Opinion | Trump’s Cultural Push Begins With Universities

Right now, people are arguing about whether cancel culture is back and this time coming from the right. “It wasn’t too long ago the right was criticizing the left for canceling people. Now the right is doing the same thing.” “On social media, people who’ve criticized Kirk are being called out, their names and photos widely circulated.” “People say: Oh, people have a right to say things. Well, actually, they don’t necessarily have a right to say things.” And it certainly looks like the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and other controversies do represent a kind of conservative revenge for the great woke cancellations of 2020 and 2021. But I really think that you need to understand the conservative cultural strategy right now much more in terms of institutions than celebrity individuals. Long before the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Trump White House saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity to try and push America’s cultural institutions, movie studios, TV networks meaningfully to the right. “They care more about identity politics. They care more about diversity, equity and inclusion.” “We want the museums to talk about the history of our country in a fair manner, not in a woke manner or in a racist manner.” And it saw that opportunity because it realized in part that a lot of people inside those institutions actually agreed with part of the conservative critique, that they had swung too far to the left, that they had lost some of the public’s trust and that they needed some kind of course correction. So if you follow the Trump administration’s culture war strategy, you’ll see that at its most successful, it’s actually providing TV executives and college presidents with an excuse, a prodding to make changes that they might want to make already. But of course, Trump being Trump, this coexists with attempts at illiberal micromanagement and, predictably, attempts to just get cultural institutions to kiss up to the president himself. “President Trump has signed a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times ——” “A $10 billion libel lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal’s parent company ——” “All they do is hit Trump. That’s all they do.” This week, I want to talk about the most significant of these efforts, more important even than the late-night TV wars. And that’s the administration’s attempts to change elite academia, to change the way big universities admit students and hire faculty to change the way they handle free speech debates, the Israel-Palestine issue, foreign student visas and admissions, and much more. My guest this week, May Mailman, is the perfect person to discuss the Trump White House’s higher education strategy, because she’s been the person in charge of it. So I just want to start with a very, very big picture question. Tell me, what is wrong with the American university. Yeah, and I don’t think it’s every university. But I would say in general, you’ve got a lot of different problems. And the biggest one that comes for me is a culture of victimhood, a glorification of victimhood. Maybe I call it Meghan Markle syndrome as well, where the greatest good, the greatest height that you can be is a victim. So I think that’s one thing. And I think then pieces of it trickle down to racism in admissions, racism in hiring, hiring people to do things based on their identity rather than their ability. But I think at the end of the day, it all boils down to a glorification of victimhood.