April 22: Koch Coup!

Trump on "same side" as Bibi; NSC defends Ceren; Rubio restructures State

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The Big Story

In yesterday’s Big Story, we covered the controversy surrounding Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the three senior Pentagon officials he fired last week for allegedly leaking classified information to the media. As we noted then, the fight over the fate of the officials—one of whom, Dan Caldwell, was known to be a vocal Iran dove—rapidly transformed into an information operation, which saw the neo-isolationist faction on the right and its social media validators publically join hands with leftists, Islamists, the pro-Iran lobby, and Qatari and Russian state media to argue that “neoconservatives” and “warmongers,” concentrated in Trump’s National Security Council (NSC), were helping to lead a “purge” of officials opposed to an alleged push for “war with Iran”—which would be fought on behalf of Israel, naturally.

We also noted that Tucker Carlson appeared to be a central node in this network, even if his precise role is impossible to know absent further reporting. He is friendly to both Qatar and Russia, having conducted softball interviews with the leaders of both countries; he has, through his elevation of Jeffrey Sachs as a MAGA hero, laundered Chinese Communist Party talking points into the right-wing ecosystem under the guise of opposition to Zionism and the American “deep state”; and he has played an important role in amplifying anti-Israeli and in some cases openly antisemitic influencers, including Darryl Cooper and Candace Owens. He is also directly connected to the principal players in the latest drama within the Trump administration.

Just as Carlson has promoted other figures connected to the Koch foreign policy network, like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, long a frequent guest, he effusively praised the accused leaker, Caldwell, in a February episode of his show. In a March X post, Carlson cited internal Department of Defense analysis about the likely consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites—which someone obviously leaked to him. That February interview was with Curt Mills of The American Conservative, who in turn appears to be the vector for supposed “Trumpworld” leaks to Ryan Grim and Drop Site News—a leftist anti-Trump outlet that is nonetheless aligned with the Carlsonian faction of the right on foreign policy.

So, given all the above, you’ll never guess where Caldwell went to offer his side of the story. From last night:

Not very subtle, is it?

In the interview, Caldwell denied having leaked “classified” information to “liberal media outlets against the wishes of [his] superiors”—a lawyerly formulation offered by Carlson that would not exclude leaking to Carlson—and again repeated that neither he nor the other two aides fired on Friday, Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, had been made aware of the specific charges against them.

In a Tuesday morning interview with Fox’s Brian Kilmeade, however, Hegseth took a very different tack: He reiterated that the fired men had been identified as part of an internal leak investigation and accused them of attempting to “sabotage the president’s agenda.” Asked by Kilmeade about the men’s denials and Hegseth’s publicly reported friendship with Caldwell, Hegseth explained the Pentagon’s Office of Special Investigations had surfaced “information … that created a responsibility to take action.” “It’s easy to say we asked everybody and everybody said they’re good,” the secretary went on to say. “But we took it seriously. It led to some unfortunate places—people I have known for quite some time—but it’s not my job to protect them. It’s my job to protect national security.”

But perhaps the most penetrating comment on the matter from Trumpworld came from an unlikely source:

While Laura Loomer is Jewish, generally kooky, and well-known for her fanatical hatred of Muslims, no one could accuse her of being a “neoconservative”—she was the person directly responsible for the firing earlier this month of David Feith, the son of the prominent neocon Douglas Feith, and two other NSC officials accused of leaking and other vague acts of disloyalty toward the president. At the time, this was seen as a sort of mirror image of the recent Pentagon firings—i.e., as evidence that Trump was purging his administration of pro-Israel hawks. (We’d note, too, that unlike Carlson and his allies, the supposedly all-powerful neocons were unable to muster any serious pressure campaign on behalf of Feith.) So it’s a safe bet that if Loomer is saying it, it’s not to push some foreign policy agenda—it’s because she really believes there’s a “KOCH COUP” against the president.

What would make her think that? Well, as we’ve been laying out at The Scroll and at Tablet for months now, most of the Trump administration’s, uh, problematic foreign-policy hires, both at the DOD and at Gabbard’s ODNI, have a Koch connection somewhere. That includes Caldwell, a former analyst at the Koch-funded think tank Defense Priorities. It includes the DOD’s current principal Middle East policy adviser Michael DiMino and South and Southeast Asia policy adviser Andrew Byers, who previously worked at Defense Priorities and the Charles Koch Foundation, respectively. It includes Gabbard’s first, abandoned pick for deputy director for mission integration, Daniel Davis, who worked at Defense Priorities; her second, successful pick for the same job, William Ruger, who worked at the Charles Koch Institute; and Gabbard herself, who sat on the advisory board of a Koch-funded think tank, the Center for the Study of Statesmanship, housed at the Catholic University of America.

The issue with these hires, as Lee Smith has written, is not that they “oppose war.” Trump, whatever his problems with the mullahs, does not have a deep desire to “nuke Iran until the sand glows,” to borrow a colorful phrase from Caldwell’s interview with Carlson, and the president has long allowed for a great deal of infighting among policy advisers who disagree on everything and hate each other’s guts.

Rather, the problem is that Charles Koch and his network are, and long have been, opposed to the president’s foreign-policy priorities. As Loomer notes, a Koch-funded group, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, is currently suing to block the implementation of Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, and during Trump’s first term, Byers and Ruger voiced similar criticisms of the president’s “trade war” with China. Koch is also a proponent of reviving Barack Obama’s Iran deal, which no doubt appealed to both his idealism and his wallet—a 2011 investigation by Bloomberg found that between 2003 and 2007, Koch Industries sold “millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran” using foreign subsidiaries to duck U.S. sanctions. In 2023, activists backed by Koch and his erstwhile liberal rival George Soros met at the family estate of John D. Rockefeller to strategize on a “secret lobbying campaign to revive the Iran nuclear deal,” The Washington Free Beacon reported at the time.

Now, the Koch faction in (or recently exiled from) government is attempting to undermine the president by using Carlson and other self-proclaimed MAGA influencers to make their pitch directly to Trump’s base. As we said yesterday, the real question is why Trump puts up with it.

—Park MacDougald

IN THE BACK PAGES: Gadi Taub on why the global right loves Hungary

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The Rest

→Trump spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, and the president described how the call went in our Post of the Day:

→The NSC, meanwhile, defended staffer Merav Ceren (see the end of yesterday’s Big Story) against the accusation, leveled in a Monday article at Drop Site News, that Ceren had “formerly worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defense.” Spokesman for the NSC Brian Hughes told The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo (emphasis ours):

Merav was never employed by the Israeli Defense Ministry, let alone was she an Israeli official. She did a policy fellowship studying resource management in the West Bank, which is overseen by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which required her to liaison [sic] with them for her research. She is a patriotic American committed to implementing President Trump’s agenda, and these lies are efforts to undermine the President’s agenda.

→On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced “sweeping changes” to reverse “bloat and bureaucracy at the State Department”—an internal reorganization that will result in the closing of 132 department offices, the consolidation of others, and attempted workforce reductions of up to 15%, according to a report in The Free Press. We’ll link the report below if you’d like to read it in full, but one thing that jumped out to us is that State is apparently planning to junk its “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) activities at the department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism. That’s a welcome change. Here’s Jacob Siegel, writing in Tablet last year, on the legacy of the CVE paradigm:

As a modern political trope, whole of society dates to the Obama administration’s attempt to pivot in the “war on terror” to what it called CVE—countering violent extremism. The idea was that by identifying at-risk individuals and then engaging them, American officials could “get left of the boom” and intervene before extremism led to violence.

[...]

But the true lasting legacy of the CVE model was that it justified mass surveillance of the internet and social media platforms as a means to detect and de-radicalize potential extremists. Inherent in the very concept of the “violent extremist,” was a weaponized vagueness. A decade after 9/11, as Americans wearied of the war on terror, it became passé and politically suspicious to talk about jihadism or Islamic terrorism. Instead, the Obama national security establishment insisted that extremist violence was not the result of particular ideologies and therefore more prevalent in certain cultures than in others, but rather its own free-floating ideological contagion. Given these criticisms Obama could have tried to end the war on terror, but he chose not to. Instead, Obama’s nascent party state turned counterterrorism into a whole-of-society progressive cause by redirecting its instruments—most notably mass surveillance—against American citizens and the domestic extremists supposedly lurking in their midst.

Read the rest of The Free Press’s report here:

Revealed: Trump Admin Launches the Biggest Shake-Up ‘In Decades’ at the State Department

→National Public Radio reported Monday—citing one “U.S. official”—that the White House has “begun the process of looking for a new leader at the Pentagon to replace Pete Hegseth.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, however, dismissed the report as fake news, and Axios reporter Marc Caputo, generally a level-headed observer of Trumpworld, noted on X on Monday that the report ran “contrary to my discussions” with two White House officials and a senior adviser and to his general understanding of Trump. Caputo added on Tuesday morning, “I can’t find one White House official, including some at the highest levels, who confirm the NPR report that the admin has started looking to replace Hegseth.”

→The United States appears to be close to a trade deal with India, judging by Vice President J.D. Vance’s remarks in a speech in Jaipur on Tuesday. “America and India have officially finalized the terms of reference for the trade negotiation,” Vance said—remarks that followed a Monday comment by India’s finance minister that New Delhi hopes to conclude the first part of a bilateral trade deal with the United States by autumn. In his speech, Vance praised Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and expressed hope that India would begin purchasing more oil and natural gas and defense equipment from the United States; the Financial Times reports that the United States is also pushing for India to grant U.S. online retail giants like Amazon access to the country’s $125 billion ecommerce market. India, which under Modi’s leadership has abandoned its old “non-aligned” posture in favor of closer relations with the United States and Israel, appears eager to conclude a deal; in what was likely a gesture of goodwill toward the visiting vice president, India on Monday imposed a 12% tariff on Chinese steel imports. In an X post on Monday, Modi wrote that the “India-U.S. Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership will be a defining partnership of the 21st Century.”

→Iran is building up its “space program” with Russian assistance to compensate for the weakening of its regional proxies, according to a weekend report in Bloomberg. The report focuses on the regime’s plans for an Iranian “Cape Canaveral” in the southern seaport of Chabahar, on the Persian Gulf, to “anchor the Islamic Republic’s space ambitions”—ambitions that currently include the development of “internet satellites” and long-range “space-launch” rockets. While the Chabahar project is behind schedule and underfunded, several Western experts quoted in the article noted that a “space program” is a convenient cover for the development of dual-use military technology. The satellites—two of which were launched into orbit by a Russian rocket last year—could improve the speed and accuracy of Iran’s targeting of its existing ballistic missiles, while Iran’s work on space-launch vehicles “likely shortens the timeline to produce an ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] due to the similarities in technology,” according to March testimony from Gen. Anthony Cotton of the U.S. Strategic Command.

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How Harvard Can Reform Itself

It can start by ending tenure

by Gil Troy

Harvard University and its president, Alan Garber, are caught between an angry Donald Trump and a harder place—namely, the university’s sense of itself as the nation’s leading research and teaching university. In the face of Trump’s cutoff of more than $2 billion in federal funding as a consequence of the university’s ostensible failure to obey U.S. Civil Rights law, Harvard has decided not to “surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” as Garber proclaimed on April 11. But Trump’s bullying is often hard to resist because he picks well-deserved, unpopular targets. Harvard’s embrace of the Academic Intifada, rife with Jew hatred and educational malpractice through professorial propagandizing, combined with a decades-long drift from merit-based hiring, is at the root of both the university’s problems and the low public standing of elite universities. As the United States' leading college president, while working to preserve his institution’s autonomy, Garber should kick-start creative educational reform from within—by ending tenure.

Garber’s predecessor, Claudine Gay, miserably failed to acknowledge how deep the rot ran on her campus. Her infamous congressional testimony misfired not only because she was tone-deaf about the antisemitism on campus. She and her two presidential colleagues looked foolish by suddenly defending free speech after years of assaults they helped lead on “microaggressors,” which created an Ivy-covered cancel culture. It is almost funny to hear Harvard administrators, faculty, and students suddenly defending “free speech” against Trump when the university is ranked dead last in freedom of speech by the respected campus organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Dead last is not a place that Harvard generally likes to be. Nor does it inspire any confidence in the university’s attachment to free speech and free inquiry. While Trump’s remedy may be destructive, it is hard for the university’s defenders and alumni like myself to mount much of a defense of an institution that has lost its way and showed itself to be totally incapable of meaningful reform.

University presidents will only succeed morally and practically in defying Trump’s unprecedented governmental intrusiveness if they put tone-deaf posing aside and facilitate changes that are desperately needed. Looking ahead, Garber should strike a committee to prepare for Harvard’s 400th year in 2036 by reimagining higher education boldly and broadly, recognizing the opportunities and pitfalls of living in a global technologically mediated society. A second committee, on a much tighter timetable, should evaluate the admissions process, the hiring process, first-year orientations, codes of student conduct, and the range of course offerings in each department, to protect all students from harassment while escaping the grip of DEI and Woke U—which are not protected “free speech,” but rather ideological impositions by small cadres of administrators and activists, distorting the university’s broader mission.

As these committees explore, debate, and dither—being filled with academics—Garber should outmaneuver Trump by striking hard and fast to eliminate tenure. Such a move, especially combined with breaking the administrative hold of DEI hiring mandates and committees, would prove the sincerity of Harvard’s desire to return to its former excellence. American students and taxpayers alike deserve that, no matter who is president.

Why should tenure be the target?

Tenure is the foundation stone of academic arrogance—and torpor. If, once upon a time, tenure guaranteed creativity, now it imposes groupthink. If tenure once facilitated a sense of scholarly responsibility in one’s writing and teaching, it now frees professors from accountability in the classroom or on campus. If tenure once encouraged independence, it now demands fealty to woke ideology for novitiates to be welcomed into the professoriat’s lifetime club. If tenure once helped academics serve society, now it helps society serve academics—by granting them the privilege of lifetime employment enjoyed by no other professional or craft cohort, at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. As Francis Fukuyama put it in 2009, tenure “has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country.”

The tenure system was developed a century ago during the Progressive Era to avoid the narrow-mindedness, heavy-handedness, and unoriginality that students increasingly endure today. Abolishing tenure will foster the robust academic freedom and quality educational experience that the institution was supposed to protect, and bring American academia in line with the way university appointments work in many other parts of the world.

President Garber and his colleagues can learn from three successful 20th-century revolutions that reshaped American higher education—including the revolution that turned Harvard into the United States' most prestigious university. It was Garber’s distinguished predecessor as Harvard’s president, from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant, who created the Harvard most fans and critics know today, by helping to transform his university and the Ivy League from a stodgy playground for America’s old-line aristocracy into a breeding ground for its meritocracy. Key to Conant’s reforms was his endorsement of both standardized testing as the basis of merit-based admissions and investment in financial aid to recruit academic superstars from all over the world. He, too, violated tradition by including lower-class “meatballs” in the student body, and then by welcoming GI Bill veterans after World War II (while keeping quotas on Jews intact until 1951).

Still, Conant understood that the key to reforming the institution was changing the faculty. He imposed a mandatory retirement age for most at 66. Whenever the faculty resisted his proposals, Conant sighed, “Behold the turtle. It makes progress only when it sticks its neck out.”

Clearly, leadership counts. Courageous presidents can trigger system-wide change by using their universities as laboratories. Conant, in large part, built on the new model of the American university inspired by Robert Maynard Hutchins, who at 29 began transforming what was then a relatively undistinguished school—the University of Chicago—into one of the country’s most productive and prestigious institutions of higher learning.

Universities were unpopular in those days, too. When he began his reform effort in the early 1930s, Hutchins acknowledged that the “popular misconceptions of the nature and purpose of universities originate in the fantastic misconduct of the universities.” Defining the “purpose of the university” as procuring “a moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution throughout the world,” Hutchins assailed the status quo. Seeking to welcome students into “the great conversation,” he replaced specialized training for undergraduates with general education based on the great books. After all, the educational system was not developed “to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens.”

Defying alumni, Hutchins also eliminated varsity football, deeming it a distraction from the university’s mission.

During the 22 years following his 1929 appointment, Hutchins used his University of Chicago platform as a bully pulpit. He delivered 64 public addresses in his first year alone, supplemented by radio appearances and popular Saturday Evening Post articles. Transforming the University of Chicago from a regional school into an international force, Hutchins inspired imitators throughout North America.

Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/harvard-reform-ending-tenure