just ran a piece from at City Journal, some folks at the Network Contagion Research Institute who are looking at support for Luigi Mangione and they find a that there is in fact meaningful support among young, far-left leaning Americans for the guy who shot and killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, and B, that these people tend to congregate in neatly delimited social networks. They’re online, they’re on Tumblr, they’re on Discord, they’re on whatever, they’re on Twitter, whatever. X now, I guess. And so, you know, I think there’s an unwilling sort of look at those very specific social networks that are fostering violence and that are taking, you know… The idea that Josh Shapiro is going after the Gazans didn’t come out of nowhere. But unfortunately, you know, these people are influential in the Democratic base. Taylor Lorenz appears to one of these people, the former Washington Post, New York Times correspondent. So, you know, they’re able to rise to positions of influence. And I think, again, if you want to talk abstractly about hate, end up with, you become able to avoid dealing with these specific actors who are not really sort of spreading nebulously bad ideas but engaging in very real violent and meaningfully illegal actions that are worth paying attention to.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, mean, and the left would never give the right a break. this, like, you know, like, you have people, so many examples of the left engaging in this rhetoric, and that engagement is followed by people acting on it, right? I mean, another example that comes to mind, it’s like you got Chuck Schumer in the wake of the leak of the abortion case saying, you you’re gonna feel the wrath if you go through with this, and then somebody shows up with a backpack full of pistols and knives outside the house of a Supreme Court justice. It’s like, you know.
They would say, they would be the first to say that your speech has consequences, you should be held accountable, blah, blah. Where is that now? It’s nowhere. And it’s like, you you’re just giving away the game. I mean, you know, I really, I’ve come to hate the media, the mainstream media in a particularly deep way over the last few years. And this is the kind of thing that has so much to do with it. It’s like blatant hypocrisy, you know, reliably predictable partisanship. It’s a sad thing because it should be an institution that we rely on for information and for guidance and it’s not that.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to take this out, I want to ask where we see this story going. Is this going to, just abstractly, is this incident going to affect some kind of change in either Pennsylvania or nationwide? Is going to trigger a conversation or is it just going to vanish into the news cycle? Jesse, what’s your short take?
Jesse Arm: Only if leaders like Shapiro are kind of willing to break with their activist flank. I mean, like I said previously, he has a clear path, right? Support the bipartisan bail bill that’s waiting for him in the Pennsylvania State House. Reform involuntary commitment laws in his state make it easier for when a mother is concerned about her son to put him behind in some kind of facility where he’ll get the treatment he needs. And obviously call out the anti-Semitic intimidation and do something about the civil terrorists that are both in his backyard and a problem all around the country. But based on his track record, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Charles Fain Lehman: Tal, what do think?
Tal Fortgang: I think the photo of the suspect making a ridiculous face kind of did in the whole effort because as soon as you see something like that, as soon as the public sees an image like that, it’s too easy to chalk this up to one crazy person and not integrate it into our understanding of broader problems that we face. Nothing’s gonna happen because it’s just, it’s a crazy man. What can you do about a crazy man?
Rafael Mangual: I think Tal is exactly right. That’s exactly going to be the play. You know, this doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. He’s just a nut. You know, not our fault. Okay.
Charles Fain Lehman: Well, but you know, even then, even then, and I think Jesse’s right that there are at least, at the very least opportunities for Pennsylvanians to get safer, which I’m a Pennsylvanian, so I would like to see that happen. There are opportunities for bail reform, improving the quality of bail in the state, there are opportunities to reduce the extraordinarily high standard required to commit people in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and there are opportunities to sort of ask, who was priming this guy? Who was spreading information to him? And did their actions cross the line from protected speech into instigating violence? in which case you can do something about it. I wanna, yeah, please.
Jesse Arm: Charles, if I may, just to be, just to be, you know, a pro-, apology, just to be a bit, you know, bit more simplistic about all this. There are also real opportunities for Josh Shapiro to improve his own political standing and use this as an opportunity to say, someone tried to kill me, I’m going to correct the far left flank of my party and the activist groups that control the dollars and grassroots operations within my party, and I’m going to do politically popular things so that no one can do something like this again.
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s true.
Jesse Arm: Those levers are available to him whether he will have the appetite to take the risk to do things that we know with a high degree of certainty that voters will support him from doing but he may take you know a punishment from left-wing donor groups for and you know that’s that’s up to Shapiro but but you know he can improve his own standing as a result of this too.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right, I want to move us on. I want to go talk for a second about that other university in Cambridge, Harvard, which for those who have not been following the news, the Trump administration issued a new series of demands to Harvard to retain its federal funding amid allegations of violations of federal civil rights law. Harvard has declared that it will not comply and now risks losing billions in federal funding. Most recently, there’s been reporting that the university may have its tax-exempt status stripped, and also lose the right to allow foreign-born students to enroll there. I think there are a bunch of different perspectives on this. Some, like our colleague Chris Rufo in City Journal, have been entirely gung-ho about it.
Others, like our colleague Heather McDonald in City Journal, have basically said, this is going in the right direction, but the administration needs to be treading more carefully. beyond the City Journal sphere, I think there are those at these universities who see it as an attack on free speech. Where do we come down? Tal, what’s your take on this? Do you think Harvard has the better of the argument or the administration?
Tal Fortgang: Both arguments contain nuggets of truth and go off the rails as the Wall Street Journal editorial board correctly pointed out a couple of days ago off the rails legally and for good reason the law reflects a certain set of moral and legitimate positions about the relationship between the government and these universities.
So let’s start with the kernels of truth here. The Trump administration has more than a kernel of truth to go on that these universities are corrupt in every which way. They are just absolutely loaded with money, yet pretend that the administration nibbling around the edges would be the end of the world and of course would come out of the most important research possible as if like the federal funding that Harvard gets doesn’t fungibly help support, you know, the pro-Hamas departments and the administrative bloat and all that stuff. And of course, these universities do sustain the most remarkably bigoted culture you could possibly imagine, a place where, forget harassing Jews and Israelis, which is illegal, but just open discrimination against white people, against men, against political conservatives. These are not institutions of higher learning in the sense that the term has traditionally meant that’s the kernel of truth.
And there are procedures for the government to legitimately get involved, get in there and use its federal funding as a carrot to get Harvard and its peer institutions in line. Those procedures are delineated by law. There are ways to do it. And the Trump administration is playing fast and loose with some of those legal restrictions. So for instance, it is totally within its rights to investigate Harvard for anti-discrimination. And it is totally fine for the administration to list its demands as it did with Columbia as a way of saying, if you want to come into voluntary compliance, which is part of the process as described by law, these are the things that we will consider necessary to comply. What it can’t do is include elements of compliance that have nothing to do with the problem at hand. So when it starts going off the rails and saying you need to cut down on your administrative bloat. You need to reassess your DEI apparatus without any clear connection to the discrimination it claims to be combating. It loses the tight connection between the means and the ends. And furthermore, it can’t suspend all funding without the proper notice and time periods passing. That’s like deep in the law.
But you can take my word for it, there are restrictions on how fast the administration can move after giving these warnings and these demands. Meanwhile, the university is saying, any government involvement is a violation of our academic freedom. And sure, anti-Semitism is a problem. It’s even a problem here. But you don’t get to tell us what to do and what to teach. Like, no, if you’re teaching discriminatory harassment, they get to tell you what to teach. That’s the civil rights deal. So the university is right about some things, about the process, about the government overreaching, but it totally loses the plot when it says the government has no business interfering with us. Yes, it does. That’s the deal.
Rafael Mangual: So there are two distinctions that I want to draw out and ask you about, Tal. So I think you’re exactly right.
Charles Fain Lehman: And I’m gonna remind the two lawyers on the call that many of our listeners are not lawyers, so keep it simple.
Rafael Mangual: Yes. So, so there, there, think you’re exactly right with respect to the government’s threat to pull funding commitments that have already been made. But certainly the government can decide not to engage in future funding commitments on these grounds without running afoul of First Amendment free speech claims. And then what about the tax-exempt status of Harvard. We saw news that the IRS is currently considering pulling that status. You’ve got some precedent in the Bob Jones case where you had a university violate civil rights law by discriminating on the basis of race with respect to things like admissions. The government said, listen, you can’t do this. They said, well, we have a First Amendment free exercise of religion claim here.
Charles Fain Lehman: This is Bob Jones University, claimed that it had a religious opposition to interracial marriage and so would not, first it would not admit students who are black and then it would not admit students who are in interracial relationships or profess to believe in interracial marriage.
Rafael Mangual: Right.
Right. And so the government said, well, that violates civil rights law. We’re going to pull your tax-exempt status. You can go ahead and discriminate if you want to, but you’ll no longer enjoy this benefit. That still is an option. But I think in that kind of case, there the government again is going to have to prove out through some kind of process the claims that it’s making against Harvard.
But what do you think about just the idea of like, okay, you can keep the money that’s already been committed to you, but our relationship moving forward is over. And I think that’s something that the public would welcome. After all, Harvard’s got a $53 million endowment. What are we doing? Sorry, $53 billion endowment. Why are we funding it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars here and let them invest their own money?
Charles Fain Lehman: Billion, billion.
That wasn’t you.
Tal Fortgang: The way for the government to not run afoul of the law with regard to these grants is to see when they lapse and rewrite the terms or to pass by additional regulation terms for these, for future grants. Some grants already committed come with the provision that the government can freeze them, suspend them, and even terminate them at any time for any reason. That’s kind of why you saw when the Trump administration was threatening Colombia, they only did a portion of the grants at first. Those were the ones that it was authorized at the time to freeze, at least presumably it was. But moving forward, it would have to, if it wanted to follow the law, would have to change the terms of these grants. And with regard to the tax-exempt status, I know Charles, you want to jump in, but you gotta let the law-
Charles Fain Lehman: I don’t want us to get too bogged down in details, but yeah, go ahead.
Tal Fortgang: Okay, this boring lawyer stuff ends up mattering. I think that, look, the main takeaway transcends the law, which is no one is really being honest about what they’re doing here and what the right thing to do is. And it’s going to backfire because the Trump administration is not going to be able to sustain the things that it wants to do. It’s looking for wins in the popular eye, in the public discourse, and in the public imagination and it’s sacrificing sustainability.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, let me jump in with some non-lawyer stuff on that front then.
Tal, let me just a moment where stuff that I’m going to out myself as the non-lawyer along with Charles this group but Charles probably is a lot closer to a lawyer than I am. He introduced me on the front end of the call is kind of the, you know, the director of all things policy, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I actually do you know the government affairs and the polling stuff so you know, how is this going to land? Ralph pointed out accurately that the administration is fighting a war that they think they can win. Harvard is not sympathetic actor here. I will leave my colleagues Tal and Raphael and you know a number of other lawyers that are employed by the Manhattan Institute to figure out how this stuff shakes out in the courts, but I think the President and his team is correct in assuming that no sympathy for Harvard is going to come. These are people who have been openly discriminating against Asians, whites, and Jews, and they are about to find out through a rude awakening that the Civil Rights Act applies to Asians, whites, and Jews as well.
That said, this is the second time I’m using the term cascading effect, but there is a cascading effect here potentially, right? Harvard has a medical system. People like nurses, okay? And I don’t know the answer to this question, but is the administration going to use a sledgehammer or a scalpel basically as they go on fighting this war, right? Will there be carve-outs? Will there be situations that will, you know, will they find out a way so that cancer research can continue, whether it’s, they change their approach and they go with a more Manhattan Project, not Manhattan Institute, Manhattan Project style, know, centralization of efforts to do big things like cure cancer. I don’t know, I’m sort of skeptical of that necessarily as a conservative who thinks central planning is, you know, often leads to more problems than it does good.
But ultimately, yeah, the universities are not the sympathetic party here. The administration that wants to punish them for engaging in blatant racial discrimination and sort of not apologizing for it, in fact, continuing to sue the government for their right to continue discriminating by race. I also think Barack Obama coming out and defending Harvard here after he was kind of the guy who sicked his IRS on a bunch of conservative 501c3s through the tenure of his presidency.
It’s just, I don’t see them winning that fight. But that said, if they’re overstepping, they’re overstepping. Okay, I respect Heather MacDonald’s view, but ultimately I think I come down closer to the side of my colleague Chris Rufo, who is cheering on the administration as they take the fight to one of these institutions. And look, we knew they wanted to do this. They wanted to go the defund route with one of these things.
I don’t think most Americans are even aware of the fact that their taxpayer dollars are subsidizing Harvard’s $53 billion endowment to some extent. So we’ll see what happens.
Rafael Mangual: Even if Harvard wins, it loses in the public eye, right? Here you have this massive university that would never let your kids in, that has tens of billions of dollars stored away that it won’t touch, and is now crying for government welfare while you struggle to live paycheck by paycheck. I mean, I think most Americans see this fight and think, screw Harvard. And they’re right.
Tal Fortgang: Guys, I’m second to none in my hatred of higher education, especially Harvard. Believe me, no love lost. But first of all, you have to credit Harvard’s PR strategy. They are saying, look at all this important scientific research that the administration is going to be interfering with.
Right, they don’t say anything about the Middle Eastern Studies Department or whatever. It’s all about, you know, the important technological breakthroughs and the kids are going to save. And look at this administration that flouts the rule of law. They flout it here in ways that are actually unpopular and they flout it there in ways that are that are more popular. But one way or another, this is about tyranny and fascism and the hypocrisy of people who claim to like free speech, but they don’t like free speech really. They’re total hypocrites. And then my main concern is just that this stuff doesn’t stick, right? Because even if you win the PR battle in the short run, if you go to court and all the things that you fought for are overturned and your term is over, you’re done. You don’t have this opportunity again.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah.
I think there are two important things there. There’s, again, this comes down to the PR thing versus the legalities. And on the PR level, I think for every claim Harvard wants to make of its beneficial contributions to the world, I can dig up a photo of a segregated graduation ceremony. can find them boldly endorsing anti-Semites. I can determine.
They are not a popular actor and I think for good reason and this gets to the core case in my mind going on here Which is that for many years at least five but plenty much longer many of these institutions have acted fully entitled to the taxpayer dollars of half of the country whom they openly and plainly disdain and it’s like Ultimately, this gets to the realities. I think that there will be a lot of latitude. I think there’ll be a great deal of finagling here over what ends up happening legally.
Ultimately, these institutions are creatures of the federal government. The tax-exempt status exists in the hands of federal government. The receipt of federal funds exists in the hands of the federal government. They are, they have chosen to be subject to the taxpayer. This is something that Hillsdale College in Michigan has been extremely pleased to point out over the past week. They’re like, there is a solution here. You can stop taking taxpayer dollars like we do. You know, I think there’s a really interesting question which, if they’ll do that. So while I buy that there are procedural issues, I do ultimately think that Harvard is in a relationship of dependence to the federal government, that most institutions of higher education relationships of dependence. And so, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a matter of how you pull the dollars rather than if you can pull the dollars, because you kind of can. Ralph last thought, then we’re to go to our closing question.
Rafael Mangual: They are absolutely in a relationship of dependence, but it’s an unnecessary relationship of dependence because they’re rich.
Tal Fortgang: Not all tax-exempt institutions are rich. Hillsdale College is right there, 501c3. So is my synagogue. I don’t know if that’s a door you want to open. I’m not saying that the Trump administration is responsible for doing it first. Clearly this has been going on for a while, but I don’t know if we want to raise the salience of the tax-exempt issue.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right, I want to leave us there. Let’s talk about what happens next. This is sort of the second in a sequence of attacks in the Ivies. First Columbia, now Harvard. What do we think is going to happen next in Trump administration’s campaign? Are they going to go bigger or are they going to get bogged down? Tal, you seem to think bogged down. Where do see it going?
Tal Fortgang: They’re going to do both. If you put it as a choice between bigger and bogged down, go harder at Columbia, harder at Princeton and University of Michigan and all kinds of peer institutions while getting bogged down in court.
Rafael Mangual: Jesse’s ears just perked up.
Tal Fortgang: Yeah, Jesse, our proud Michigander and Wolverine is thrilled to be a peer of Harvard now. No, but every obstacle is interpreted as an opportunity to double down. That’s how this goes.
Charles Fain Lehman: Alright, Ralph, where’s it going?
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think, you know, they’re probably gonna get bogged down on pulling funding. I don’t know if they’ll end up pulling the 501c3 status or trying to. I can’t really predict how that’s gonna play out. I don’t think it’s gonna work out for the Trump administration. But what I do think you’re gonna see is a continuing war of escalation against institutions like Harvard through pattern and practice investigations, through the DOJ Civil Rights Division. And, you know, just refusals to work with them on any future kind of initiatives. And I think Harvard understands that and they’re going to wait this out and hope for a Democratic ally in the White House in 2028 and things will go back to normal.
Charles Fain Lehman: Jesse, what’s your take?
Jesse Arm: I think we’ll follow a similar playbook to the nineteen sixties when you had governors resisting school desegregation, and today you’ve got ivy league presidents who are resisting race neutral policies and admissions. The legal and moral terrain has flipped in some ways but the pattern of elite obstruction is familiar, and I d ultimately think you know the administration may change it s approach here or there, move off the c3 approach, may move off the viewpoint diversity demands but ultimately, I think the administration has the much better of the two arguments here.
I’ll just take one moment to briefly respond to something Tal said previously. Yes, Harvard is doing good things on the medical research front. The administration’s argument is that if Harvard stops being racist, it will achieve much more on the medical innovation and research front. And I think they’ve got a really strong case to make on that front.
Rafael Mangual: Amen.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, you know, I think I think they’re going to keep escalating. I think it’s right that they have to be careful. You know, there is I’m not thrilled about I’m not usually one to think about how you open the door for the other guys. I’m a little concerned about what President AOC will do with the set of precedents. That said, and this gets to, why I think it makes sense they continue to push forward. There has only ever been one force pushing on these institutions, which has been the sort of entrenched left on and around their campuses. Right.
This is why most university presidents who are basically just like passive bureaucrats do these insane things. It’s because they are beholden to the campus left. And I think what the Trump administration is trying to do and hopefully succeeds at doing is not actually demand that these universities become hard right institutions. It’s that they sort of adhere to their professed values of academic freedom, neutrality, respect for diversity, et cetera, and can become a countervailing force. So, you know, one possibility is that we get a backlash that is destructive. Another one is that this is a push closer to sort of the center and a legitimate function of the university, which is like inquiry, not activism.
I’m going to take the last word here. Let’s go to our closing thoughts. Fun story, light story from the news. Over the weekend, as you gentlemen may have seen, Jeff Bezos’ wife, is that they married? Girlfriend? I forget. Lauren Sanchez took the first all-female crew to space in 60 years aboard a Blue Origin rocket. This included a host of funeral celebrities like Katy Perry. And so my questions for the panelists is, if you were to assemble a first al- something crew to go into space, what would it be? Ralph, I’m gonna put you on the spot.
Rafael Mangual: I would go with an all-Dominican crew as long as the flight is going to be filmed and audio recorded because I think it would be hilarious. So yeah, that’s what I would go with.
Charles Fain Lehman: Ralph, Ralph, should just claim for those who are listening, is Dominican. He’s, he’s, he can get away with that. The rest of us can’t. Jesse, what’s your, what’s your take?
Rafael Mangual: That’s right.
Jesse Arm: Well, you guys mentioned I was a Michigan graduate. My good friend, another Michigan graduate, Suzy Weiss, had a really good piece at the Free Press that kind of compared this whole escapade to a a bachelorette party. It was more Nashville than NASA. So I guess my response to question would be would be pretty fun to have a bachelor party, the first bachelor party crew in space. Zero gravity beer pong would be an interesting endeavor. I think that would be fun. And maybe I’ll try it out if I end up getting engaged any time soon.
Charles Fain Lehman: Good one.
Let’s get on it. Tal, who are going? Who you sending to space?
Tal Fortgang: If things go wrong out in space, you’re going to be out there for a while, you’re going to be floating around, you’re not going to know what your fate is, you’re not going to know how the story ends. You need a crew that is prepared to deal with the ups and downs, the false hope, the wandering, the drifting, the seeming aimlessness, and then know how to handle all of that, which is why you need the first all-Mets-fan crew out in space.
We know how to deal with a summer of uncertainty and false hope, fits and starts, and every once in a while we actually land. Well, not a World Series, not in my lifetime, but maybe this year.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair enough. I will of course be taking the All-City Journal podcast crew into space. We’ll see how it goes. I think that’s about all the time that we have. Thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our producer, Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you enjoyed today’s episode, or even if you didn’t, please don’t forget to like, subscribe on YouTube and other platforms.
Please feel free to comment and leave questions down below. If they’re good, non-belligerent ones, we might even read them on the show. That’s about all the time we have. And so until next time, I hope you’ll join us again soon.
Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
