A parody video widely shared on X on June 1st had this to say of Harvard university:

Ever wish your child was a full-blown liberal idiot? Desperate to turn them into a Jew hating extremist who’d rather burn a flag than think for themselves? Well Harvard University has the answer. For the low, low price of half a million dollars we will transform your kid into the kind of zealot who sets bags of shit on fire in the street, screaming about whatever CNN’s whining about today. Our elite programme guarantees they’ll swap reason for rage and facts for feelings faster than you can say protest permit.

But, beyond the parody, the escalating confrontation between the Trump administration and Harvard University, the bastion of elite academia, has laid bare a deeper culture war over the direction of American higher education. This clash is not only about gender and sex discrimination under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), allegations of antisemitism and of undue influence exerted by unreported financial ‘donations’ from China and other countries. It is fundamentally a reckoning with the Gramscian capture of institutions like Harvard by a globalist agenda propped up by government funding and a web of NGOs seed-funded by Leftist billionaire foundations.

A key plank of the globalist agenda is rooted in Malthusian climate alarmism. This pseudo-scientific hobgoblin has long served as a cudgel to demonise fossil fuels and impose a vision of ‘Net Zero’ that prioritises ideological certainty over pragmatic trade-offs in energy policy. The Trump administration’s aggressive actions against Harvard’s politicised administration include freezing $3 billion in federal grants, revoking Harvard’s ability to enrol international students and threatening its tax-exempt status.

This may, as a welcome collateral effect, disrupt the university’s key role in the Church of Climate, forcing it to align instead with the Trumpian vision of American energy dominance and a rejection of the constraints of the Paris Agreement. The Trump-Harvard standoff could mark a turning point in dismantling the climate-industrial complex’s grip on academia.