At CNN, Stephen Collinson reluctantly reports on the Claudine Gay situation at Harvard. I write “reluctantly,” because, upon reading it, it becomes clear that Collinson has been told both to relate the details of the story and to convey to his audience that the whole thing is really about the boundless treachery of the Republican Party. “Elite academia,” Collinson explains at the beginning, “appears to be playing directly into the hands of ex-President Donald Trump’s populist Republicans.” And from there, that’s his pattern. Fact, followed by dismissal, followed by fact, followed by dismissal, and so forth …

Why are members of Congress “probing Harvard”? Because Harvard receives hundreds of millions of dollars from Congress, that’s why. Per Harvard’s own financial reports, the college was given $625 million by the federal government in 2021 — a number that “accounted for approximately 67 percent of total sponsored revenue.” Between 2018 and 2022, records show, Harvard was handed more than three billion federal dollars. If Harvard wishes to be completely “independent” of Congress — as, say, Hillsdale is — then it must also become completely independent of Congress’s wallet. It cannot pick and choose. With subsidy comes oversight. That isn’t a threat to “our democracy”; that is our democracy.

[Isn’t it funny that any criticism of the Left now gets spun into “an attack on democracy,” even when it has almost nothing to do with election processes? The NAACP’s statement that prompted Cooke’s riposte claims that Congress is “challeng[ing] the independence of private institutions,” but as Cooke argues, they’re anything BUT independent. And when the Left uses government to meddle in the private sector — such as with the Big Brother “misinformation” censorship regime in partnership with Big Tech of the last few years — suddenly that’s totes cool for democracy. Utterly absurd. — Ed]