Trump and Man at Harvard
- Mike Dickey
- Jun 3, 2025
- 4 min read
"Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."
Thirty-nine degrees at sunup here. Great sleeping weather, with a forecast high in the mid-80s. If the work gods smile, or at least curl a little smirk, maybe I'll get to go play golf after work.
Of course, Peg's now working tens, four days a week, so the after work golf cart ride may be a thing of the past for us. We'll see how it goes.
When I awoke the second time, after my nightly terrors kept me awake from 2 to 4, the headline on my phone (back on the nightstand again--not a good thing) read, "What is the Number One Risk Factor for Stroke?"
You probably already knew this--it's high blood pressure. I padded down to my office to take my waking pressure, which is probably about as low as it's going to get today: 169 over 98.
Shit. I look healthy, but this has been a feature my entire life, once considered beneficial when I was pulling 8 Gs and looking over my shoulder. Now I go through every day as a ticking time bomb, afraid one day Peg will be stuck watching one side of me drag the other through public places, or that I'll end up like my friend Pierre when he had his stroke and never spoke another understandable word for the rest of his life.
So I reckon I'll break down and take the meds, tell the FAA, and acknowledge this is a thing instead of ignoring it at my peril. It's also going to necessitate some lifestyle changes: limit those after work toddies to the weekend, try to manage the crushing stress of my profession a little better.
On that latter note, I also read in the Atlantic this morning that one's gut biome directly impacts anxiety and stress. Who knew? Apparently, rats given lots of probiotics exhibited the same calm behavior as those on Xanax. And lawyers being so much like rats, not-so-distant cousins really, perhaps that'll work for me.
Speaking of lawyers and the law, I was struck this morning by the new, petty low in a very petty autocrat's war against that flagship research university of our otherwise knuckleheaded nation, Harvard.
The pride of Cambridge has paid a price for rejecting Cadet Bonespur's application some six decades ago. First he pulled their grant money. The he unilaterally decreed that they had to send their foreign students home.
Those moves were silly enough. Now the DOJ has cast its gimlet eye toward that seed bed of radical leftism, the Harvard Law Review.
For those who never went to law school, a word about the venerable institution of the law review. Every law school, to my knowledge, maintains a handful of student-run publications covering specialty topics like international law or alternative dispute resolution. For each school, the most prestigious journal is simply the law review, which covers whatever its student editors deem worthy of publication. Scholars, mostly law professors, submit scholarly pieces as part of their mandate to "public or perish" on their road to tenure, and eagerly await a response from the 3L editorial team that their work was selected for publication. From there, it's relentlessly edited by a handful of earnest 2Ls whose one desire is, in most cases, to be one of the 3Ls who run the show. Each quarter the review publishes a paperback book, usually with two articles by professors and two "notes' written by someone on the student editorial board.
Why serve on the law review? The pay is nonexistent, but for students seeking to distinguish themselves there's a huge prestige factor that comes with service, which in turn opens the door to high-paying big firm jobs or judicial clerkships, or both. The only way to be selected is either by finishing one's first year in the top 10% (half the 2L board), or to "write on" with an article the board reviews. I was on the editorial board at UGA, and was definitely a write on with my middling grades that first year.
I hated being on the law review. Picture the social milieu of your high school, but with the nerds running things instead of the jocks and cool kids as God intended. It's petty. It carries its own rituals of forcing the 2Ls to "pay their dues" in some sort of brutally stupid apprenticeship. I arrived thirty years old, with a kid and a resume that involved a no kidding shooting war. Taking orders from some stoop-shouldered geek didn't sit well. In fairness, they didn't think much of me, either. I didn't apply for that final year on the board, which suited both sides just fine.
So this little student run enterprise is now the target of Stephen Miller and his merry band of vandals. Granted, the Harvard Law Review is maybe the most read of its ilk, and publishes heavy hitters dealing with important legal issues of sometimes global import. But it's still just a student publication.
How did they draw the attention of the Dark Empire? Apparently one of those stoop-shouldered nerds also happened to be an aggrieved white male searching for signs of discrimination against his tribe, and he simultaneously took a job in the Trump Administration upon graduation (ponder on that, if you will--some recent law graduate who doesn't know how to balance a checkbook loose in the halls of the policymakers. No wonder we're screwed) and proclaimed himself a whistleblower as to all the secret DEI goings-on there along the River Charles.
He also apparently downloaded and stole a bunch of proprietary material as proof of the liberal conspiracy, and when the law review directed him to return or destroy it, they added an allegation of spoliation (basically, willful destruction of evidence). It's not clear how one spoliates evidence in someone else's custody, but whatever. That's not the point. The purpose here is to cow everyone, right down to a bunch of law students, to toe the line and write what they're told to write.
This is how far we've fallen. I can feel my blood pressure creeping upward as I type.
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