The governor of New York and the mayor of New York City are joining together in America’s 250th birthday year to back a plan for taxation without representation—precisely the injustice that the United States of America was founded to oppose.

Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who some had hoped would serve as a moderating influence on Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old socialist, used the April 15 tax filing deadline to announce a tax on people who own property in New York City but who are not New York City residents for income tax purposes.

“This is a targeted surcharge on second homes and investor-owned apartments worth over $5 million; homes that in many cases sit vacant for a large part of the year,” Hochul said. “Those people are not part of our city.”

“The people who own these pied-à-terres are not contributing in the same way that the 8.3 million New York residents do,” Hochul claimed.

The people who own these properties are not New York City voters or in some cases even New York State voters, though they do pay property taxes already; if their primary residence is in Florida and they vote there, they don’t even have the ability to elect the New York politicians who are imposing taxes on them. That was precisely the same position that the North American colonists were in in the 1760s and 1770s when the British Parliament—where the colonies were not represented—were imposing taxes on the colonists. The colonists likened it to slavery and fought a revolution over it. The Declaration of Independence issued in July 1776 referred to it as “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.”

Details on the proposal were scant. A press release from the mayor’s office said, “It is projected to generate $500 million in annual revenue.” That’s less than what the mayor needs to close an existing budget gap, let alone to fund his plans for new programs such as “free” buses and “free” childcare. I put “free” in scarequotes because these programs aren’t actually free, they are expensive. That is why New York, already the worst state out of 50 in the Tax Foundation’s 2026 State Tax Competitiveness Index, is busy finding taxes to increase rather than ones to reduce.

Mamdani went so far as to attack by name a Florida-based businessman, Ken Griffin, who has been purchasing New York City real estate. “Yesterday I was standing in front of I think it’s 220 Central Park West. Ken Griffin owns a penthouse that he bought I think for $228 million. …This is the kind of wealth that is being stored in the city and it is a residence that is so often empty,” Mamdani said at his own April 15 event, managing to get Griffin’s address wrong while vilifying an entrepreneurial and patriotic job-creator. Griffin, who left Chicago for Florida while criticizing Chicago’s business climate, was also singled out for demonization by name in the mayor’s press release.

Mamdani’s event featured left-wing economists Gabriel Zucman of UC Berkeley and Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz and was moderated by the city’s Commissioner of International Affairs, Ana María Archila, who before joining the Mamdani administration was co-director of the Working Families Party, a far-left alternative to the Democratic Party.

Collecting a tax on second homes and investor-owned apartments in New York City poses potential practical challenges from an enforcement perspective. Some New York City apartment buildings are organized as cooperatives; the co-op building pays the tax, and the shareholders in the co-op pay maintenance, a portion of which goes to pay the building’s taxes. In the case of condos, a couple or family could designate a lower-income family member as a New York City resident, and as the apartment owner, for tax purposes, and file a separate tax return for that person. The tax also might be subject to legal opposition on the basis of retroactivity or equal protection, though those efforts might face steep challenges. People could choose to sell the properties, accelerating the flight from New York.

A tax lawyer at Hodgson Russ LLP who has written about the issue, Timothy Noonan, told the Washington Free Beacon that without seeing the text of the new law, it’s hard to determine if there’d be any workarounds. He was skeptical of the spouse solution, “since spouses are generally presumed to have the same resident status under New York’s residency rules.”

“My view generally is that any attempts to circumvent a tax like this will be difficult, and that the main way to get around the tax will actually be a lot simpler: taxpayers with this potential problem will just get rid of their place!” he said. “But in general, I do think it’s possible that a tax measure that provides preferential treatment to City residents and is targeted specifically to nonresidents could be subject to a legal challenge, perhaps on the privileges and immunities clause, for essentially imposing a penalty on a taxpayer for living somewhere else.”

Advocates of higher taxes acknowledged the chance people would sell but suggested that’d be okay. “If a couple of billionaires were to leave New York or Massachusetts, is that a problem? That’s not clear,” Zucman said on stage at the CUNY Graduate Center before a large “Tax the Rich” backdrop.

As is typical in such situations, the anti-rich, high-tax politics and the anti-Israel politics mix easily together. Zucman touted an upcoming meeting in Barcelona convened by Spain’s president, Pedro Sánchez, who has been hostile to Israel. The meeting, which Zucman said would attract 15 heads of state, is to impose a two percent global wealth tax on billionaires. Mamdani denounced what he called “images of our country bombing girls’ schools in Iran.”

And Stiglitz claimed that America is spending “on weapons that don’t work against enemies that don’t exist, killing people” “more like a billion dollars in just ordnances every day, in, you know, the bombs.” Though some early estimates were in that range, much of the costs relate to missile and drone defense—not “killing people” or “weapons that don’t work” but defending precious economic, military, and civilian assets against Iranian attacks. And costs declined as Iranian air defenses were defeated, making it easier for the U.S. to use cheaper and more common bombs that could be dropped from overhead rather than shot from afar. Anyway, it was telling that Mamdani and his favorite Columbia and U.C. Berkeley economists couldn’t even stay on message at a “tax-the-rich” event, they had to find some way to drift into criticizing the war effort. It’s all connected, and, watching, one got the sense that if Mamdani, Stiglitz, and Zucman had been around in 1776, they’d have been busy whining about the cost of muskets and powder instead of volunteering in the glorious cause of freedom.

READ MORE: New York Marks America’s 250th With Turn to Taxation Without Representation

A new database of all the New York Times articles published in the past 25 years provides empirical evidence of some of the biases that many of the newspaper’s critics have long suspected.

The developer of the database, Ted Alcorn, is not a media critic but a former policy analyst for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He’s a freelance journalist who does some work for the Times and also teaches at Columbia and NYU. Alcorn this week launched "Below The Fold," a dashboard that allows readers to parse and sort a database of 25 years' worth of New York Times articles in ways that concretely quantify the paper’s quirks and record the way the coverage has changed over time.

For example, the dashboard allows for sorting coverage by country and sorting that by population, to get a Moneyball-style statistic called articles/million residents/year, or AMRY. The tiny Pacific island of Nauru is tops because of climate change coverage, but Gaza is next with an AMRY of 104.4, followed by Israel at 55.7 and the West Bank at 41.14. Countries that the Times is less obsessed with include Japan, with an AMRY of 1.32, Germany, with an AMRY of 2.78, and Singapore, with an AMRY of 2.33. In raw number of articles, the Times tagged 14,483 with coverage of “Israel” over the quarter century from 2000 to 2025. India, with a vastly larger population, generated 10,678 Times stories.

The dashboard also allows a similar sorting of states by how much attention they get from the Times, adjusted by population. The early presidential primary and caucus states of Iowa and New Hampshire attract a lot of Times coverage, as does the District of Columbia. Sparsely populated Times summer vacation destinations like Vermont and Maine also do well. The states that get the least attention from the Times relative to their populations include Alabama, Connecticut, Indiana, New Jersey, and Arkansas. What Times reporter wants to use an Ochs-Sulzberger expense account to go to Indiana, New Jersey, or Arkansas when they could be in Vermont or Maine?

Sections are trackable; one can see the decline in Times book coverage, from a peak of 2,852 articles in 2006 to a low of 1,312 articles in 2025. One can also track the decline in New York coverage, from 19,742 articles in 2006 to the years from 2019 to 2025, when the Times has published fewer than 3,000 articles about New York each year. The New York Sun, of which I was an owner and managing editor, published from 2002 to 2008.

You can also search the frequency of words appearing in article headlines. Here’s a visualization of the Black Lives Matter movement as measured by the word “Black” appearing in New York Times headlines.

Some of the trends the database reveals are not even ideological or substantive, but probably relate more to the transition to online from paper. The number of articles the Times publishes each year, for example, declined to 47,793 in 2025 from 65,497 in 2016. Words published declined too, but not as much, so the average article length increased, to a prolix 973 average words an article in 2025 from 768 average words an article in 2016. Online, there’s no paper or ink cost associated with a longer article.

— 2016: 65,497 articles, 50.3M words, 768 avg words/article
— 2017: 59,967 articles, 47.8M words, 796 avg words/article
— 2018: 58,832 articles, 50.1M words, 851 avg words/article
— 2019: 53,255 articles, 49.7M words, 933 avg words/article
— 2020: 55,479 articles, 54.6M words, 983 avg words/article
— 2021: 54,514 articles, 47.6M words, 873 avg words/article
— 2022: 48,705 articles, 45.9M words, 942 avg words/article
— 2023: 46,043 articles, 42.6M words, 925 avg words/article
— 2024: 48,693 articles, 44.5M words, 914 avg words/article
— 2025: 47,793 articles, 46.5M words, 973 avg words/article

Times staffing has ballooned in recent years. In 2019 the paper reported, “Last year the company added 120 newsroom employees, bringing the total number of journalists at The Times to 1,600, the largest count in its history.” In 2026 publisher and chairman AG Sulzberger said, “Here’s the number we should be proudest of: 2,300. That’s the current size of the newsroom — 50 percent larger than a decade ago. Across all our products The Times now employs more than 3,000 journalists.” While most businesses are trying to be more productive, the Below the Fold analysis suggests that the Times is using either double or 50 percent more journalists to produce fewer words, and fewer articles. And while the Times also discloses subscription revenue (increasingly bundled with cooking and games), it does not disclose how many people are reading these words. A lot of what the new journalists are producing isn’t written words but podcasts, vertical videos, or Instagram or other “off platform” social media content. The cost to get the print paper delivered or to buy one at the newsstand (if you can find one), meanwhile, has also soared, even as the number of words or articles in the paper has declined.

Alcorn told the Washington Free Beacon that while he is long-time freelancer for the New York Times, having written for the Health, New York, National, and World desks since 2018, he built the project relying “entirely on public data from the New York Times developer portal; I had no access to internal Times systems or unpublished data. I did this entirely as a personal project.”

He said public feedback has been supportive. “A number of Times reporters reached out to me to identify little bugs, or to suggest features, or to thank me for making it,” he said. No one there has offered to buy it or asked him to take it down.

READ MORE: New Database Empirically Proves Everything You Suspected About the New York Times

“Never just read one newspaper” is one of my media literacy rules. Sometimes even that fails, as it did on Monday April 13, 2026, when the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both weighed in with suspiciously similar, and sadly unskeptical, stories claiming that the Iran war somehow provided vindication for China’s emphasis on wind and solar energy.

How’d the New York Times (“War Highlights China’s Renewables Lead”) and the Wall Street Journal (“An Iran War Winner: China’s Clean Energy”) wind up with the same bad takes on the same story on the same day? It’s likely that their editors were both reading the Associated Press, a wire service that drives newsroom agendas by providing a tip sheet in advance disclosing what stories the AP is working on. The AP had its own version of the same story, headlined, “Iran war’s global energy crisis sharpens China’s advantage in clean tech.” Datelined Hong Kong, a China-controlled territory where journalists are imprisoned if they publish articles that the Chinese authorities disapprove of, the AP story begins, “China is poised to benefit from the Iran war as global energy disruptions accelerate a shift away from fossil fuels and toward clean technologies and renewable power, industries that China dominates.”

The gist of the story—that the Iran war somehow demonstrates that China is right about wind and solar energy—is a fantasy, not a fact. Even if you rely on China’s own unreliable data, the International Energy Agency lists coal and coal products as 71 percent of China’s energy production, and solar, wind, and other renewables combined at 5.4 percent.

Not everyone agrees that the Iran war is a win for China, energy wise.

President Trump posted to Truth Social over the weekend, “Massive numbers of completely empty oil tankers, some of the largest anywhere in the World, are heading, right now, to the United States to load up with the best and ‘sweetest’ oil (and gas!) anywhere in the World. We have more oil than the next two largest oil economies combined - and higher quality. We are waiting for you. Quick turnaround! President DJT”

Trump also posted a world map of marine traffic depicting tankers headed for the U.S. to fill up. “GREAT!!!,” Trump commented.

“The U.S. is going to make a fortune,” said an Israeli reserve brigadier general, Amir Avivi, the founder and chairman of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum. Avivi said in Monday’s IDSF briefing that American interests for the conflict include moving Iran “from alliance with China to alliance with the United States.” He also said that a successful war outcome for America would likely include Iranian oil being traded in petrodollars as part of the SWIFT system (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) rather than on the black market.

A headline that said “Iran War Winner: U.S. Fracking and Offshore Drilling” would be as accurate, probably more accurate, than the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Associated Press headlines. It’s unlikely to appear so long as the AP is driving the agenda.

The AP used to be funded largely by dues from member newspapers. But as the newspaper industry has collapsed, the AP has become increasingly reliant on grants from nonprofit organizations with ideological agendas.

The AP website also lists a “partnership” with the China News Service. It describes the China News Service as providing “News and insight from daily life in China,” illustrating the partnership with a pair of adorable pandas. “China News Service (CNS) provides in-depth news from China to an international audience, with coverage including feature stories and topics such as current events, art, lifestyle, people and travel,” the AP website says. What AP doesn’t say is that China News Service is controlled by the Chinese government and its governing Communist Party.

The AP article carries a disclaimer stating that “The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content.” The Washington Free Beacon has previously exposed this relationship with articles such as “The AP’s Climate Coverage Is Funded by Left-Wing Groups—And It Shows” and “AP Quietly Reveals Donation From Foreign Group That Trains Journalists as Climate Change ‘Activists.’” I wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal in 2025: “Following the Money, the Associated Press Moves Left.” This latest AP article fits the pattern.

The first quote in the AP article says: “China’s approach to energy sector development and geopolitics has been completely validated by the Iran conflict,” said Sam Reynolds with the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis is funded by the same left-wing foundations that fund the AP. For example, the Hewlett Foundation gave $200,000 to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in 2025 and $750,000 to the AP’s climate desk in October 2024 for a 24-month grant.

A member of the board of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis is Sarah Brennan, who works at the Rockefeller Family Fund on the Funder Collaborative on Oil & Gas. The Rockefeller Family Fund gave $347,250 to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in 2024, according to the Rockefeller Family Fund tax return, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis $570,000 in 2025. The AP website lists “The Rockefeller Foundation” as a current funder. There are lots of Rockefellers, and the Brothers Fund, the Foundation and Family Fund are distinct entities, but the heirs of John D. Rockefeller, founder of what is now ExxonMobil, have been outspoken against fossil fuels. “Supporting the AP’s climate desk dovetails with The Rockefeller Foundation’s recognition of climate change as a singular threat to humanity,” the Rockefeller Foundation website says. The Rockefeller Foundation 2024 tax return listed a $250,000 grant to the AP in 2023 “in support of launching a climate coverage initiative.”

Another passage in the AP article: “They are at the very forefront of this, more so than any other countries in the world, certainly more so than the United States,” said Li Shuo, director of the Asia Society Policy Institute’s China Climate Hub. The Rockefeller Foundation gave the Asia Society $200,000 in 2024 for “researching China’s climate goals and implementation strategies,” according to the Rockefeller Foundation tax return.

There’s nothing necessarily problematic about a news organization funded by Rockefellers publishing news articles that also quote sources funded by Rockefellers. The problem is when it leads to readers being misled about reality. The stories are deceptively illustrated with pictures of windmills, solar panels, and batteries instead of coal mines or nuclear power plants.

The executive editor of the New York Times, Joseph Kahn, has been pushing this Chinese triumphalist line: “It’s obvious China has taken the lead … America is relatively stagnant by comparison,” he claimed in December 2025. The reality is that China is heavily dependent on imported oil, notwithstanding all the greenwashing pliantly provided by the AP, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal reporters. The U.S., by contrast, is a net exporter of energy.

The AP’s director of Media Relations & Corporate Communications, Patrick Maks, answered a question about the organization’s partnership with China News Service, providing a statement that said, “AP distributes clearly labeled third-party content from hundreds of unconnected organizations around the world. This content is marked as fully separate from the core AP news report. None of the AP’s business relationships have any connection to, or influence over, the journalism AP produces and provides to its customers and audiences around the world.”

He did not say directly whether the AP is paid for the arrangement, or if so, how much. Whether it’s a paid or voluntary “partnership,” it’s concerning, no matter the labeling. China will have less money to throw around on this sort of thing now that its supply of smuggled petroleum from Iran is getting more scarce and more pricey. Alas the same does not apply to the Rockefeller and Hewlett Foundations, at least if their return is measured in articles produced rather than in readers convinced.

READ MORE: The Misleading Media Groupthink On China’s Renewable Energy

That video of congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, grilling college presidents about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their university policies—and the college presidents responding that it depended on the context—has been viewed more than a billion times, making it what the jacket copy of her new book calls “the most-watched congressional hearing in history.”

The performance propelled Stefanik to new prominence but not yet into a different job. She was reportedly considered—how seriously is unclear—to be President Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate. Trump eventually did nominate her to be the U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, a cabinet position, but then in March 2025 Trump pulled the nomination. Stefanik entered the 2026 race for governor of New York—and then announced she was suspending that campaign and also not running for reelection to Congress.

Making a success as a nonfiction writer may be even longer odds than winning election as governor of New York as a Trump Republican. Yet on the basis of her debut performance, Stefanik just might have a promising future ahead of her as an author. Poisoned Ivies is the best book yet on how the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel reverberated on American campuses.

The right-wing jeremiad against decadent universities is a genre with a long history. The conventional list starts with William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1951 God and Man at Yale and continues through Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, and Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. You could take it back even further, to Irving Babbitt’s 1908 Literature and the American College: “The function of the college … should be to insist on the idea of quality.”

Unlike Buckley and D’Souza, who came at it as students, or Bloom and Babbitt, who were professors, Stefanik brings the perspective of a politician. With that hearing questioning Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill, who both subsequently resigned, she “reset the course of American higher education” and changed the perception of Ivy League institutions. “Instead of bastions of knowledge and vibrant institutional life, they are considered hotbeds of radical ideology, groundless elitism, intellectual laziness, and anti-American hatred,” she writes.

“The leaders of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning flunked the most basic moral test imaginable,” says Stefanik. “They acted like a brainwashed herd, all trotting out the same lawyerly verbiage and bureaucratic talking points.”

Stefanik is particularly good on Harvard, where she went to college. This book includes details that I didn’t know about, and I follow this stuff very closely. For example, the senior fellow of Harvard’s governing Corporation, Penny Pritzker, “had hired her own legal team separate from Harvard’s.” And, “at Pritzker’s deposition, there was a heated disagreement when her lawyers would not allow the Harvard lawyers into the room.” Stefanik also reports a meeting she had in 2024 with Alan Garber, then the interim president of Harvard. “Garber seemed surprised and dismissive when I told him that Trump would win, and he insinuated that was not what he was hearing from Harvard’s pollsters and professors about the presidential election.”

She’s also good with details from some of the other campuses, drawing on student reports: “Yale students dropped a heap of fake ‘bloodstained’ hundred-dollar bills on the heads of American Jewish undergraduates as they passed underneath the balcony of one of Yale’s dining halls. According to Sahar Tartak, a dean told her that Yale considered the blatantly antisemitic act ‘political speech.’ The dean’s only stated objection was to the littering.”

She’s good on the causes of the campus problems—tenure; overwhelmingly left-wing faculty hiring for conformity; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; social media, especially TikTok; and the influence of foreign students and foreign money.

She’s good on some possible solutions, including requiring “syllabus transparency” to allow parents and students to understand what they are getting into, and donors to see what they are funding. Also “using our free choice to send a message” by moving away from the Ivy League toward friendlier destinations such as Washington University in St. Louis, Vanderbilt, Emory, Clemson, even Bari Weiss’s University of Austin, in Texas.

And she’s spectacularly good in explaining how this is an issue that matters not only to the Jewish community but “to every American.” She says it “determines whether we strive for academic excellence or political indoctrination at our most esteemed colleges.”

There are a few points where I wished she’d been a little more precise about facts. The hearing transcript at the end of the book has her grilling Gay about what Stefanik four times calls Harvard’s “Middle Eastern Studies Department.” Harvard has no “Middle Eastern Studies Department.” She also writes that, “In fact, the Biden administration went so far as not to open up a single Department of Education investigation into any college regarding antisemitism, using ongoing litigation as the lame excuse for cowardly leadership.” The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights notified Harvard by letter on November 28, 2023, that it was opening an investigation into a complaint about discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students.

She’s also too easy on some institutions and too tough on others. Stefanik’s depiction of Dartmouth as an exemplary model is too sanguine. A program to bring Israeli scholars there has been subject to a flood of opposition in the student newspaper, including from the opinion editor. Even the University of Florida, another success story in Stefanik’s book, recently had to deal with what a university statement described as an “antisemitic gesture” among its College Republicans chapter. I thought she was too harsh on Brown, faulting the university for negotiating with protesters but omitting that Brown arrested 20 protesters in November 2023 or that Brown, unlike other Ivy League institutions, talks about recruiting at religious day schools and has seen meaningful growth in its observant Jewish population in recent years. She’s too harsh on Larry Summers.

But those are minor quibbles. On the big picture, Stefanik—and her House Education and Workforce Committee colleagues like Virginia Foxx and Burgess Owens—are so much more sensible than Claudine Gay or Liz Magill or Michael Schill of Northwestern or Baroness Minouche Shafik of Columbia. As Stefanik puts it, “the American people, much smarter than these university presidents, said enough is enough.”

Perhaps the most stirring example of this were the “patriotic frat boys” at the University of North Carolina who, Battle of Iwo Jima-statue style, raised the American flag on a campus where demonstrators had replaced it with a Palestinian one. Stefanik—daughter of an Italian-American mom and a Polish-American dad, neither of whom has a college degree—has played her own role. If Harvard isn’t proud of her, it should be—Stefanik has done more to improve that university and American higher education than any of its current faculty and staff. In a just world, Harvard would give her an honorary degree and make her the commencement speaker. Or put her on the faculty at the inflated salary the school is reportedly paying Claudine Gay. Perhaps if the government wins its lawsuit against Harvard, Stefanik will wind up as the court-appointed “independent outside monitor.” It would make another good book.

Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities
by Elise Stefanik
Threshold Editions, 256 pp., $29

READ MORE: How to Handle Your Out-of-Control Ivy

One of the refreshing things about President Trump is that his patience has its limits. America’s enemies have found that out the hard way—ask the late Ayatollah Khamenei or the now-former president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. Some of our so-called allies are also hearing from the president.

“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…” Trump posted Tuesday morning. “Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you any more, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT.”

All that was missing was a “thank you for your attention to this matter.” It was classic Trump, cutting to the heart of the matter by challenging the other countries to show up. It’s a win either way, by shaming the allies into action or by exposing their fecklessness.

The phrase that came to mind was Yiddish: tochis afn tish. As Leo Rosten parsed it in the 1989 book The Joys of Yinglish, “Tochis afn tish does not mean ‘buttocks on the table,’ which is its literal translation, but — ‘Put up or shut up,’ ‘Let’s get down to brass tacks,’ or ‘Lay all your cards on the table.’”

A 2011 New York Times profile of a private investigator in Brooklyn explained the term, sometimes abbreviated and anglicized to “T.O.T.”: “It means ‘Put your tuchis on the table,’ … In other words, ‘Show me the proof.’”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reinforced the president’s point. Asked at a March 31, 2026 press conference, “Is the United States still committed to NATO’s collective defense?” Hegseth replied, “as far as NATO is concerned, that’s a decision that will be left to the president. But I’ll just say, a lot has been laid bare.”

Hegseth continued, “A lot has been shown to the world about what our allies would be willing to do for the United States of America when we undertake an effort of this scope on behalf of the free world. These are missiles that don’t even range the United States of America, they range allies and others. And yet, when we ask for additional assistance or simple access, basing and overflight, we get questions or roadblocks or hesitations. And the president’s pointing out you don’t have much of an alliance if you have countries that are not willing to stand with you when you need them. He’s simply pointing that out. And ultimately, it’ll be his decision of what that looks like after this is complete.”

Trump singled out France in a follow-up message. “The country of France wouldn’t let planes headed to Israel, loaded up with military supplies, fly over French territory. France has been VERY UNHELPFUL with respect to the ‘Butcher of Iran,’ who has been successfully eliminated! The U.S.A. will REMEMBER!!! President DJT.”

The United States during President George W. Bush’s presidency had a similar standoff with France over its lack of cooperation with the Iraq War. Critics will fault Trump for alienating Europe to begin with over tariffs or for failing to do the long-term personal relationship building, but he actually has spent time visiting and meeting with Europeans. In the case of other partnerships, such as those with Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and even arguably Turkey and Qatar, Trump has gotten results. NATO, or at least some of its members, are a different story.

It’s one thing not to have any military might to deploy—there’s an old joke about French tanks that have only one gear, reverse—it’s another thing to refuse overflight by the U.S. in a war against a regime, Iran, that has killed Americans and is a threat to Western Civilization. It’s not exactly reciprocity when the U.S. invaded the beaches of Normandy to liberate France. Of the approximately 350,000 Jews in France in 1940, 77,000 “perished in concentration camps and killing centers—the overwhelming majority of them at Auschwitz—or died in detention on French soil,” according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia. That makes the refusal of France to allow overflight of arms shipments to Israel, as Israel fights against enemies who want to kill all the Jews, particularly poignant.

The left will accuse Trump of ruining relations with our European allies, just as the French-speaking 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, blamed George W. Bush for doing. It didn’t help Kerry much in the election, which he lost. The voters understood that if anyone was ruining the alliance, it wasn’t America or its president, it was the Europeans.

Whether France or any other countries show up in the Strait of Hormuz in response to Trump’s invitation will be interesting to see. If they do, let them bear the risk of running into any mines that may remain. And if they don’t, it will be up to Trump whether he wants to leave the area alone or act to seize and rename what the president called on Friday “the Strait of Trump.”

READ MORE: Trump’s Tuchis Afn Tish Moment: ‘Go Get Your Own Oil!’

The disclosure to potential investors in documents for Harvard’s planned new $675 million tax-exempt bond offering doesn’t give enough warning about the risks, a watchdog group says.

The National Jewish Advocacy Center, a nonprofit legal group that works to combat anti-Semitism, wrote on Monday, March 30 to lawyers working on the bond offering.

“We write regarding potentially materially inadequate disclosure in the Preliminary Official Statement,” says the letter, signed by Marc Greendorfer and shared with the Washington Free Beacon, warning that the statement, “fails to provide sufficient disclosure concerning Harvard University’s role in fostering antisemitism and the resulting financial, regulatory, and reputational risks to investors.”

“Public reporting, including recent coverage by Ira Stoll in the Free Beacon, outlines significant litigation and governmental risks facing Harvard, including a newly filed lawsuit by the United States Department of Justice. In addition, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s report, ‘How Campuses Became Hotbeds: The Radical Rise of Antisemitism on College Campuses,’ and its 2024 predecessor House report, ‘Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,’ document extensive evidence of antisemitism at Harvard, referencing the University’s culpability dozens of times. Numerous private lawsuits have also been filed by individuals alleging antisemitic discrimination,” the letter says.

“Despite this,” the letter continues, the offering document “contains only conclusory, boilerplate disclosure. It provides no meaningful analysis of the scope, likelihood, or magnitude of these risks. It omits discussion of the House reports, fails to address the potential consequences of adverse outcomes in federal litigation (including risks to approximately $2.2 billion in research funding), does not analyze the financial impact of a potential loss of 501(c)(3) status or additional governmental funding and does not meaningfully address ongoing reputational harm. These risks are not speculative; they have occurred and will continue to occur.”

The letter says that “boilerplate disclosure is inadequate.”

“Relevant securities laws’ anti-fraud provisions apply and require materially complete and accurate disclosure,” the letter says, urging Harvard and its bankers “to promptly revise and expand” the offering document “to ensure that investors are fully informed of these material risks.”

“While disclosure need not be exhaustive and shouldn’t be speculative, it must be substantive and specific,” the letter says. “We hope this matter can be resolved promptly and without the need for formal proceedings. However, if it is not addressed in a timely manner, we are prepared to pursue all available legal remedies.”

The Massachusetts Development Finance Agency did not provide a response to a query about the disclosure issue. Key staffers working on the offering at Harvard, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley also did not respond to a query about the letter and whether they plan to revise the offering document to provide more robust disclosure.

It’s the second legal issue to arise related to the offering. Earlier this week, the Free Beacon reported that some of the nation’s foremost legal scholars expressed concerns about the state’s requirement that Harvard “agrees that no part of the Project, so long as it is owned or controlled by the Institution, shall be used for any sectarian instruction or as a place of religious worship or in connection with any part of a program of a school or department of divinity for any religious denomination.” Law professors said that amounted to discrimination that unconstitutionally interferes with the free exercise guaranteed by the First Amendment as interpreted by recent rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Harvard has been upping its borrowing in recent years as its finances have come under pressure amid an outbreak of anti-Semitism and a concomitant decline of intellectual rigor and vitality on the campus. The federal government sued Harvard March 20, 2026, over what the Justice Department’s complaint calls the university’s “toothless non-response to the ongoing relentless antisemitic on-campus discrimination.” Harvard has insisted it is in compliance with the antidiscrimination laws and blamed the Trump administration, even though at least two federal judges have been critical of Harvard’s response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. “Harvard failed its Jewish students,” Judge Richard Stearns found in August 2024. And even Judge Allison Burroughs, who found in Harvard’s favor at trial in an admissions case in which she was later overturned by the Supreme Court, has ruled, “It is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and could (and should) have done a better job of dealing with the issue ... Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did.”

READ MORE: ‘Potentially Materially Inadequate Disclosure’ on Harvard’s $675 Million Bond Offering Prompts ‘Anti-Fraud’ Warning

Conditions imposed by the state of Massachusetts on a $675 million tax-exempt bond offering by Harvard raise serious questions about unconstitutionally infringing on free exercise of religious liberty, some of the nation’s foremost legal scholars told the Washington Free Beacon.

The Free Beacon reported Sunday that Harvard, under financial pressure from the federal government, will try to borrow $675 million via the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency. A draft offering document used to help line up buyers for the bonds says that as a condition of qualifying for the Massachusetts tax-exempt financing, Harvard “agrees that no part of the Project, so long as it is owned or controlled by the Institution, shall be used for any sectarian instruction or as a place of religious worship or in connection with any part of a program of a school or department of divinity for any religious denomination.”

“That’s got to be unconstitutional,” the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School, Nicole Stelle Garnett, wrote in response to my query. Garnett, who is also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said the state is “imposing a condition on the funds that discriminates against religious conduct/free exercise in violation of Carson v. Makin,” a case the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2022.

My Sunday story asked, “If an economist says a prayer before eating a meal at his desk, does that turn his office into a ‘place of religious worship?’ What if a Harvard Divinity School student wants to come talk with Ben Friedman, a Harvard economics professor who wrote a book titled Religion and The Rise of Capitalism. Is Professor Friedman supposed to bar the Harvard Divinity School student from the Pritzker building?”

Garnett said the stipulation “raises bizarre enforcement challenges. Maybe Harvard would reply that its Divinity School isn’t sectarian.”

It’s not inconceivable for religious worship to take place inside Harvard buildings. Harvard Chabad has Shabbat dinners inside Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School buildings and hosts High Holiday services at Harvard Law School. Harvard has a Hindu prayer space in the basement of a dormitory building for first-year students. It has a Muslim prayer space on the second floor of the Smith Center, an office building and campus center whose eighth and ninth floors are part of the “project” being financed with the tax-exempt bond offering. A room adjacent to a shower in the basement of the Harvard Kennedy School also functions as a Muslim prayer space, or did when I worked in the building from 2019 to 2023.

The Maurice & Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia, Philip Hamburger, who is author of the landmark 2002 book Separation of Church and State (published by Harvard University Press), wrote to me that he may use the example in the course he teaches on religious liberty. “You are right that the breadth of the limit raises free exercise and even free speech questions,” wrote Hamburger, who is also CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

Brenden Mann Foundation Chair in Law and Religion at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, Michael Helfand, who is also a visiting professor at Yale Law School, wrote to me that “these sorts of provisions exist across state and across contexts, previously enacted because of an old, but now abandoned, interpretation of the Establishment Clause. Indeed, under a recent series of Supreme Court cases over the past decade, this sort of provision is unconstitutional as it violates the Free Exercise Clause as a prohibited form of religious discrimination. A state cannot exclude an institution from participating in such a government program because it would like to use the funds—made available to other private institutions—toward some sort of religious use.”

Garnett and Helfand maintain a website, religiousequality.net, that describes itself as “Exposing discriminatory laws and regulations to prevent the exclusion of religious organizations and activities from public programs.” Garnett said they might add this example to the website documenting discrimination.

Penny Pritzker, who announced a $100 million gift for the new economics building in 2021, did not respond to an email seeking comment. Pritzker served as Secretary of Commerce in the administration of President Barack Obama and as a State Department envoy in the administration of President Joe Biden. She is the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, one of Harvard’s two governing boards. The chairman of the Harvard economics department, Elie Tamer, did not respond to an email seeking comment. Lawyers for Harvard and for the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency did not provide comment before deadline.

The Harvard bond offering was approved by the state in February at an amount up to $750 million. It’s unclear why the amount of this offering is $675 million when a larger amount was approved by the state. One possibility is that Harvard plans a separate, taxable offering for the remaining amount of $75 million. Another possibility is that the offering was downsized after informally checking and discovering less interest from investors. It’s also possible Harvard found borrowing conditions better than expected and was able to raise more money with a smaller-sized offering because it had to pay lower interest rates.

READ MORE: Harvard’s Prayer-Free Pritzker Economics Building Is Called ‘Unconstitutional’

Harvard is going to try to borrow more money, issuing $675 million in tax-exempt bonds with the help of the state of Massachusetts, according to a preliminary official statement dated March 27, 2026.

The 102-page document, a draft offering document used to help line up buyers for the bonds, offers some hints at how Harvard is coping under intense pressure from the federal government, which says the university has “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” The Massachusetts Development Finance Agency is controlled by Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat and former captain of the Harvard women’s basketball team; Harvard has already tapped the agency for $1,169,075,000 in bond offerings in 2024 and 2025, and if this offering is completed at the $675 million level, Healey’s helping hand to Harvard via Massachusetts’ municipal bond authority will reach a total of more than $1.8 billion.

Among the key disclosures:

— “First-year student applications received” by Harvard plunged more than 21 percent to 47,893 for the 2025-2026 academic year from a recent high of 61,221 in 2022-23. Peer institutions such as Yale reported 54,919 applicants this year, Brown 47,937 applicants, and Columbia 61,031 applications. Harvard isn’t releasing its application numbers for students entering in the fall of 2026 until it is required to by the federal government, the Harvard Crimson reported.

— Harvard, which has been complaining it is so financially strapped that potentially life-saving cancer research is endangered, employs 12 vice presidents. The United States of America somehow manages with just one vice president, and MIT somehow survives with a mere seven.

Harvard says in the preliminary official statement that “various legislative, administrative, and enforcement actions initiated by the federal government and its agencies against the University, some of which allege violations of law,” may have “a material adverse effect on the current and future financial profile and operating performance of the University.” It said the developments involving the federal government may reduce revenue, adversely affect the university’s tax status, or damage “the reputation or business of the University.”

Proceeds of the bonds will be used in part to refinance existing debt and also for “construction of a new 109,500 square foot … building for the study of economics.” Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow of Harvard’s key governing board, the Harvard Corporation, announced a $100 million gift for the new economics building in 2021. Pritzker served as Secretary of Commerce in the administration of President Barack Obama and as a State Department envoy in the administration of President Joe Biden. The Crimson reported earlier this month on a presentation indicating that fundraising for the project “had raised a little more than $138 million of its $175 million goal — leaving a gap of roughly $37 million with construction already underway.”

As a condition of qualifying for the Massachusetts tax-exempt financing, Harvard “agrees that no part of the Project, so long as it is owned or controlled by the Institution, shall be used for any sectarian instruction or as a place of religious worship or in connection with any part of a program of a school or department of divinity for any religious denomination.” This is supposed to be to comply with the First Amendment’s establishment clause, but the language is so sweeping that it probably infringes on the free exercise clause. If an economist says a prayer before eating a meal at his desk, does that turn his office into a “place of religious worship?” What if a Harvard Divinity School student wants to come talk with Ben Friedman, a Harvard economics professor who wrote a book titled Religion and The Rise of Capitalism. Is Professor Friedman supposed to bar the Harvard Divinity School student from the Pritzker building?

When the Trump administration tries to get Harvard not to discriminate against Jews, Harvard self-righteously declares, “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” Yet when the government of Massachusetts tries to declare the entire Harvard economics department building a prayer-free zone, Harvard appears ready to say okay and take the tax-exempt $675 million.

In a “roadshow” slide presentation that goes with the bond documents, Harvard touts its “endowment valued at $56.9 billion as of June 30, 2025.” That endowment is allocated 41 percent to private equity and 31 percent to hedge funds, according to the most recent Harvard Management Company annual report, so one way to look at the situation, since money is at least somewhat fungible (not all the endowment is restricted) is that Harvard is borrowing to invest in private equity and hedge funds. The Harvard endowment has underperformed peer institutions and public markets over long periods of time, even using Harvard’s valuations, which Harvard itself has conceded, for the private equity parts, may be somewhat imprecise. “In FY24, for the second year in a row, private equity returns lagged those of public equity markets. Readers will recall that in FY22, private managers did not reduce the value of their investments in a manner consistent with declining public equity markets at the time,” the October 2024 endowment annual report said.

In a March 27 statement affirming Harvard’s “Aaa” rating, Moody’s listed among “factors that could lead to a downgrade of the ratings” “over an extended period of time, gradual erosion of brand or competitive position relative to other elite global universities.” The statement also said that “Harvard has considerable exposure to governance scrutiny. An evolving political landscape adds potential operational and financial complexities.” Moody’s saw the 12 vice presidents as a positive: “a deep bench of highly skilled administrators provide ample capacity to manage through periods of change or weaker operating performance without adverse impacts to credit quality.”

A March 26 statement from S&P Global Ratings gave the bonds its “AAA” rating and said “operating performance could be strained due to changes in federal funding.” S&P said, “We could consider a negative outlook or a downgrade with a sustained weakening of demand, the issuance of additional debt that yields balance-sheet metrics not commensurate with the rating, or if overall financial resources deteriorate. There could also be pressure if there are significant impacts related to evolving federal policies around funding for research or other policies that lead to a materially weaker financial position.”

In 2016, 2020, 2024, and 2025, Harvard quickly followed tax-exempt bond offerings with taxable bond offerings. It’s not clear if the university plans to do the same this year. The lead managers for the offering are Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

READ MORE: Harvard To Borrow Another $675 Million as Applications Plunge

The New York Times food section is celebrating the Passover holiday by recommending a recipe for “matzo” that the newspaper itself acknowledges is not kosher for Passover. At least one rabbinic authority says the crackers the Times is touting are “hametz”—leavened bread that is the opposite of the unleavened bread that Jewish law requires for the holiday.

A Times feature by Melissa Clark repeatedly and openly acknowledges—once in the subheadline, twice in the article, and once in the accompanying recipe—that the food is not kosher for Passover. The story makes a halfhearted attempt at a justification, attributed to chef Hillary Sterling of “Italian-inflected” restaurant Ci Siamo, whose menu includes pork Milanese. “These dishes aren’t strictly traditional or kosher, but all of them have good stories behind them. And telling those stories together, Ms. Sterling said, is why we gather at the Passover table.”

Leave it to the New York Times to consult a pork-selling chef on the reasons for the Passover holiday rather than, say, the Hebrew Bible. The Bible has explanations like, “You shall celebrate it as a festival to GOD throughout the ages … Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; on the very first day you shall remove leaven from your houses, for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day to the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel.” (Exodus 12:14-12:15) Or Exodus 12:19, “No leaven shall be found in your houses for seven days. For whoever eats what is leavened, that person—whether a stranger or a citizen of the country—shall be cut off from the community of Israel.” Or Exodus 13:6, “Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a festival of GOD.”

The Times matzo recipe is the latest in a long line of examples of the newspaper being clumsy around food and Jewish holidays. In 2016, a Times article headlined, “For Juicy Beef for Your Seder Table, Look Beyond Brisket” generated a classic Times correction: “An earlier version of this article incorrectly implied that beef tenderloin is kosher and appropriate for Passover. It is not kosher, but other cuts of beef that are kosher may be used in the recipe in its place.” In 2024 the Times magazine ran an article attacking the Passover Seder as being too focused on Jews rather than on others. “I’ve been to a lot of Passover celebrations … and it’s so weird that the story is only of Jewish subjugation, even though subjugation is still so present for other people,” the article quoted a far-left activist as saying.

On social media, the non-kosher “matzo” recipe was seen as on-brand for the Times. “New York Times promoting a homemade matzoh recipe that isn’t kosher for passover is definitely on the nose,” commented Yoni Freedhoff, a professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa.

And on the Times’s own website, reader comments were negative. “I’m saddened … Next time be more sensitive to the importance of what matzah is representing,” wrote one commenter, upvoted by 13 readers.

“Why would you share a matzo recipe that isn’t kosher for Passover?” asked another commenter.

“Matzo recipe that’s not kosher for Passover — and I thought that I’d seen it all,” said another commenter.

“If its similar to Sardinian flatbread, but not kosher for Passover, why would you call it matzo and not Sardinian flatbread? I guess anything too kosher, too jewish, or too israeli (Pearl couscous) just isn’t right for the NYT,” said another commenter, Golda. Golda is right; the Times indeed stopped using the term Israeli couscous and started referring instead to “pearl couscous.”

The ingredients for the flatbread or cracker that the Times is mislabeling as matzo include salt, olive oil, flour, and water. The recipe involves stirring, forming the dough into a ball, “cover with a plate or plastic wrap, and let rest for 15 minutes.”

The resting was the main concern for one rabbinic authority. Rabbi Ethan Tucker, president and Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, ordained by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and with a doctorate in Talmud and Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary, explained in response to my query: “the biggest thing is: ‘let rest for 15 minutes’! You cannot have planned idle time with the dough and once there is idle time more than 15 minutes (and there will be 3 minutes scattered throughout the rest of the process with the cutting, etc.) you are in hametz land, at least for Ashkenazim, who do not require the 18 minutes of idleness to be consecutive.”

One tradition the Times does revere is what it calls “the tradition of putting an orange on the Seder plate as an act of inclusion of L.G.B.T.Q. Jews,” though even there the Times leaps from the orange to kumquat. Anyway, “not kosher for Passover” seems to me like the Times’s attempt at a sophisticated way of saying leavened rather than unleavened, or hametz rather than matzo. “Cut off from the community of Israel” is actually a pretty accurate description of whatever is happening over at that publication, in more ways than one.

READ MORE: To Observant Jews, New York Times Cooking Offers a Pre-Passover Insult

The scholar of Yiddish Ruth Wisse began her Jefferson Lecture last night at the Trump Kennedy Center in Washington with the observation that “There have been many far more distinguished speakers in this series, but I think none has been older, and no one more grateful.”

Wisse didn’t explicitly make the connection between her age—89—and her topic—”our anxieties about endurance”—but I’m old enough myself to begin to understand what she was talking about. So is America, in its 250th birthday year.

Wisse introduced her talk as “a grateful Jewish message on staying power, in three parts.”

Part one focused on a Yiddish poem by Abraham Sutzkever that asks “Who will last? And what?” It concludes “Who lasts? God abides — isn’t that enough?”

I took Sutzkever—and Wisse—to be suggesting that faith in God is one secret to endurance, and also that the anxiety about endurance is eased by the knowledge that only God is eternal.

As Wisse put it, “To find lastingness, he insisted, you must look to its source. Trust in eternity can be sought only in the eternal.” Or, as she concluded, “Sutzkever, who survived the sacrifice of his formative world—when that’s what it cost to remain a Jew—reminds us to acknowledge before whom we stand. If that secure knowledge could restore him and resurrect the Jewish people, so can it inspire this nation to reach its 2,500th anniversary.”

Part two focused on an essential Jewish prayer, the Shma, which begins, “Hear, O Israel. The Lord is our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them thoroughly to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for a reminder between your eyes. And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.” As she put it, the “ratio of content to transmission is about 1:7.”

Transmission, she said, requires teachers who inspire and reinforce rather than only complain. “The absence of insistent, creative intellectual formation, particularly in the humanities, does not just leave a vacuum; it gets filled by adversarial ideas: Marx for Madison, Lenin for Lincoln, and lately the Islamist incursion for the American Revolution. … If there is to be enduring government of, by, and for the people, the people would have to be instructed and reminded to respect and confidently to perpetuate their precious inheritance.”

Part three had to do with military force—appropriate for Wisse. Michael Segal of Advocates for Harvard ROTC wrote me to say that Wisse “was one of the key faculty members supporting return of ROTC to Harvard. … the example of Israel was very much in mind for the importance of having capable people in the military.”

Wisse said in the Jefferson lecture that “the United States is still this planet’s main hope … and that hope depends on the fighting strength of its armed forces and the fighting spirit of its citizenry. … Jews who represent the principle and practice of coexistence—and who paid the highest price when they’ve tried to endure without self-defense—can testify that soldiering is the mainstay of any society that intends to protect its members.”

Faith, teaching, and soldiering—as Wisse put it, “May these messages from the Blue and White forever help to strengthen and to secure the Red, White, and Blue.”

The full text is up, paywalled, at the Free Press, and YouTube has video. For those fortunate enough to attend in person, it was a large crowd heavy with some of the most prominent American Jewish rabbis, writers, editors, professors, and philanthropists, including some who traveled from Florida, Boston, and New York. The standing ovation for Wisse even before she started speaking “to all my fellow lovers of America out there” attested to the warmth, respect, and affection for a speaker who in the teaching, faith, and soldiering departments hasn’t only lectured but has lived as an example.

READ MORE: For America at 250, Some Jewish Wisdom on How to Last 3,000 Years

A Harvard Business School professor who participated in a library protest in favor of student anti-Israel protesters is planning to teach a “case” in her class on Friday about divesting from Israeli and other companies because of “their possible complicity in the crisis in Gaza.”

A copy of the 26-page “case” obtained by the Washington Free Beacon puts the decision in the context of responding to “the apartheid regime in South Africa.” The Free Beacon is not printing the case in its entirety because Harvard Business copyrights the materials. The case makes gestures at even-handedness, noting that the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel “faced criticism of antisemitism in its singling out of Israel, as opposed to the numerous other states engaged in human rights violations globally, for divestment.” Yet on careful analysis, the case as drafted is slanted against Israel from the very first sentence, which describes the October 7, 2023, attack as one by “Palestinian armed groups” rather than by terrorists. The word “terrorists” doesn’t appear in the whole case, including in an extensive discussion of what the case calls a “separation barrier” or “wall”—actually a security fence that Israel built to prevent terrorist attacks.

The case is about whether the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global—at $2.1 trillion, one of the world’s largest—should divest from Caterpillar, IBM, Microsoft, and Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings Inc. and Unilever on account of being “‘too’ complicit in unethical activity to justify investment.”

The lead author of the case and the teacher of the business school class is Reshmaan Hussam. Hussam co-wrote an October 2024 Harvard Crimson article about participating in a library protest wearing a black scarf as a variation on “traditional Palestinian keffiyehs” worn by students. “Our students’ suspensions from the library come amid a wave of new, excessively restrictive rules governing campus speech that have been codified in direct response to student protests about the devastation in Gaza,” she wrote. She was also quoted in Harvard Magazine coverage of the faculty in-library protests, which the participants described as “study-ins.”

Harvard “case study” pedagogy sometimes features a two-part presentation in which students get part of the story, discuss what they’d do, and then get the second part of the case reporting what the decisionmakers actually did and how the decision turned out. The case version that was obtained by the Free Beacon is titled Divestment (A), suggesting that a part (B) may be next. The case carries a boilerplate disclaimer that cases “are developed solely as the basis of class discussion” and “not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.” The fine print also says “Funding for the development of this case was provided by Harvard Business School. The citation review for this case has not yet been completed.” A Free Beacon article last month about the Norwegian fund’s divestment from Bezeq, an Israeli telecommunications firm, reported that at that point, it was “up more than 50 percent in the 14 months since the Norwegians decided to sell.” That story also addressed Caterpillar: “On Aug. 25, 2025, the Norges Bank Executive Board decided to dump its $2.1 billion worth of shares in Caterpillar Inc., the Texas-based construction giant. The ethics board reportedly declared that ‘bulldozers manufactured by Caterpillar are being used by Israeli authorities in the widespread unlawful destruction of Palestinian property.’ Caterpillar stock closed at $702.89 a share on Feb. 3, 2026, up from its $432.30 close on the day of the divestment announcement, according to Yahoo Finance. That’s a 62.6-percent gain, handily outperforming the 8.3-percent return of the S&P 500 index.”

Hussam did not reply to an email seeking comment. An HBS spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment. Harvard says generally that it “cares deeply about members of our Jewish and Israeli community and remains committed to ensuring they are embraced, respected, and can thrive on our campus,” and that the university “has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism.”

Hussam’s doctoral adviser at MIT was economist Esther Duflo and her thesis director was Duflo’s husband Abhijit Banerjee. Duflo and Banerjee won the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics; the pair also both signed a 2025 letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing Israel’s treatment of Gaza as “unconscionable.”

The U.S. government sued Harvard on Friday, March 20 over what the suit called the university’s “toothless non-response to the ongoing relentless antisemitic on-campus discrimination.” On Sunday, March 22, Harvard co-sponsored an event with a boycott-Israel advocacy group in which a Harvard researcher accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. On March 23, the federal Department of Education announced it was opening a new investigation into anti-Semitism at Harvard.

The controversy comes as the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which has played a key role in investigating campus antisemitism and whose hearings led to the resignations of Harvard president Claudine Gay and of presidents Liz Magill of Penn, Michael Schill of Northwestern, and Baroness Minouche Shafik of Columbia, released pages from a confidential draft report of Harvard Business School’s anti-Semitism working group.

Among the disclosures that the draft report labeled as “key findings” were that Jewish business school faculty “were shocked by the hatred.”

“Several said they used to feel pride to work at Harvard, but now felt embarrassed,” the draft report said.

Among the “themes” that the report said emerged from interviews with Jewish students, staff and faculty at Harvard Business School were “a palpable experience of feeling unwelcomed, abandoned, fearful, and silenced,” “a surprising level of ignorance, insensitivity, and arrogance,” and “a School culture of silence and anti-intellectual tendencies.”

One staffer quoted in the report said, “An all-staff meeting was scheduled on Yom Kippur.” The staffer reported being told, “If we have to schedule meetings around all religions, we’ll never be able to meet.” The meeting eventually was rescheduled.

The disclosures also come as some of Harvard’s Jewish faculty, led by a professor who wrote in 2015 that he was boycotting Israel, publicly claim that the description of Harvard fostering a climate of anti-Semitism “paints a portrait of Harvard that we do not recognize.” They claimed the Trump administration “cynically exploits concerns about antisemitism to justify what can only be called an authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education.”

This is an example of the anti-Semitism at Harvard rather than evidence that it doesn’t exist; to win social approval and avoid shunning there is pressure to come out publicly against externally enforcing accountability for Harvard’s problems. The anti-Trump politics are so pervasive that there’s pressure to prove you are a clubbable Jew. In legendary Harvard leader Henry Rosovsky’s words about the Jews of the 1930s: “Jewish scholars who managed to become professors frequently became ‘closet Jews,’ anxious to dissociate themselves from their background.” The Havard closet Jews of the 1930s have become the Harvard as-a-Jews of 2026.

Sure, there’s a case that competition and choice are better enforcement mechanisms than heavy-handed litigation from Washington, though anti-Semitism is literally the only area in which left-wing Harvard Jews believe this to be so. But events on the campus—as well as the documents from the House committee—undercut the narrative that this is all fully repaired or some imaginary pretext by the Trump administration to seize control of Harvard. President Claudine Gay, after all, resigned during the Biden administration. Many of the same professors now blaming anti-Semitism enforcement on Trump authoritarianism were among Gay’s most vehement defenders.

READ MORE: Harvard Business Professor Who Protested at Library Now Teaching Israel Divestment ‘Case’ in Class

The weekend after the federal government sued Harvard for ongoing “relentless antisemitic on-campus discrimination,” Harvard co-sponsored an event with a boycott-Israel advocacy group in which a Harvard researcher accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza.

Signup for the online event of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council was available via the website of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, which sits within Harvard’s School of Public Health. The “Harvard FXB program” was announced at the start of the event as a cosponsor, and the main speaker at the event, Bilal Irfan, was introduced as a bioethicist at “Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s hospital.”

After greetings from Alice Rothschild of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council, which is promoting on its website a report about Israel’s “engineered collapse of Palestinian life,” and Miguel Garcia, global secretary of the People’s Health Movement, which issued a statement Thursday condemning “Israel’s military assaults on Lebanon and the US backing that makes it possible,” Irfan plunged into a slide presentation that he described as “documenting the Gaza genocide.”

Irfan spoke of what he said was “Israel’s policy of destroying the health system,” which he said was “a part of the genocidal aims.” He accused Israel of acting to “abduct these physicians” without mentioning that the Israel Defence Forces have described at least some Gaza doctors as suspected Hamas terrorist operatives and the released Israeli hostage Sharon Cunio said that most of her time in Hamas captivity was spent in a hospital. Irfan did not mention Hamas once in the entire presentation. At one point he referred to October 28, 2023, as “three weeks into the genocide” without making any mention of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. He accused Israel of “targeted attacks on maternity wards,” without acknowledging that Hamas stores weapons in hospital neonatal incubators. He also demonized Israeli doctors: “there are a number of Israeli health-care providers who are pro-genocide.”

Among the other accusations that Irfan made against Israel were “sexual violence against children” and detaining children “in small cages,” an accusation he said dated to June 2023.

Irfan complained that he had trouble publishing some of his findings because of pressure from journals and medical societies to “keep it two-sided” and because of funding guidelines “pushing people to not support boycotts of the apartheid regime.”

He concluded by urging people to “continue advocacy in your personal and professional lives.”

Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias has singled out the FXB Center for criticism. The task force’s April 29, 2025, report notes that the FXB staff openly and in writing rejected neutrality in favor of advocacy. Three FXB-affiliated individuals, Bram Wispelwey, Sawsan Abdulrahim, and David Mills, wrote a February 2025 article in which they say, “we join many others who have called for a paradigm shift away from the inertia of supposed objectivity and claimed neutrality that function to perpetuate injustice. Instead, we call for the collective practice of critical advocacy, solidarity with people affected by injustice and oppression, and an emancipatory politics in pursuit of justice in Palestine.” Wispelwey, Mills, and three other Harvard FXB-affiliated individuals, Yara Asi, Osama Tanous, and Weeam Hammoudeh, wrote a 2024 article, “Social medicine education towards structural transformation in Palestine,” in which they describe a course they taught to Harvard students in which one of three objectives was “to champion structural health interventions through solidarity, advocacy, and organizing.”

The task force also noted that FXB webinars were a subject of student complaints. “Several students raised concerns with the Task Force about these webinars, alleging that some of the featured speakers presented a demonizing view of Israel and Israelis,” the April 2025 report said.

As Robert Friedman, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 2024, noted in a November 18, 2025, report on a previous FXB webinar, the task force report described the FXB webinars about Gaza as “characterized by bias and misinformation,” noting, “The accumulation of dis- and misinformation of this kind about Israel is a form of demonization, and we were told it was experienced as such by Israeli and Jewish members of our campus community.” Said Friedman, “When a webinar like this is presented even after students have complained about the series and after a presidential task force has faulted them—and even after Harvard became subject to lawsuits and federal investigations for antisemitism—it raises questions of institutional intent.” That observation applies a second time around, and with emphasis, again, here.

In December 2025 the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, Andrea Baccarelli, announced a change in the FXB center’s leadership and focus. That prompted a petition for reinstatement of the previous director, Mary Bassett, from signers who saw “a deeper, troubling pattern of targeted erasure–especially of Black women whose scholarship confronts structural violence and insists on the dignity of marginalized peoples, including Palestinian.” The petition said, “Removing one of the few senior Black women leaders in public health amid heightened suppression of Palestine-related work is not incidental as it signals that both Black leadership and principled human rights scholarship are expendable when they challenge institutional comfort. This decision sends a chilling message that critical scholarship on racial justice and Palestine is unwelcome.”

Irfan did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Neither did the new interim director of the FXB Center, Kari Nadeau, or two spokespeople for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Neither did spokespeople for Mass General Brigham, the parent of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

In response to Friday’s lawsuit from the U.S. government, Harvard issued a statement claiming “Harvard has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism.” Whatever steps “Harvard has taken” in the case of the FXB Center seem insufficient. Not that Harvard should curb academic freedom or free speech. But neither should it allow an ostensibly research-and-teaching-focused university to be repurposed for “solidarity, advocacy, and organizing”—in the cause of falsely and obsessively demonizing the Jewish state.

The U.S. Department of Education announced March 23 that its Office of Civil Rights has opened two new investigations into Harvard, one related to undergraduate admissions, and the other related to "alleged ongoing antisemitic harassment on Harvard’s campus and the institution’s purported failure to protect Jewish students."

READ MORE: Israel’s ‘Genocidal Aims’ Denounced by Harvard Researcher at Harvard-Sponsored Event Days After U.S. Government Files Antisemitism Lawsuit Against University

The federal government is suing Harvard over what the Justice Department’s complaint calls the university’s “toothless non-response to the ongoing relentless antisemitic on-campus discrimination.”

The suit was announced with a traditional press release that included quotes from Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, who represented Trump as a private lawyer before he was elected in 2024, also posted to social media a video of herself describing it as “an important federal civil rights lawsuit.” She announced, “we look forward to litigating this case.” The Washington Free Beacon has learned that Trump himself has personally been calling Dhillon directly every so often to check in on the case.

The new federal complaint relies heavily on facts described in the report of Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias. That makes it difficult for Harvard to dismiss the facts or characterizations in the report, because the task force was made up largely of Harvard professors picked by Harvard’s president. Harvard can claim the situation has since been remedied, but, in that regard, an inconvenient truth is that not all of the task force’s recommendations have been implemented. While the pace of disruptive anti-Israel public protests on the campus has slowed, and while the anti-Israel activists are whining about what they characterize as “politically motivated terminations of leaders at Harvard’s scholarly centers that include programming on Palestine,” egregious incidents of bigotry persist to this day. So does robust “programming on Palestine”; Harvard’s English and history departments paid a $35,000 honorarium and $7,500 in travel expenses “for a 5 star hotel” to have Ta-Nehisi Coates appear on campus on September 24, 2025, the second day of Rosh Hashana, and “read from his chapter on Palestine,” according to documents released this week by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. An Arab Conference at Harvard is scheduled for April 17-19, 2026, and is described by organizers as “the largest Arab Conference in North America.”

The anti-Israel protesters have tried to hide behind the First Amendment’s protections on free speech and assembly; Mahmoud Khalil has a case against Columbia on this before Judge Arun Subramianian of the Southern District of New York. In a Harvard case brought by Harvard student Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024 and who accompanied Trump on an October 7, 2024, visit to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Queens, New York, Judge Stearns declared himself “dubious that Harvard can hide behind the First Amendment to justify avoidance of its Title VI obligations.”

The reference is to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race and national-origin discrimination in federally funded programs and activities. As today’s complaint puts it, “Harvard is currently set to receive more than $2,615,000,000 of taxpayer money under active federal grants from the Department of Health and Human Services alone (to say nothing of other agencies). Yet Harvard defied federal law and violated Title VI repeatedly by discriminating against Jewish and Israeli students without remorse. And Harvard remains in violation of its Title VI obligations.”

In addition to the Title VI claims, there are civil breach of contract claims; the government asks the court to “Rescind and award the United States restitution of all grant payments made to Harvard during the time of Harvard’s noncompliance with Title VI.” It also asks for appointment of an independent outside monitor, “subject to approval and in collaboration with the United States, to oversee and ensure Harvard’s full compliance with all injunctive and equitable relief ordered by the Court. The monitor shall be empowered to audit Harvard … and recommend corrective actions for such duration and scope as the Court deems just and necessary.” Kestenbaum or outgoing New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik might be fine candidates for that role.

The federal complaint also notes that Harvard was far more permissive and lenient when it came to anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli actions than the “rigorous enforcement” against professors whose offenses were directed at black people or at “trans identity.”

Harvard responded by lashing out with a flailing denunciation of the Trump administration, calling the lawsuit “yet another pretextual and retaliatory action by the administration for refusing to turn over control of Harvard to the federal government.” In its unsigned statement, the university also claimed, “Harvard has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism and actively enforces anti-harassment and anti-discrimination rules and policies on campus.” It did not specify what it meant by the “root causes of antisemitism,” itself a ridiculous formulation given the fundamentally irrational nature of bigotry and bigots, and a phrase that does not appear a single time in the 311-page report of Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias.

In other court filings and outside of court the university and its employees have made a variety of claims, including that the anti-Israel protests on campus did not rise to the level of severe, pervasive harassment that would lead a reasonable person to fear physical harm; that it has taken steps to improve the campus climate; and that the Trump administration is vindictively, groundlessly targeting Harvard along with other civil society institutions, such as the press, as part of a broader plan of replacing democratic freedom with authoritarian tyranny. (Really, I used to work at Harvard, and I live in Boston; a substantial fraction of the Harvard faculty and alumni actually believe this last theory and go around selling books and Substack subscriptions to each other and soliciting campaign and charitable contributions on these “democracy is in danger” grounds.)

In a separate federal lawsuit filed last month, the Justice Department sued Harvard for admissions data the government says it needs to assure that Harvard is complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that found its use of racial preferences in college admissions violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “Harvard has failed to disclose the data we need to ensure that its admissions are free of discrimination — we will continue fighting to put merit over DEI across America,” Attorney General Bondi said in a press release announcing that case.

Federal district judges and even appellate judges in Massachusetts are typically highly sympathetic to Harvard. They frequently either went to school there, guest-lecture at Harvard Law School, or have spouses who work there. Even so, at least two federal judges have been critical of Harvard’s response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. “Harvard failed its Jewish students,” Judge Richard Stearns found in August 2024. Even Judge Allison Burroughs, who Trump has described as a “TOTAL DISASTER,” and who found in Harvard’s favor at trial in the admissions case in which she was later overturned by the Supreme Court, found, “It is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and could (and should) have done a better job of dealing with the issue ... Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did.”

Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, resigned in early January 2024, in part because of her own botched response. The federal complaint does a nice job of recounting that:

On December 5, 2023, President Gay testified about antisemitism at Harvard before the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce. When asked by Representative Elise Stefanik whether a call “for the genocide of Jews violate[s] Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment,” President Gay answered, “It can be, depending on the context.” While President Gay publicly expressed contrition for her poor choice of words, in a private meeting with Harvard’s governing board, she condemned Representative Stefanik as a “purveyor of hate” and “supporter of proudboys.” This hostility toward Rep. Stefanik for giving President Gay the platform necessary to embarrass herself and Harvard demonstrates that Harvard as an institution views the problem as being called out, not being hostile to Israeli and Jewish students. This shows Harvard’s deliberate indifference.

Stefanik praised the lawsuit. “This is the absolute correct decision by the Trump Administration to sue Harvard for failing to protect Jewish students. This is after years of Congressional oversight work that I was proud to lead in holding Harvard accountable,” she said in a statement.

The civil complaint also contains language referring to the possibility of criminal liability. It notes language certifying that “the award recipient is in compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, certifications, and assurances, including all terms and conditions of the award,” and concluding that “a false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement in this declaration and certification or otherwise in connection with this payment/drawdown request (or concealment or omission of a material fact as to either) may be the subject of criminal prosecution.”

The federal government had halted funding to Harvard last year, but Harvard sued to get it restored. The money is mostly flowing while that case is under appeal. This case addresses some of the same issues but with a cleaner start under the Administrative Procedure Act and other laws governing the flow of federal funds to universities.

READ MORE: Harvard Discriminated Against Jews, U.S. Government Says In New Lawsuit

If and when America and Israel win the war against Iran, as I hope and expect we will, part of the reason will be the success of the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, in communicating directly to the American people and to the troops.

Every war in the age of television has had its face. In Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 effort to repel Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, it was General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf. In the Iraq War, it was Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, functioning haplessly as American proconsul in Baghdad. In the present conflict, Operation Epic Fury, as the American part of it is called, Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of the U.S. Central Command, has made some compelling appearances. President Trump himself has spent plenty of time in front of the cameras. And the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dan “Raisin’” Caine, has appeared effectively alongside Hegseth. But if there’s a figure in the administration who is becoming the face of this war, it’s Hegseth—and so far, he’s doing pretty well.

If you had to predict who the Trump administration would want out there, Hegseth might not have leaped immediately to the top of a conventional wisdom-driven list. He was confirmed to the job on the narrowest possible margin—a 50-50 vote with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie and Republican senators Murkowski, ​​McConnell, and Collins against. Yet as Trump noted in announcing his nomination, Hegseth not only has degrees from Princeton and Harvard and experience serving in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he spent eight years as a Fox News television host. He’s professionally good at being on television—just like Trump himself, who starred in the television series The Apprentice.

Whether you catch Hegseth on an old-fashioned television or in a livestream pop-out window on the X app on a smartphone, the message is clear and consistent. Rather than get drawn into Vietnam-War style 5 p.m. follies of daily briefings, Hegseth and Caine have come out somewhat sparingly. They’ve been careful about keeping the press questions limited; the point of the briefings isn’t to make journalists famous, it’s to let Hegseth communicate to the country. Choose your preferred modifier—relentless, robotic—Hegseth stays on message, with short sentences, simple language, hammering the ideas home to the audience like another bombing sortie against enemy targets.

On March 19, Hegseth broke the fourth wall and straightforwardly acknowledged that the press were there primarily as props.

“I stand here today speaking to you, the American people, not through filters, not through reporters, not through cable news spin,” Hegseth said. “Yes, there are reporters in front of me, but they are not our audience today. It’s you, the good, decent, patriotic American people; you, the hardworking, tax paying, God-fearing American patriots.”

What has Hegseth been saying?

One somewhat refreshing thing is that he talks, unburdened by political correctness, about killing the enemy. “Our warriors have fought with lethality,” he said March 13. He is unsparing in describing the targets. “Rats,” he called Iran’s leadership. “Barbaric savages.” “Terrorist cowards.”

He’s been nearly as derisive toward the Pentagon press. “A dishonest and anti-Trump press will stop at nothing, we know this at this point, to downplay progress, amplify every cost and call into question every step. Sadly, TDS is in their DNA. They want President Trump to fail, but you, the American people, know better,” he said March 19. He called a CNN report “fundamentally unserious,” and said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

He’s been consistent about the U.S. war aims. “One: destroy their missile stockpiles, their missile launchers and their defense industrial base; missiles and their ability to make them. Two: destroy their Navy. And three: permanently deny Iran nuclear weapons forever.”

He’s been similarly consistent in touching on religion. On March 10 he said, “I’ll close with Scripture, drawing strength from Psalm 144. Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle. He is my loving God and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield in whom I take refuge. May the Lord grant unyielding strength and refuge to our warriors, unbreakable protection to them and our homeland, and total victory over those who seek to harm them. And amen. God bless our troops and this mission.” On March 19 he said, “May almighty God continue to bless our troops in this fight. And again to the American people, please pray for them every day on bended knee with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ.”

And he’s been telling Americans that we are winning. “We’re winning decisively and on our terms,” he said March 19. “We’re winning decisively with brutal efficiency,” he said March 10.

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan gave him an early review as “something between an excitable morning TV anchor and the rooster who thought he brought the dawn.”

In the end the outcome of the war will be up to the brave people of Iran, to seize a better future for their country. It will be up to the U.S. and Israeli militaries and intelligence operations people and to the president and prime minister. But if Hegseth can help buy them all more time by projecting confidence and fighting the “quagmire” narrative from the press, it will help maximize the chance of success. The risk for Hegseth is if it doesn’t work out he gets blamed. Trump could cut him loose the way he did with Kristi Noem. But there’s upside, too. Hegseth, 45, was on the couch in the Oval Office this afternoon right alongside Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio, who are thought of as presidential material. If this war ends in an American victory it may be the first of more wins ahead for Pete Hegseth.

READ MORE: Pete Hegseth Is Having a Good War

More than half of the best 100 public schools in New York City as measured by performance on state math and English tests are charter schools, many of them located in poor neighborhoods and serving students that the city describes as economically disadvantaged.

City and state websites offer report cards on individual schools but make it hard to sort schools by test scores or compile a list, perhaps because the results are embarrassing to the government-run schools. So no one—until now—has reported that charters make up 59 of 100 top math schools and 53 of the 100 top schools for English language arts in New York City, according to 2025 state tests. Many of those schools are in the Bronx or Harlem or in parts of Brooklyn that are not Park Slope.

The results undercut the narrative being pushed by the New York Times, which published a news article this week originally headlined "As Income Gap Grows, So Do Fears Over Access to a Quality Education." The online subheadline states, "Leaders and parents worry that a widening economic divide amid the current affordability crisis could amplify the role that money plays in access to a robust education in New York." The article says, "some education leaders and parents worry that a widening income divide amid the current affordability crisis could amplify the role that money plays in access to a quality education in New York, one of the nation’s most economically unequal cities."

I emailed the author of the Times article, Troy Closson, “Don’t you think it’s worth mentioning that most of the city’s best schools by English and math state test scores are charter schools serving poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Doesn’t that undermine the whole premise of your story?” He did not respond by deadline.

The Times report does mention that “In recent years, some middle-class parents have begun to consider charter schools, which are publicly funded, enroll 150,000 students and traditionally enroll poorer families,” but that’s low down in the article, after all the talk about “worry” and a quote from someone about “the growing gulf between not even just the haves and have-nots, but the ultra, ultra wealthy, and everyone else” and about how “At a certain point, it’s like education is a luxury good.”

The Times also chose just one academic—Stanford’s Sean Reardon—to quote in its story, without noting that Reardon’s work about income inequality and education is highly contested, including by one of his Stanford colleagues, Eric Hanushek. Reardon has described “widening income disparity in academic achievement,” or “No Rich Child Left Behind,” as a headline over a 2013 New York Times article he wrote put it.

It’s as if the Times’s progressive editors can’t bear to acknowledge that many charter school students are getting excellent educations. Such an acknowledgement might undermine the campaign to stoke anxiety about the “income gap” and therefore to justify higher taxes on the rich, voting for Zohran Mamdani—the complete left-wing agenda. Rather than reporting on the “worry,” why not provide readers with the factual information needed to determine whether the worry is justified or unwarranted? If the Times won’t do it, we will.

Unfortunately, the anecdotal lead featuring a worried individual is becoming a grim pattern in Times education coverage. Last week, it was the University of Pennsylvania law student who “has worried ever since he learned that Trump administration investigators had demanded that his school turn over the names of many Jewish people on campus.” This week, it is a parent who “struggled to find the right school for her bright son” and the subheadline about “Leaders and parents worry.” So much worry.

A lot of the incentives with online journalism are to figure out what your readers might be induced to worry about and then write a headline that will get them to click. My own worry is that those incentives are at odds with an accurate portrayal of reality, that is to say, the truth.

That’s not to be dismissive of upper-middle-class envy of the rich or of the difficulties parents sometimes have finding the right schools for their children. It is to say, though, that of all the things to possibly worry about in New York City in 2026, income-gap-related fears over access to quality education are not high on any rationally composed list.

There are many possible ways to measure public school performance—parent satisfaction surveys, employer satisfaction surveys, surveying the happiness of the teachers who work there (that one is a particular favorite of teachers’ unions), eventual college enrollment and graduation rates, whether students eventually wind up in prison, on welfare, or in good-paying jobs. But asking whether the schools are doing the job of teaching students to read and do math—as measured by standardized tests—is one method with enough political support that it has been enacted into federal and state law.

The good news in New York City is that thanks to a 1998 charter school law that then-governor George Pataki, a Republican, championed—and to vigorous efforts in the years since by charter school parents, network leaders, board members, charter teachers and staff, and others—charter schools where 80 percent or 90 percent of students are classified by the city as economically disadvantaged are getting more than 90 percent of their students to pass state math and reading tests. There’s always room for further improvement, and not all charter schools are high achievers. Yet it is an achievement worth recognizing and appreciating rather than ignoring or denying.

READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Charter Schools Dominate New York City’s Top 100 Public Schools by Math and English Test Scores

Editor’s Note, March 24, 2026 2:52 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect that remarks initially attributed to Harvard College’s dean of admissions and financial aid William Fitzsimmons were incorrect.

Harvard is following Brown University’s lead in admissions outreach targeting Jewish day schools, and results so far this year have been encouraging.

The news emerged at a Harvard Chabad shabbat dinner at Harvard Business School on February 20 where a former Brown chancellor was the honored guest speaker. Harvard College’s dean of admissions and financial aid, William Fitzsimmons, was in attendance. Fitzsimmons also joined Harvard president Alan Garber and Harvard Chabad in December in publicly lighting the Harvard Chabad chanukah menorah in Harvard Yard.

The news comes as the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, the university’s official Jewish alumni group, released a 64-page report, A Narrowing Gate: Jewish Enrollment at Harvard and Its Peers, 1967-2025.

“Harvard’s Jewish undergraduate enrollment stands at 7 percent today, the lowest level recorded since before World War II and the lowest of any Ivy League institution with reliable data. That is roughly half what it was a decade ago, and less than a third of the 25 percent share Jewish students held for much of the latter twentieth century,” the report says. “Among well-documented peer institutions, no school has seen a steeper recent-decade decline.”

The report calls on Harvard to count Jewish applicants, admits, and enrollment, to “commission an independent, third-party investigation” and correct any disparities.

“Our Jewish community share at Harvard is at lows we haven’t seen in 100 years. Other institutions subject to similar pressures have not seen such severe drops,” the president of the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance and an author of the report, Adrian Ashkenazy, told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview. “Why is Brown succeeding where Harvard failed?”

The level of Jewish enrollment has been an issue of long-running concern for the Harvard community. I wrote about it in December 2022 when I was working at Education Next, a Harvard-based education policy journal. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) questioned the then-Harvard president, Claudine Gay, about it in a December 2023 congressional hearing: “According to the Hillel college guide, the Crimson freshman survey, and even Harvard’s own Education Next journal, the population of Jewish undergrads at Harvard has plummeted from roughly 25 percent in the 1980s to between five and 10 percent. Now, why is that?”

Gay, who resigned in January 2024 under pressure over a plagiarism scandal and a botched response to anti-Semitism on campus, replied, “that is not data that we collect as part of the admissions process. So I can’t speak to those numbers or to the trajectory.”

Interest in the issue extends far beyond Harvard or the Jewish community.

President Donald Trump had a Jewish Harvard student, Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, speak at the 2024 Republican National Convention. Kestenbaum sued Harvard alleging discrimination and won an early ruling from a federal judge that “Harvard failed its Jewish students.” As president, Trump froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to Harvard and also tried to block foreigners from entering the U.S. to attend the school. The funding fight is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Harvard College admissions were also the subject of a decade-long, multimillion-dollar legal battle that culminated in the 2023 Supreme Court opinion Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, in which the court held that the racial preferences Harvard had been using in its admissions violated the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Fitzsimmons testified in that trial. Harvard defended its practice up to and even after the Supreme Court called them unconstitutionally discriminatory.

Brown’s July 2025 settlement agreement with the federal government included, among “significant, proactive, effective steps to combat antisemitism and ensure a campus environment free from harassment and discrimination,” “outreach to Jewish Day School students to provide information about applying to Brown.” Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, spoke March 17 at the American Enterprise Institute about using admissions as a way to increase diversity of perspectives on campus. “We’re doing recruiting in religious day schools,” Paxson said.

Harvard may wish its fight with the government over anti-Semitism to be in the rearview mirror, but, unlike Brown, it has no settlement agreement. Instead it faces yet more litigation and public scrutiny. Stefanik has a book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, coming April 14. She posted to social media about the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance report: “The antisemitism does not just impact students on campus at Harvard. It shapes admissions.”

The House Education and Workforce Committee, whose hearings led to the resignations of Gay and of Presidents Liz Magill of Penn, Michael Schill of Northwestern, and Baroness Minouche Shafik of Columbia, is pressing ahead on the issue. The committee on March 17 released a majority staff report, “How Campuses Became Hotbeds: The Rise of Radical Antisemitism on College Campuses.” It highlights how some of Harvard’s problematic staff and faculty—including the executive director of Harvard’s Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Jehane Sedky—remain in place at the university. Sedky did not respond by deadline to a request for comment on the report. According to the House report, she responded to the report of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias by claiming that the report “exhibits all six elements of anti-Palestinian racism,” and citing the use of the word “terrorism” as a symptom of such racism.

“Let the release of this report serve as an important reminder: if university leaders forget their legal responsibility to address discrimination of any form on campus, my colleagues and I will remind them,” the chairman of the committee, Rep. Tim Walberg, Republican of Michigan, said.

Since Fitzsimmons himself is not hostile and was in place both at Harvard’s Jewish peak and at its recent low ebb, it’s worth considering what or who else may be driving the decision making. There’s a pincer of anti-Israel students and faculty that are involved. Harvard’s anti-Israel student activists have infiltrated the admissions office and at one point even were posting pictures of themselves in keffiyehs from the main Harvard College admissions Instagram account. And there is a faculty standing committee on Admissions and Financial Aid in Harvard College. Its members include Ali Asani, who signed a statement demanding “an end to US support for Israel’s apartheid regime,” condemning Israel’s “state aggression,” and expressing “support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.” Another member is Maya Jasanoff, who said she brought oranges and bananas to the anti-Israel protesters who erected an encampment in Harvard Yard in violation of university policies. Asani and Jasanoff are both on leave this academic year. President Trump recently posted a link to a Washington Free Beacon article about Jasanoff, who was expected to take over as the next chair of Harvard’s history department, proclaiming, “Harvard should not hire this misfit!”

In addition to the influence of individuals, there are market forces at play. College rankings and internal discussions related to admissions put a premium on “yield,” that is, the percent of students admitted to a college who choose to attend. Harvard, unlike many of its competitors, doesn’t have a binding early decision option that allows an admissions office to goose its yield by offering admission only to candidates who are committed in advance to accept. To compensate, Harvard has resorted, essentially, to paying students to attend—offering not only free tuition but extra cash in the form of $2,000 “startup grants,” $2,000 “launch grants” and “coat money” for students whose families are poor enough to qualify for “need-based” financial aid. A 2023 article in the university-published Harvard Gazette featured one such student, Innocent Munai, who called such grants “a lifeline.”

“Coming from Tanzania, East Africa, and being on full financial aid here, every opportunity like this represents more than just financial support; it embodies hope, validation, and a reminder that my dreams and aspirations are recognized, valued, and supported, and it ignites an even stronger desire to excel and give back to the community,” Munai said in the Gazettearticle.

Munai was recently featured in the Crimson as pleading not guilty to two counts of indecent exposure after prosecutors said he repeatedly walked through dorm halls “undressed from the waist down.” Munai’s lawyer did not respond by a deadline to a request for comment.

Some prospective Jewish applicants to Harvard, seeing what a circus it is, may decide not to even apply. Or, if they do apply and get in, they may choose to go somewhere else instead. It’s that second risk that might drive even a nondiscriminatory admissions officer to go with a more sure-bet-to-attend applicant instead of a Jewish student who might decide that there’s less hostility at Vanderbilt, the University of Florida, Yeshiva University, Brown, Yale, the University of Chicago, West Point or Annapolis, or Washington University in St. Louis. The University of Florida and the University of Texas at Austin are both offering 4-year, full-tuition scholarships via the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars Program for “exceptional undergraduates interested in the great ideas of Jewish and Western civilization and the responsibilities of American civic leadership.”

As I observed in 2018 about Stephen Schwarzman, a Jewish student rejected when he applied to Harvard College in the pre-Fitzsimmons era who later became a significant donor to Yale and MIT, the genuinely scarce resources aren’t the slots at Harvard College but the future Stephen Schwarzmans. For all of the constructive interventions by Stefanik, Trump, and others, and for all the ways that endowments and federal financing make it less than a purely free market, the most powerful forces for quality and improvement in higher education are competition and choice. That’s part of why Harvard’s Fitzsimmons and Ashkenazy are both suddenly talking about Brown.

READ MORE: Harvard to Recruit at Jewish Day Schools After Study Finds Steep Decline in Jewish Enrollment

A mostly obscure and widely derided sector of the financial industry—bond rating agencies—may be one of the few remaining things with the power to save some of America’s largest cities from destruction by the policies of the far-left mayors who run them.

Moody’s Ratings this week revised its outlook on New York City to “negative” from “stable.”

“The negative outlook reflects the emergence of sizable and persistent projected budget gaps that signal underlying structural imbalance and reduced financial flexibility,” the agency said, noting that if New York City is struggling to balance its budget even in a strong economy, things could worsen “if economic growth slows sharply or an outright downturn materializes.”

“That the city projects large and persistent imbalances under still-favorable economic and revenue conditions highlights the extent of its underlying structural budget challenges,” Moody’s said.

Analysts at S&P Global, another ratings agency, also warned that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plans “make it difficult to sustain budgetary balance beyond fiscal years 2026 and 2027,” a Bloomberg report said.

The ratings agencies review the creditworthiness of borrowers. Lower ratings may deter prospective bond investors, or mean that the borrowing costs of the cities increase as bond-buyers demand higher interest rates, or yields, in exchange for increased risk of default. Just like a consumer with a lower credit rating might have to pay higher interest rates on an auto loan or a mortgage, governments also, at least theoretically, have increased costs if they are seen as riskier borrowers.

The ratings agencies are notoriously bad at judging risks and were heavily criticized after the 2008 financial crisis for slapping solid AAA ratings on debt that wound up in default. The agencies are paid by the bond issuers, so their incentives are not to be particularly harsh. They were late to discover the problems in Orange County, California, whose 1994 failure was, when it happened, described as the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Yet for all those limitations, the agencies—and the bond markets they communicate with—at least provide some constraints, a reality check on the impulse of the mayors to spend recklessly without sufficient tax revenue to pay for it.

The New York City comptroller, Mark Levine, called Moody’s decision “a sobering wake-up call.”

“The fact that this is happening at a time of relative health in our local economy is all the more remarkable. The underlying challenge is clear: New York City is currently spending more than it is bringing in,” Levine said.

Mamdani, meanwhile, attacked the rating agency. “I think that the decision to revise the outlook, frankly, is premature,” he said at a March 12 press conference. Moody’s stopped short of downgrading the existing, outstanding debt; what changed was the outlook for future issuances.

A similar dynamic is playing out in Chicago, which also has a far-left mayor, Brandon Johnson, and a Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker, who is a possible 2028 presidential candidate. Fitch Ratings and Kroll Bond Rating Agency both downgraded the City of Chicago’s general obligation bonds in late February.

Fitch said the downgrade “reflects consecutive operating deficits since 2023, the still high dependence on non-structural solutions and assumptions underpinning the adopted 2026 budget, persistent out-year gaps, and ongoing disagreements between the administration and the city council.” It warned that among the factors that could lead to future negative rating actions are “Management ineffectiveness, including late budget adoption, non-credible revenue forecasting, inaction if mid-year gaps materialize or irresolute or excessively contentious fiscal decision-making.”

Kroll said its rating downgrade reflects the City of Chicago’s “deteriorating fund balance, narrowing liquidity, and exceptionally high and rising fixed cost burden.”

Somewhat ironically, the higher tax rates soar in Chicago and New York City, the greater the relative tax advantages are of tax-free—or, in the case of New York City, triple tax free—municipal bond interest. A cynic might suggest that is Mamdani’s plan—to drive New York taxes so high that the only sensible place for anyone left in the city to put any remaining capital is in municipal debt. Instead, people and businesses are likely to head for the “exit” in the exit, voice, and loyalty framework, moving to lower-tax and freer jurisdictions. Census data and individual examples—the Chicago Bears moving to Indiana, Starbucks’s Howard Schultz leaving Washington for Florida, six billionaires and half a trillion in capital leaving California late last year—support that pattern.

Mamdani seems vaguely aware that New York once had a municipal debt crisis for which it desperately sought a federal rescue. On February 6, he posted to social media a photo of himself, President Trump, and the 1975 “Ford to City: Drop Dead“ Daily News tabloid front page. It was a ploy aimed at eliciting the president’s financial backing for a development project in Queens. But it was also a reminder of what can happen when a city is mismanaged.

READ MORE: Bond Market May Be a Last Guardrail on Far-Left Mayors as Moody’s Goes ‘Negative’ on Mamdani’s New York

The Democratic Party is heading into the 2026 midterm elections and 2028 presidential elections pushing legislation that would increase federal income tax rates to levels not seen since before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani were even born.

The politicians are billing some of the legislation as a tax “cut” on the basis of promises to redistribute the revenue from their tax increases. Some of the press is even falling for that spin.

But drill down, and it’s clear that what Democrats are proposing is an immense tax increase that would bring top marginal rates to levels not seen since the 1970s for capital gains or the mid-1980s for income.

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland rolled out his legislation at a press conference on March 12, 2026. It is essentially a national version of a millionaires tax that Mamdani has been pushing for New York State.

Anyone tempted to portray a millionaire tax as a fringe policy proposal pushed by class warriors such as Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts or socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont would get a sobering reality check from Van Hollen’s rollout. It featured Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, along with the president of the AFL-CIO, Elizabeth Shuler, and the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten. “I do see our plan as a fundamental pillar of any Democratic plan,” Van Hollen said.

Van Hollen said he’d hit the 615,000 Americans who earn more than $1 million a year with a “surtax.” The surtax would start at 5 percent of adjusted gross income for those earning over $1 million and climb to 10 percent for joint filers with income above $3 million or individual filers with income above $2 million, and 12 percent for joint filers with income above $7.5 million or individual filers with income above $5 million. The top individual income tax rate now is 37 percent, and Democrats raise that back to the Clinton level of 39.6 percent whenever they get any significant leverage in Washington. A 12 percent surcharge would take the marginal rate to 49 percent immediately, or 51.6 percent with a 39.6 percent base rate. Top-earning New York City residents pay a combined 14.776 city and state marginal income tax rate; the Van Hollen bill would leave them with a mere $3.62 out of the next $10 they earn, with government of one sort or another claiming $6.38. And that’s before the additional millionaires tax that Mamdani is pushing at the state level.

“This is the AFT’s no. 1 priority,” said Weingarten, whose union is a major force in Democratic politics. It’s a remarkable statement from the leader of a union that helped to defeat the Soviet Union and has also prioritized education policy.

“What I really like is the surtax doesn’t just apply to wages. It applies to all the capital gains,” Beyer said. He cited French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Harvard University Press book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and also a Yale Budget Lab estimate that said the millionaire tax would raise “one and a half trillion bucks” over the next decade.

Van Hollen said the Senate legislation had 19 cosponsors. Those named included Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Cory Booker and Andy Kim of New Jersey, Chris Coons of Delaware, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Sanders, and Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats.

Also appearing at the press conference was a doctoral student in psychology at Georgetown, Katherine Hayes, a member of the American Federation of Teachers, who identified herself as a “graduate student worker.” “I want a tax code that treats working people fairly and that isn’t shy about taxing the wealthy,” she said. “A few extra thousand dollars might not mean much if you’re a multi-millionaire or a billionaire.”

Van Hollen stressed that his bill isn’t the only Democrat tax-increase legislation but will proceed in parallel with other proposals.

Those include:

— Legislation by Senator Booker that would “raise the top tax brackets from 35 and 37 percent to 41 and 43 percent,” which the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates “would raise about $1.4 trillion over the 10 year budget window.” Booker, who ran for president in 2020 and is a possible 2028 presidential candidate, would also increase the standard deduction.

— Legislation that would make the Social Security payroll tax of 12.4 percent apply to income above $250,000 a year. That’s backed by 36 House Democrats, including AOC, Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, Rashida Tlaib, Mark Pocan, and Ro Khanna. There’s a lot of overlap between the worst anti-Israel members of Congress and the most aggressive tax-increasers; what might be called the Zohran Mamdani approach. In the Senate that approach also has backing from 10 Democrats and Sanders, an independent socialist.

— A new 5 percent annual wealth tax on billionaires, backed by Sanders and Khanna, a Democrat from California best known for trafficking in Epstein-related conspiracy theories and confusing an Hermès factory with CIA headquarters. It would raise $4.4 trillion over a decade, according to a letter from Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley.

Americans for Tax Reform, which advocates for lower taxes, denounced the Van Hollen plan. The group focused its criticism on the effect on the capital gains tax. “Democrats just cannot stop raising taxes. Their latest proposal would increase the top capital gains tax rate to 35.8% from the current 23.8%. This would impose the highest capital gains tax since 1978, the stagnant Jimmy Carter era,” ATR’s John Kartch and Rachel Loren wrote. “A 35.8% capital gains tax rate would saddle the USA with a much higher burden than our competitors … the combined federal-state capital gains tax rate will exceed 40% in many states. Van Hollen’s constituents in Maryland would face a 47.6% combined top capital gains tax rate. Californians would face a 49.1% combined top capital gains tax rate.”

The Democrats are cynically marketing these tax increases as tax “cuts” on the grounds that they are promising to use the money to provide benefits to lower-income Americans. Yet there is a long history—Bill Clinton in 1992, for one—of politicians campaigning while promising middle class tax cuts, then arriving in office and forgoing the promised cuts while keeping the tax-increase part of the plan. At the state level the “millionaire tax” politics have generated at least some wins for the unions, in part because non-millionaire voters far outnumber millionaires. For all the complaining about how the rich have too much power, in a one-person, one-vote system, it’s tempting for the many non-millionaires to gang up on the small millionaire minority and use the power of the state to take their money.

READ MORE: Democrats Head Into Elections Pushing $1.5 Trillion Tax Increase

“Trump’s Big Achievement: Making the New York Times Care About Antisemitism“ was the headline over a piece I wrote more than nine years ago for the Algemeiner.

The point—that New York Times concern about anti-Semitism is highly conditional on whether it can be blamed on the Trump administration—holds up pretty well, alas.

The latest example of this phenomenon comes with the Times’s unusual solicitousness to concern about potential persecution from a Jew at the University of Pennsylvania. The Times begins its article from the point of view of a student, Jacob Naimark. Naimark’s big fear? Not the keffiyeh-clad anti-Israel students marauding around the campus, but a federal investigation into anti-Semitism.

“Jacob Naimark, a law student at the University of Pennsylvania, has worried ever since he learned that Trump administration investigators had demanded that his school turn over the names of many Jewish people on campus,” the Times news article begins.

The Times article goes on, “‘It was disturbing,’ said Mr. Naimark, a co-president of the school’s Jewish Law Students Association, adding, ‘We know very well the history of governments assembling lists of Jews does not end well.’”

Naimark, who federal campaign finance records not mentioned by the Times indicate donated to the Biden campaign against Trump for president in October 2020, “is interested in studying the relationship between climate change and migration and hopes to use the law to protect immigrants impacted by environmental hazards,” according to a profile of him on the Penn website.

Naimark told the Free Beacon, "One of my firmest commitments is to combating antisemitism on both sides of the political spectrum." But the Times left that part of Naimark’s perspective out.

The Times could just have easily begun its article with some government antidiscrimination lawyer, worried ever since he learned that Penn was refusing to produce documents needed for the investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We know very well the history of institutions invoking secrecy to avoid government civil rights oversight, and it doesn’t end well.

Yet in the inverted world of the New York Times, it’s the antidiscrimination investigation, not the anti-Semitism, that’s the threat to the Jews. The choice to begin the article with Naimark’s perspective makes the spin clear. It’s also not even accurate that “the history of governments assembling lists of Jews does not end well.” A Japanese government diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, assembled lists of Jews during World War II for the purpose of saving them from being killed by the Nazis. A Swedish government diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, also made lists of Jews to save.

Maybe Naimark is under the mistaken impression that Trump is a Nazi because he gets his news from the New York Times? The Times imposed a total news blackout on Trump awarding the Medal of Honor this month to Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, who put his own life at risk in January 1945 in a German POW camp. As the Army recounts it: “Edmonds was appointed the senior noncommissioned officer in charge of the American barracks. That evening, the Germans announced that only American prisoners who were also Jewish would fall out for roll call the following morning under threat of execution. Edmonds understood that segregating more than 200 Jewish prisoners of war from the larger group would likely result in their persecution and possible death, so he directed his senior leaders to have all 1,200 American prisoners present themselves for roll call. The following morning, the Nazi officer became incredulous after realizing that so many Americans were standing in formation. Edmonds said to him, ‘We are all Jews here,’ and reminded the officer about the rights afforded to all prisoners under the Geneva Convention. Enraged, the officer removed his pistol, pressed it hard against Edmonds’ forehead between his eyes and demanded that he order all American Jewish prisoners to step forward or he would be shot. Instead of conceding, Edmonds warned the officer that executing him would lead to prosecution for war crimes after the war. The officer lowered his weapon and returned to his office without further attempts to segregate the Jewish prisoners from the larger group.”

Fox News covered that medal. The Associated Press covered it. The New York Sun covered it. But the Times is too busy depicting the U.S. military as destroyers of a school in Iran and Trump as some sort of Nazi-like figure. Trump giving a medal to the “We are all Jews here” sergeant, and telling his son, Chris, who attended the ceremony, that “today your father gets the honor he so courageously earned” was news the Times did not find fit to print. Maybe A.G. Sulzberger can recover some of the newspaper’s honor by ordering a make-up editorial the way the Times did the last time it was embarrassed to miss covering the award of a Medal of Honor.

In addition to onesidedly highlighting the claims of Naimark, the Times article is flawed for omitting crucial context. There’s an extensive treatment of “Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.” Yet the Times doesn’t mention that, as the fourth report of Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism put it, “the AAUP consistently and categorically opposed academic boycotts. In August 2024, the AAUP changed its position, declaring ‘academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom; rather, they can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.’ Although it wasn’t mentioned by name, Israel and its universities were clearly the object of this new policy.” The AAUP today is functionally a group defending a boycott of Israel; the idea of them riding to the rescue of Jews at Penn against the Trump administration is laughable. There’s no reason the Times should treat them seriously.

Another character in the Times article is “Penn’s lead litigator, Seth P. Waxman, who served as U.S. solicitor general under President Bill Clinton.” The Times does not mention that Waxman’s law firm, WilmerHale, prepped both Penn and Harvard’s presidents for their disastrous, presidency-ending congressional testimony before Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx. Or that the same firm unsuccessfully tried to get Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum’s discrimination case against Harvard thrown out of federal court, only to be met with a ruling from Judge Richard Stearns that “Harvard failed its Jewish students.” Waxman signed a federal court filing in that case that twice misspelled the name of Louis D. Brandeis—an 1877 graduate of Harvard Law School—as “Brandies.” He also accused Harvard’s Jews of being unreasonable, writing in a court filing that Harvard’s Jewish students, who took off their yarmulkes and hid under desks as an anti-Israel mob rampaged disruptively through the campus, did not “describe an environment in which an objectively reasonable person would fear physical violence.” Waxman and WilmerHale also represented Harvard—and billed millions of dollars that weren’t covered by insurance, because Harvard failed to give the insurer notice—in the university’s ultimately losing effort to defend the constitutionality of its use of race as a factor in its college admissions.

That case, Students for Fair Admission, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, surfaces in the legal filings in the Penn case in a somewhat ironic way. A February 18, 2026, filing cites the case to support the idea that “government action that classifies individuals based on a suspect characteristic is subject to heightened scrutiny” and that “the existence of an assertedly benign motive does not relax constitutional scrutiny.” The comedy comes from the fact that the filing is from the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania; when the case was being litigated, the national ACLU was arguing to the court that “strict scrutiny must take fundamental differences into account” and that “not every decision influenced by race is equally objectionable.” When the opinion was handed down, the ACLU complained that it was “restricting universities’ ability to fully address systemic racial inequalities that persist in higher education.” Now, suddenly, the case is convenient to wield against the Trump administration as it seeks to combat anti-Semitism at Penn.

EDITOR'S NOTE March 12, 2026 3:54 p.m.: This article has been updated to include comment from Jacob Naimark.

READ MORE: New York Times Joins Resistance to Antidiscrimination Investigation at Penn

New York Times reporter Julia Moskin has what seems to be a pretty good story. The Times online headline definitely doesn’t undersell it: “Punching, Slamming, Screaming: A Chef’s Past Abuse Haunts Noma, the World’s Top-Rated Restaurant.” Nor does the subheadline: “Dozens of former employees say René Redzepi inflicted physical and psychological violence on the staff for years.”

Yet leave it to the New York Times to take an apparently solid story and undercut it by inserting a totally unnecessary left-wing political tilt. For context on Los Angeles, where the Copenhagen-based Redzepi, the subject of the Times article, is opening a $1,500-a-meal, 16-week pop-up, the Times says, “Some local chefs have posted that they find it offensive that Noma is swooping in and drawing deep-pocketed diners, when Los Angeles restaurants are facing existential threats from climate change, inflation and immigration enforcement.”

The two hyperlinks in the sentence are to two Times articles about challenges facing the L.A. restaurant industry. Neither one of them mentions “climate change.”

One of the articles names several factors: “the pandemic,” “the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020,” “the 2023 Hollywood strikes,” wildfires, and a curfew imposed by city officials to prevent rioting in protests against immigration enforcement.

The other article reports that “Covid shutdowns made diners more comfortable with food delivery and appreciative of the virtues of home cooking.” It also mentions “marchers protesting the immigration raids” and “the writers’ strike and the fires, and rising rents.”

If the Times were looking on a politically open-minded basis for factors threatening the Los Angeles restaurant industry, it might have mentioned what restaurant operators have described as the region’s “crime and homeless crisis.” It might have mentioned a series of increases to the minimum wage that took the statewide rate for fast-food restaurant workers to $20 an hour in 2024 and has moved the minimum wage up in the city of Los Angeles to $18.42 an hour in July 2026 from $16.04 an hour in 2022. It might have mentioned Governor Gavin Newsom’s failed leadership or the threat of a confiscatory wealth tax.

The Times could claim that it’s not offering its own analysis, just passing along what “some local chefs have posted.” But it doesn’t quote or link to any examples, and it doesn’t explain why harebrained social media posts should be passed along to Times readers, “some people are saying” or “I am hearing” style. After all, plenty of cities—Las Vegas, Miami, Tel Aviv, Dubai—have flourishing restaurant scenes with warm temperatures and no less exposure to climate change than Los Angeles or anywhere else on the planet. As crafted, the line about climate change and immigration enforcement sounds like a Democratic Party campaign attack ad against the Trump administration, not something that belongs in a news article about a chef’s labor practices.

I asked Moskin for an on-the-record response, or to point me to specific examples that “some local chefs have posted.” I did not hear back by deadline.

The Times article is noteworthy for two other reasons. First, it omits any kind of humility or self-examination when it comes to the Times’s own coverage of Redzepi over the years.

In 2011, writing in the New York Times Magazine, Mark Bittman described Redzepi as “a sweet guy running an oddly nonhierarchical kitchen,” praising dishes such as “deep-fried moss” and “Beets with onion ash.”

Also in 2011, Times bigfoot Roger Cohen noted Redzepi’s “Macedonian Muslim father.” Cohen described Redzepi as “a chef for a shrinking planet” and also mentioned the “deep-fried Finnish moss with boletus mushroom and a cream dip.” Said Cohen, “I found Redzepi in a bubbly mood.”

In 2018, Pete Wells, then the Times restaurant critic, assured Times readers, “There is no discernible hierarchy in the service staff, although Mr. Redzepi is obviously the boss.” Wells, too, described Redzepi as “the son of a Muslim father of Albanian descent.”

Now that there’s “Punching, Slamming, Screaming” and “past abuse” involved rather than an adulatory celebration of the world’s best chef, the Times no longer finds the Muslim angle fit to print.

Redzepi, who wrote publicly in 2015 about his own behavior—“a terrible boss,” a “bully,” “I’ve yelled and pushed people”—told the Free Beacon, “I am deeply sorry and I have worked to change. A decade ago, I began speaking openly about my behavior in the kitchen – the outbursts, the anger, and at times even physical aggression, where I shouted and pushed people, acting in ways that are unacceptable. I was not able to handle the pressure, small mistakes could feel enormous to me, and I reacted in ways that I regret deeply today.”

A spokesperson for Noma said “we’ve made meaningful changes to transform our culture and workplace over the last several years – including a fully paid internship program, improved hours and time off, expanded benefits, a dedicated HR team, leadership training, mentorship programs, and more. … We’re committed to making Noma a supportive and rewarding environment for everyone who works here.”

The Times article does acknowledge that “Restaurant kitchens have long been punishing workplaces … and many chefs have admitted to bullying workers.” Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential that “The life of the cook” was one “with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality.”

READ MORE: New York Times Blames ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Immigration Enforcement’ for L.A. Restaurant Closures