The Trump administration announces that billions of dollars in subsidies to Harvard will be frozen after the university refuses to obey the law; the White House shrugs at the fate of a deported suspected MS-13 member; and tariff uncertainty continues to roil the markets. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/3WDjgHE Ep.2179 - - - Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings - - - DailyWire+: We’re leading the charge again and launching a full-scale push for justice. Go to https://PardonDerek.com right now and sign the petition. Now is the time to join the fight. Watch the hit movies, documentaries, and series reshaping our culture. Go to https://dailywire.com/subscribe today. Get your Ben Shapiro merch here: https://bit.ly/3TAu2cw - - - Today's Sponsors: Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine that searches the internet to deliver fast, unbiased, high-quality answers, with sources and in-line citations. Ask Perplexity anything here: https://pplx.ai/benshapiro PureTalk - Switch to PureTalk and start saving today! Visit https://PureTalk.com/SHAPIRO Policygenius - Head to https://policygenius.com/SHAPIRO to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. Grand Canyon University - Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University. Visit https://gcu.edu today. LifeLock - Join now and save up to 40% your first year. Call 1 (800) LifeLock and use promo code BEN or go to https://LifeLock.com/BEN for 40% off. Terms apply. - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3cXUn53 Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3QtuibJ Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3TTirqd Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPyBiB
Chapter 1: What is the Trump administration's action against Harvard University?
Movies, documentaries, series reshaping the culture in real time. Join right now, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe. Alrighty, so the big story over the course of the last couple of days that the United States government has now frozen. billions of dollars in funding to Harvard.
The reason for this is because Harvard refuses to go along with the federal government's demands that it abide by the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act dictates that universities and any business that actually receives federal funding must abide by anti-discrimination law.
Now, you cannot like some aspects of the Civil Rights Act, its attempts to intrude into the private sphere, for example. But the Civil Rights Act is, in fact, the Civil Rights Act. And the fact is that if a university had facilitated anti-Black racism to the extent that Harvard University has facilitated anti-Semitism, there is no question that removal of its federal funding would be on the table.
Chapter 2: Why is Harvard University accused of violating the Civil Rights Act?
Now, we can also be real about the politics of the situation, which is that federal funding should not be going to these universities anyway. So how much money does Harvard actually get from the federal government? I asked our sponsors over at Perplexity exactly how much money does Harvard University receive on an annualized basis from the federal government?
Chapter 3: How much federal funding does Harvard receive and why is it controversial?
They said Harvard University receives substantial funding from the federal government each year, primarily to support its research activities. In fiscal year 2024, Harvard received approximately $686 million from federal agency.
This amount constituted about 68% of the university's total sponsored research revenue and accounted for roughly 11% over its overall operating revenue, which is a lot of money. I mean, that's a lot of money that they are receiving. Most of it goes to various science programs,
outlets like Harvard Medical School or the School of Public Health, but it also does go to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The Department of Health and Human Services, the largest federal funding, they provide $520 million in fiscal year 2024. Now, again, this is a lever.
It's not as though all of this money is going into the pockets of the English professors at Harvard, but money is also fungible. So money that would have been spent on the medical facility is now being spent instead on the English faculty. And this is sort of the point the Trump administration is making.
There's no reason at all that your federal taxpayer dollars should be going to Harvard University, which has a massive endowment, billions and billions of dollars in its endowment, $53 billion at last count. There's no reason your taxpayer dollars should be going to fund Harvard in the first place. And maybe that's the overall fight that we actually should be having.
But that's a fight that has to be had in Congress as opposed to inside the executive branch. The executive branch is now making the claim that Harvard University should have its funding removed because it is in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
Harvard, for its part, says it is now going to resist the Trump administration's demands to change its governance structure over campus anti-Semitism concerns. And so the government then responded by announcing a $2.26 billion freeze of Harvard's multi-year grants and contracts. That's according to the Wall Street Journal.
However, President Alan Garber put out a statement complaining about the federal government and suggesting the federal government was wrong for involving itself in this way. How dare the federal government actually attach strings to the things it has always attached strings to? However, President Alan Garber said the university.
will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. The Trump administration said the school's response, quote, reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation's most prestigious universities and colleges, that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws. What exactly are the demands?
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Chapter 4: What are Harvard's responses and the Trump administration's demands?
As far as things like a comprehensive mask ban, the idea there is that you don't want people who have shown up to campus on student visas, participating in anti-American activity that would otherwise get them deported, and the university is facilitating all of that.
The government is also demanding necessary changes be made to address bias, improve viewpoint diversity and end ideological capture, fueling anti-Semitic harassment, according to the task force's letter.
Lawyers for the university said Harvard has made and will continue to make lasting and robust structural policy and programmatic changes to ensure the university is a welcoming and supportive learning environment. But the task force is making demands, quote, in contravention of the First Amendment and say that they are ignoring due process.
Now, again, this will all get played out in the courts, presumably, but the idea that Harvard University is somehow owed federal money is absurd. It's absurd on its face. There's no reason that the Trump administration should not be able to attach strings to money that it is sending out the door to a university with a $53 billion endowment. You know what's an easy way for Harvard to
continue its policy of independence from the federal government to be independent of the federal government. It turns out that's an excellent way. Don't get in bed with the government if you don't want to get screwed. It tends to be a pretty good way of approaching life.
The faculty put out a statement on Friday saying, quote, that the federal government's actions overtly seek to impose on Harvard University political views and policy preferences advanced by the Trump administration and commit the university to punishing disfavored speech. Well, no, actually, they're just saying that if you engage in antisemitism, then that is in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
It's funny to watch all these universities that for years were willing to expel students for saying that boys were not girls. that went after Harvard University. I was there when they went after Lawrence Summers, who at the time was the president of Harvard University.
They got angry at him because he made the mere suggestion that perhaps the lack of women in scientific institutions might be due to the fact that women are less interested in scientific pursuits overall as opposed to men, and also that the ends of the bell curve with regard to scientific performance on tests tend to be heavily male. He was ousted from his position for that.
So don't give me your free speech concerns. when you guys have been cracking down on free speech yourselves for a long time. At the very least, if you want to say that free speech doesn't apply, they're a private university, all right, then you have to be a private university. You can't have it both ways. You can't say free speech applies to us. We are a free speech institution.
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Chapter 5: What is the controversy surrounding the deportation of a suspected MS-13 member?
In court, they claimed in their filings that they'd made a mistake in deporting him. They admitted they'd made a mistake in deporting him, not because he shouldn't be deported, but because they didn't realize that the withholding order was still good and they had to go through the process. So he ended up being deported. He goes down to El Salvador.
He's currently being held in prison in El Salvador. And the Supreme Court found nine to nothing, not that he couldn't be deported. They found nine to nothing, that the process by which he was deported was flawed. And the Supreme Court suggested that a lower court clarify its directive with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.
And they said the U.S. government had to, quote, facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. So the question legally here rests on what it means to facilitate his return from El Salvador. Again, this is not about him ending up in the United States.
So yesterday in the Oval Office, Large-scale controversy broke out because Bukele was there. Bukele is the head of the prison that is holding this particular Salvadoran national. He is doing so under the terms, by the way, of an agreement between the United States and El Salvador. As Andrew McCarthy over at National Review points out, there's actually an agreement between the U.S.
government and El Salvador. It's for temporary detention for a period of one year. By the conclusion of that period, the United States is supposed to make a final decision on the detainees' long-term dispositions.
The idea here is that the United States still does have some level of control over the detainees that we are sending there because there's still supposed to be some sort of final disposition of those people. Do they get sent back to Venezuela? Do they get sent back to Mexico? Wherever it is they're supposed to be sent back to.
So yesterday, members of the media started asking about this particular national. They started asking about, is he being brought back? Why won't you send him back? Pam Bondi, the attorney general, she was in the oval office. Here's what she had to say.
First and foremost, he was illegally in our country. He had been illegally in our country. And in 2019, two courts, an immigration court and an appellate immigration court ruled that he was a member of MS-13 and he was illegally in our country.
Okay, so that's not quite what they ruled. They ruled that he was credibly accused of being a member of MS-13 and that the executive branch had the ability to deport him. So that part of what she's saying is true. Stephen Miller, as always, makes the most credible case for what the administration is doing. Stephen is obviously incredibly articulate and very hard on this issue. Here we go.
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Chapter 6: What did President Trump and Nayib Bukele say about the deported MS-13 suspect?
How can I return him to the United States? Like I smuggle him into the United States or whether I do, of course, I'm not going to do it. It's like, I mean, the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States.
OK, now, of course, that's a bit of a red herring. The reality is that the United States is not actually going to request that Bukele smuggle him back into the United States. The question is whether under the Supreme Court's ruling, we have to facilitate his return so that he can be adjudicated, not here legally, and then he gets sent out of the country.
And so facilitation might mean that we request it of Bukele. The idea we have no control over the people that were shipping down to this prison in El Salvador is obviously not particularly true. And nobody has taught what we're paying El Salvador right now, some $6 million for the current arrangement. So again, this is an interesting legal issue.
As far as a moral issue, the fact is that this is a loser for Democrats. It's a loser for the left. People do not want to see MS-13 members in the United States. And if the idea is that he didn't get his day in court, I mean, his case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. If the idea is that he must be returned so that he can have a one-day hearing and then deported again,
I don't think that's something most Americans are going to lose sleep over one way or another. President Trump, however, he says, because President Trump is always going to go to the limit. He says the homegrowns are next. Not clear what he means by this.
I'd like to go a step further. I mean, I say I said it to Pam. I don't know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws. But we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways that. hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking. That are absolute monsters.
I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve, okay?
OK, now, again, the president continues to say he's going to abide by the laws here. He's not going to just willy nilly pick American citizens up and throw them in a Salvadoran prison.
This, of course, has driven the left insane because whenever President Trump says something like this, even though he is caveating at 10 times that he's going to look at the legality, they immediately jump to he's going to start rounding people up off the street and sending them to Salvadoran prisons. And meanwhile, the administration continues to be extremely strong in pursuing means for the.
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Chapter 7: What recent developments have impacted the stock market amid tariff uncertainties?
So it is pretty clear at this point that President Trump wants to box in the Chinese, which, again, is a goal with which I wholeheartedly agree. We talked about this at length with former Representative Mike Gallagher, now of Palantir, talking about what we could do to box in the Chinese with regard to the markets.
Because obviously they're stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of IRP every single year. They're growing their military at exorbitant rates. They're flexing their muscles in the South China Sea. They're building connections all over the world, ranging from Africa to the Middle East to Latin America and all the rest.
So absolutely agree with President Trump's orientation toward the containment of China and the reversal of their economic growth. I totally agree with that. If you're going to do that, you have to have a few preconditions. There are certain things you have to do. Number one.
You have to have allies on board because if China just increases its trade with everybody else, then you get in macro scale basically what's happened with Russia during the Ukraine war, where there's an attempt to cut Russia off from the world economic system.
Chapter 8: What is the current state and future outlook of the US tariff policy on China?
Russia formed greater alliances economically with places like Russia and even places that are sort of oriented between the United States and Russia, like India. And they've been able to economically survive. So you really have to box everybody in. It's really, really important to box China in by having a bunch of allies around because that's step number one. You got to have allies.
Number two, you have to make sure that your own supply lines are durable, that China can't break your supply lines because China has certain things that they can do to really hurt the United States economy and put us on the wrong foot with regard to even things like military readiness.
So that means we need alternative supply lines with regard to everything from semiconductors to rare earth minerals. That would be step number two. And then step number three is you would actually have to gradually increase the tariffs so that you don't destroy American businesses in the process. Give them a chance to adjust.
There are a lot of people who I've been talking to, business people, who have after 30 years, 40 years of working with the Chinese, they were hit overnight with 145% tariff. Many of those businesses are likely to go under. because there is no actual replacement supply chain for those businesses at this point.
Prices are likely to skyrocket, demand is likely to then fall, and then you are likely to see an actual economic recession if that sort of thing was to continue. So the administration... went whole hog. They put tariffs on everybody, but most of all on China. Then they backed off the tariffs on the rest of the world to a certain extent, but not all the way.
10% tariffs are still quite high by historical standards. 10% tariffs across the board. The United States was charging an effective 2.7% tariff on the rest of the world. That would have included China before all of this. And now it's 10% on everybody who's not China and 145% on China. So it's a pretty radical escalation.
And so now it seems that they're trying to walk their way back into what would look like a good tariff policy. The question is whether they're going to be able to effectively do that. So on Friday night, President Trump created exemptions for semiconductors and iPhones.
This led to a late afternoon spike in the stock markets on Friday, and it led to mild gains on the Dow Jones Industrial Average yesterday. Now everybody is unsure of what comes next exactly.
According to Newsweek, President Trump's reciprocal tariffs as of a Friday night update spares smartphones, computers, and other electronic products that had been expected to face steep duties under sweeping new levies, particularly those targeting Chinese imports. Now, again, some of this looks like favoritism.
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