They want a nice white 1950s college | Will Bunch Newsletter

On New Year’s Day, I thought 2025 was going to be all about Donald Trump and the fight to save democracy. Those things have happened, but I’ve also learned that the circle of life is a lot stronger than politics. I told you about the downward arc, when I lost my dad and, just weeks later, my nonstop companion Daisy the red golden retriever. But what goes down must come up. Maisie the goldendoodle, the newest member of our family at just 11 weeks, has arrived. She is sweet and affectionate and right now she’s here helping me write the newsletter, her job for the foreseeable future. Keep reading and I promise pictures in future weeks.

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The Donald Trump regime’s war on higher education began practically the moment it took office, with immediate deep cuts to government-backed scientific research followed by targeted attacks on elite schools like Harvard and Columbia (over alleged antisemitism) as well as Penn (over a transgender swimmer).

If you had to predict one school on the Eastern Seaboard that would be spared this carnage, it would be George Mason University, not far from the nation’s capital in Northern Virginia.

In a post-1960s era in which campuses were pegged as islands of liberalism, GMU — a public university that severed its founding link with the University of Virginia in 1972 — developed a reputation by the 1980s for drifting right with the arrival of future Nobel economist James M. Buchanan. The conservative professor was a mentor to the billionaire libertarian Koch brothers, gave advice to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and pushed the idea that affordable college tuition produced revolutionaries.

So it wasn’t a shock in 2016 when George Mason decided to rebrand its law school by renaming it for just-deceased Supreme Court justice and conservative icon Antonin Scalia, which brought in $10 million from the Koch brothers — who it turned out had also been involved for decades in making sure GMU hired right-leaning econ professors — and another $70 million from other conservative billionaires.

What was surprising, then, was a report last week that Trump’s Education Department — which has been using its power over federal aid to universities like a bludgeon — has launched a crusade against George Mason by investigating alleged antisemitism there, as conservatives push for the firing of its president, Gregory Washington.

Arriving at GMU in the highly fraught summer of 2020, Washington joined most campus leaders of the era following the police murder of George Floyd by voicing support for diversity, and the free speech rights of protesters. A joint statement Washington co-authored just before taking office said, “Our nation is fighting two pandemics — the COVID-19 virus, and the pandemic of racism in America."

Did I mention that Washington is also George Mason’s first Black president?

Although the northern Virginia campus is now one of many under some form of attack from the Trump regime, the fate of GMU’s Washington — along with the recent ouster of the president of the public University of Virginia, Jim Ryan — has revealed a lot about how far MAGA will take this jeremiad. And what it’s really all about.

For one thing, using the power of the almighty federal dollar to essentially push major American universities to fire their presidents — coupled with micromanagement demands for a say in faculty hiring or the admissions process at several Ivy League universities, or a conservative academic center at Harvard — shows this is not your father’s fight over “political correctness.” No, this is an authoritarian takeover of higher education.

But the targeting of the two Virginia universities seems especially instructive. Both schools resonate with the MAGA right: Virginia because of its history with the deadly 2017 Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville, which was a coming-out party for far-right extremism, and George Mason because of its ties to conservative judges and think tanks.

But perhaps more importantly, both UVA and GMU have produced notable Trump administration members, donors and allies — folks inclined to monitor their alma maters or dream of sending their own kids there, and thus more concerned about what they see as the cardinal sin of 21st century academia: “wokeness.”

It didn’t take a lot from the two college presidents to convince conservative alums and fellow campus watchers that their remembered idylls of frat-party white male privilege were under assault from leftist ideology and its goals, such as admitting more first-generation students. UVA’s Ryan, who arrived just after the Unite the Right uproar, said he wanted the school to be “great and good” and encouraged volunteerism; GMU’s Washington wasn’t as strident as some peers in quashing 2024’s pro-Palestinian protests. We’re not talking about any Che Guevara types here.

Yet Washington was attacked by the City Journal as “a disastrous president” who supported “racially discriminatory DEI programs” that encouraged diversity, equity and inclusion at a school located in one of America’s most diverse suburbs.

What do these critics really want? It’s clearly gone beyond merely Republican fears that teaching about Rosa Parks or allowing drag shows will indoctrinate 19-year-olds to vote Democratic. They want universities with more slots for white legacy kids (despite evidence there’s too many already) where they can make offensive comments at four years of football games and keg parties that lead to a credential for a job market where locked-out Black and brown young adults can’t keep up. That’s easier when your school is run by a Dean Wormer from Animal House, not a Gregory Washington.

Hyperbole? Just listen to the self-anointed spokesman for collegiate white privilege, tech billionaire Marc Andreessen, who recently in a group chat explained his enthusiasm for Trump’s war on college, even after his own still-affordable 1990s education at the University of Illinois launched him toward Silicon Valley.

“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal,” Andreessen wrote. “When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”

This is utter baloney. Black and Latino students, rather than greatly benefiting from DEI, have struggled with the exact same problem holding back young white kids from rural Trump-voting counties: College is not affordable, triggered by years of GOP-led budget cuts. If Trump and his minions truly wanted to fix college for kids of their Rust Belt voters, they wouldn’t have just made it harder to get Pell Grants.

But that isn’t what the war on college is all about. It’s about making sure some kid from North Philly doesn’t take the CEO kid’s slot, that no one complains about Confederate garb at the frat’s Halloween party, and that the other 90% never get educated enough to vote the makers of this mess out of office. Just like Doc Brown, Team Trump has set the flux capacitor for 1955, accelerating forward to the past at 88 mph.

Question: With Trump’s polling starting to slump, do you think there is a sweet spot in the polls where we can expect some Republicans to start to defect, or are they forever locked in? What areas are likely to see public disagreement? Is it limited to Epstein, Ukraine/Russia, maybe Immigration/ICE? — Charles (@gimpyhand.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: That’s a great question, Charles, and I think you’ve hit on something here. Not all Trump voters are alike. For the hardcore MAGA extremists, their rage over the handling of the Epstein case feels similar, in a strange way, to the farther left’s 2024 anger at Joe Biden over his support for Israel in Gaza. That is, something that might make right-wingers stay at home, or look for a third-party candidate, in the next elections. The growing outrage over masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids is something else entirely, affecting the less-committed centrist voters who picked Trump over the Democrats on issues like inflation. But put both things together, and the risk to the MAGA movement in future elections looks real.

OK, I officially get it now. Even with thousands of subscribers, readers of this Philadelphia-based newsletter just don’t care about local Philadelphia politics. Last week’s question about Mayor Cherelle L. Parker drew the all-time record low of just one response. So let’s hear from Jana Moore, who bashed the first-term mayor over everything from handling of the 76ers new arena to Philly’s lack of a bus terminal. “Finally, she can’t give a speech without shouting,” Moore added. “WHY IS SHE SHOUTING AT ME?”

📮 This week’s question: The Trump regime’s botched handling of the never-going-away Jeffrey Epstein case has erupted into a full-blown scandal. What’s your take? Is the MAGA movement exposed as a legion of conspiracy kooks? Or is there actually a cover-up, linked to Trump’s friendship with the late disgraced financier and sex fiend? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Jeffrey Epstein” in the subject line.

The first presidency of Donald Trump triggered waves of protests, and at many of them reporters covering these marches were heartened by signs that read: “First they came for the journalists... After that we don’t know what happened.” A movement that branded itself as pro-democracy openly embraced press freedom as a most critical value, and no news outlets benefited more than the two largest and most visible: The New York Times and the Washington Post. Digital subscriptions soared, and the Post even winked at its new readers with a new mantra: “Democracy dies in darkness.”

Eight years later, the divorce has been bitter. Marchers at massive rallies like No Kings and commenters on social media popular with the left, like Bluesky, still love the idea that journalism is a check against autocracy. But they see Big Media — not just the legacy newspapers, but electronic giants like CNN and CBS News — as morally compromised defenders of the status quo, even in a time of rising fascism in Washington. Yet like any breakup, the details are messy and complicated.

The New York Times, in particular, continues to do essential reporting around issues like the large-scale corruption of the Trump family that contributes a lot to our understanding of the current crisis. But on too many days, to paraphrase Frank and Nancy Sinatra, it spoils it all by saying something stupid. It’s a hard-to-pin-down combination of the institution’s extreme caution, a badly dated view that “the paper of record” has to twist itself into knots to appease increasingly irrational conservatives (who don’t even read it), and, yes, a hidden ideology that defends a certain status quo of wealthy folks who see themselves as liberal on social issues, as long as they can keep their money and their kid’s privileged school.

The end game has been the Times’ unhinged war on New York’s leftist Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, which included both an attack editorial and then a strange story about which ethnic boxes Mamdani — a Muslim of South Asian heritage who came to America from Uganda — checked on his application to Columbia 15 years ago (he didn’t even get accepted). The story muddied the Times’ already conflicted ethical stances on using hacked data, tried awkwardly to protect its source who was a controversial online racist, and offered no real news — only “just asking questions” doubts about the rising young pol. The episode cemented the Times as a defender of power elites right at a moment for smashing sacred cows.

The Post story is a little different. Its downward spiral has been driven largely by its owner, the Amazon founder — and world’s second richest man — Jeff Bezos. He’d pledged in buying the Post for $250 million in 2013 to carry on the traditions of the paper’s legendary coverage of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, but then joined the Silicon Valley bromance with Trump. Since last fall, we’ve seen Bezos spike a would-be presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris, Amazon pay $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary no one wants to watch, and a Bezos pledge to reinvent the editorial pages as a bastion of “personal liberty and free markets.” On Monday, his new opinion editor Adam O’Neal — most recently top editor at the conservative Dispatch — introduced himself with a smarmy memo that felt numb to the crisis of democracy, promising the Post editorial pages will “communicate with optimism about this country.”

In the four months after Trump’s election, more than 300,000 people canceled their Post subscriptions. Although Big Media’s protection of the powerful is no surprise to its longtime critics, many resisters of MAGA autocracy feel adrift. But journalism has a long history of reinvention. Not so long ago, the staid Cold War conservatism of powerful newspapers was shattered by new outlets — the alternative press that thrived in the latter 20th century — and the fresh voices of a New Journalism. You can see the green shoots of a new guerrilla journalism rising yet again from the ashes if you know where to look.

Where’s Leo? I asked that question on July 15, 2010, and 15 years later we still don’t know the answer. The Leo in question is — or maybe was, who knows — Leo Burt, a one-time altar boy from the Philly suburb of Havertown who went to the University of Wisconsin to row, got radicalized like most of the campus by Vietnam, and went underground in August 1970 after a car bomb obliterated the Army Math center and killed a grad student pulling an all-nighter. I wrote: “How does a studious, bespectacled athlete from Philadelphia’s middle-class suburbs, who took part in Marine ROTC training, end up behind America’s worst car bombing until the World Trade Center attack in 1993?” Read the rest: “Where’s Leo?”

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