What’s the best way to get to Harvard?
Don’t study and don’t know anything. Just have the right politics. Just ask former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who washed out of the presidential primaries, abandoned a gubernatorial bid after polling at 12%, and then dropped out of a congressional primary after polling next to last at 5%. At least that was better than the 0% that he polled during his presidential campaign.
Where could the most hated politician in New York go? To Massachusetts. Bill de Blasio has become the 2022 visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.
What can Bill de Blasio teach Harvard students besides how to have your wife lose $850 million and get away with it? According to De Blasio, he’ll use his time at Harvard-Kennedy’s Institute of Politics to “to help inspire our nation’s next generation of leaders.” If his track record holds up, half of them will be inspired to move to Florida and the other half to stage a massive race riot.
At Harvard’s Institute of Politics, De Blasio will serve alongside other “prominent elected officials” like Secretary Natalie Tennant, one of the beneficiaries of Soros’; Secretary of State Project, who, despite claiming to oppose Obama while being endorsed by Michelle Obama, lost a Senate race by 62% to 34%. But 34% is still better than DeBlasio’s 5%.
Also on deck at Kennedy Street is former Prime Minister Stefan Löfven of Sweden, a leftist hack, who boasted, “my Europe doesn’t build walls” before folding and agreeing to some border security as the Muslim mass migration mobs swarmed out of control. His deputy famously burst into tears on camera as she announced that Sweden couldn’t take any more illegal migrants.
Neither cared about Sweden, but about their jobs.
Löfven met with terrorists, announced that he would recognize the Islamic terrorist entity inside Israel, and claimed that Muslim terrorists stabbing Jews doesn’t count as terrorism.
Like Bill de Blasio, Löfven managed to cling to power despite being widely hated until Sweden’s Communist originated Left Party dropped its support for his regime. Last year, the leftist became the first prime minister to lose a no-confidence vote. Where do you go after that? Harvard.
Maybe Löfven and Bill de Blasio can bond over their shared love of terrorism, hatred of Jews and historic record of political failures. And where else could they do it except Harvard?
Harvard has become a sanctuary campus for the failed leftists of the nation and the world.
After Brian Stelter was dumped by CNN for having the appeal of a rotten taco in a burning dumpster, Harvard’s Shorenstein Center brought him in as a “democracy fellow”. No one knows more about democracy than a guy who has been working in the media to cover the media right out of college. And has no idea how anyone who doesn’t work in the media thinks or lives.
Brian Stelter wasn’t good enough for CNN. But he’s more than good enough for Harvard.
Stelter succeeds such notable Shorenstein fellows as Donna Brazile, the Hillary hack who oversaw the massive defeat at the DNC in 2016, and was so hated by her own party after allowing Hillary Clinton to take over the party machinery that she ended up at FOX News.
Another ‘fellow’ is Richard Stengel, currently an MSNBC analyst, who recently resurfaced to argue for turning America into an Islamic theocracy.
“Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that? It’s a fair question,” Stengel whined in a Washington Post op-ed.
Who better to serve as a “media and democracy” fellow at Harvard-Kennedy than a leftist who thinks that Islamic dictatorship should be our model for the First Amendment?
Harvard-Kennedy has become a sanctuary state for failed leftist politicians and activists. Its institutional infrastructure is overrun with fellowships, institutes, collaboratives, think-tanks, and assorted bodies whose only purpose seems to be housing the growing number of radicals.
Take the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice which exists as little more than a BLM activist group embedded inside Harvard. Run by former NAACP president Cornell William Brooks, it’s activism not academics. A Harvard press release for the Collaborative touts “using nonviolent direct action and radical love.” That’s not even indoctrination, it’s mobilization.
The Harvard Kennedy’s Ash Center’s Democratic Governance program appointed community organizer LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter and jazz singer, as one of its senior fellows. Brown apparently got started as a “young college dropout mother” who helped put in cash into bail funds for Black Lives Matter rioters.
According to Brown, she views herself as the founder of a new America. “The founders’ vision was limited. They couldn’t see my leadership,” she claims. Harvard however can and does.
Brown has spent years in various fellowships at Harvard including at the Kennedy Center for Public Leadership, Leader in Practice for Women and Public Policy and American Democracy.
Ivy League leftist activism isn’t even being cloaked in the usual facades of academia. Activism disguised as academics is becoming just activism with nothing but contempt for academia.
Harvard used to pride itself on attracting the best. Now it’s settling for the worst, not only morally, but intellectually and effectually. Stelter was tossed aside by CNN and Bill de Blasio couldn’t break 6% in a congressional primary, but they’re good enough for Harvard.
Wokeness destroys standards. And no place demonstrates that half as well as Harvard.
Harvard had long cultivated an air of mystery and selectivity. When it was sued for discriminating against Asian students in the name of diversity, it fought in court to keep its admissions policies secret. The truth about Harvard is that its standards for admissions are as poorly political as its standards for offering fellowships to leftist politicians and activists.
If you’re a leftist hack who failed miserably at governance, you can teach students about governance at Harvard. If you failed at media reporting, you can teach students about the media. No matter how badly you fail, there will always be a warm spot waiting for you at Harvard. It doesn’t matter if you’re an idiot. It only matters if you’re a woke idiot.
Great article, thanks Daniel!!!
To think, I once felt guilty, maybe in the 1960s, about not going to Harvard (went to Berkeley instead 🙂 while my friend across the street went to Harvard.
Harvard was supposed to be the best school back then, I think.
“Neither cared about Sweden, but about their jobs.”
That is what they will be lecturing the students about, that is government from top to bottom, apart from approximately 20% who actually do something worthwhile.
He’s a perfect example, next stop, the UN.
Donna Brazile is particularly hideous. A real negro problem.
Bur she has lost most of her accent.
The lights are pretty, though.
So what is Mr. Potato Head going to do there? Get fired at CNN? Go Harvard.
The Mecca of Socialism for the masses and abortions!
Decades ago, I would have been deliriously thrilled to teach Harvard undergraduates–even as a part-time temp “adjunct lecturer” with my B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa, btw) and M.A. in English Literature….
The Restoration Wits and their Age (Rochester, et al.); the Greats of the English Augustan Age (Dryden, Pope, and Swift); the brilliant comedies of Sheridan; and the Masters of the Eighteenth Century Novel–Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, and Richardson.
Today, NONE of them are still read, much less seriously “studied” or taught in any English Department of any American college or university that I know of.
My own alma mater–Middlebury–refuses to allow any ENGLISH MAJOR to take more than a single course in Shakespeare, while REQUIRING a Major in the Department to take and pass courses in “LGBTQ Literature” and…I forget how it’s worded…something like “Slavery” or “the African Experience” or “Women’s Lit,” or something like that.
The greatness of what used to be recognized as The Canon of works that throughout all of written history have been recognized as our civilization’s greatest, wisest, and most eloquent, which have addressed and spoken most eloquently and persuasively to “The Human Condition,” are now despised, condemned, and banned, their wisdom and learning ignored.
Harvard–like Middlebury College–has abandoned that recognition of, and fidelity to, eternal and universal Truth and value in these works and their teachings; and both schools–along with most others–have shamed and disgraced themselves in doing so.
Harvard most of all, whose motto is “Veritas”–“Truth.” Middlebury College perhaps somewhat less, with her less-pretentious founding motto “Coll. Med. Virid. Mon.” — “College in the middle of the Green Mountains.”
If the descendants of the current crop of young barbarians inside the gates ever, by some miracle, discover that they are not living in Year Zero and that there is a rich past to be explored, who will teach them? Already few “art majors” can draw, not life, not still life, not landscapes. Few people can write a coherent sentence, much less a short essay of the sort that you have delighted readers here with. Can anyone read Shakespeare and understand the universality of so many of his plays, or do they look at him as just another dead white man and probably a racist? Do those two old radicals, Dickens and Tolstoy, strike a familiar chord in anyone under fifty today?
Ronald Reagan feared that if we did not pass our values — in his context our love of liberty — to our children, the world might face “a thousand years of darkness”. If Western civilization, built over a period of three and a third millennia on the three supports of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, were to fall it probably could never be restored, not in three hundred millennia.
The Critical Marxists will have no shortage of contributors to create new constructs to replace the racist, patriarchal and capitalist ones of old. It should be clear, when we hear how many young people have a favorable opinion of socialism, we are more than halfway there. One more generation may be all it takes to turn over the nation to a tyrannical government fed by the indoctrination centers known as “higher” learning.