The Federalist
For too long, conservatives have been loath to use government power to defend the republic from enemies within. That has to change.
Amid the controversy following recent congressional testimony on the problem of campus antisemitism by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio has introduced a bill that would drastically increase the tax rate on the largest university endowments.
This is something Vance has been talking about for some time now, and while it’s a good idea on the merits, it’s also a good example of how conservatives should be willing to use whatever political power they have to fight back against the left. Simply put, unless the right starts treating the left and its institutions like the hostile entities they are, our republic will not likely survive.
This is especially true when it comes to higher education, where the wealthiest and most elite schools have long enjoyed preferential treatment even as they poison the body politic by actively promoting not just antisemitism, but racism, gender ideology, and every other brand of cultural Marxism you can imagine.
The recent spectacle in Congress is a case in point. During their testimonies last week, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn refused to say the blatant antisemitism on their campuses since the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists — including explicit calls for genocide of the Jews — violates their schools’ policies on harassment.
Their equivocation, insisting that whether such antisemitism constitutes harassment depends on the “context,” elicited understandable outrage from donors. After a major Penn donor pulled a $100 million gift to the school that was made in 2017, Penn President Liz Magill was forced to resign — a rare instance of a leftist elite facing real-world consequences for defending her appalling ideology in public.
Vance, for his part, rightly sees these schools as threats to American values and our way of life that in no way deserve special treatment. Currently, the tax rate on endowments at places like Harvard and Penn is just 1.4 percent, making them effectively slush funds for the ultra-rich. His two-page bill would increase the rate to 35 percent on all endowments worth $10 billion or more…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (thefederalist.com)
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