One of the most famous magazine covers in American history is National Lampoon’s 1973 “shoot the dog” cover. It shows a black and white dog, with its eyes rolling to its right, as a gun is aimed directly at its head. The caption says, “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.”
Harvard looked at the cover and said, “Hold my beer.” One of its research scientists has announced that, unless the federal government coughs up the almost half a billion in taxpayer funds it receives annually, it’ll kill the research animals under its care.
Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants, backed by thousands of Gaza residents, invaded Israel to slaughter over 1,200 civilians and kidnap more than 200, Harvard has become a very hostile environment for Jews. In classrooms, hallways, and on outdoor grounds, Jews have repeatedly been subjected to physical and verbal attacks.
Harvard insists it’s just allowing free speech and the free expression of ideas. However, you have only to imagine that this same speech were being directed at blacks, gays, or so-called transgenders to understand that it would never allow these things to be said to anyone other than Jews.
Indeed, in 2006, Harvard’s then-president, Lawrence Summers, was driven from that office for noting that women’s absence from the STEM fields might have been because they were less interested in scientific subjects or because, just as men are provably more likely to occupy the lower end of the intelligence bell curve, the same is true about their representation on the high end. That kind of free speech and free expression of ideas was verboten.
Image made using a YouTube screen grab of one of the monkeys subjected to Harvard experimentation.
Of course, if Harvard existed only on tuition that wasn’t backed by tax dollars and relied solely on its $53 billion endowment (which makes it wealthier than almost 100 countries) to make up for tuition deficits, its antisemitic, anti-white, anti-male ideology would be its own business. With luck, it would fail to attract students, but that failure would be all its own, and it could say whatever it wanted with impunity.
However, that’s not the case. Instead, last year, Harvard received almost $700,000,000 from American taxpayers, just as it has done year after year, for decades (in inflation-adjusted dollars, of course). Harvard’s endowment continues to grow as America funds an institution that hates whites, men, and Jews. (And, of course, it’s also anti-Christian and anti-American, because that’s part of the whole Marxist package that the elitist Harvard now sells.)
Donald Trump, however, believes that an institution that openly violates the Civil Rights Act, which says that publicly funded institutions cannot engage in discrimination based upon race or creed, shouldn’t be receiving taxpayer dollars. To that end, he’s instructed Harvard to end its antisemitic ways. He’s also told Harvard that, to the extent it’s floating on a sea of taxpayer money, it needs to let the feds do an audit to make sure that the money is being spent as intended.
Harvard responded by saying that it has a right to taxpayer funds, and any diminution in those funds is tantamount to censorship. It is an Orwellian perversion of the First Amendment. Free speech once meant that the government couldn’t silence you in the realm of ideas. At Harvard, though, free speech means the taxpayers must subsidize your speech. Indeed, the Harvard Crimson insists that what Trump is doing—that is, saying abide by federal law or lose federal funding—is a form of extortion.
Perhaps inspired by that essay, a Harvard professor has announced that unless she gets her money, her department will start killing all the animals in its research programs:
A professor at the Harvard School of Public Health said that medical research animals may have to be euthanized following the Trump administration's decision to slash $2.2 billion in federal funding for the university. This after Harvard refused to comply with the administration's policy demands, including eliminating DEI initiatives and cracking down on anti-Semitism. The Ivy League school has a $53 billion endowment.
Sarah Fortune, a professor who has been conducting tuberculosis research by testing vaccines on primates, reported that she received a stop-work order on a $60 million contract this week. The contract involved a dozen labs at institutions throughout the country, per CNN.
Fortune has since started weighing options, some of which could be life or death for animals. "The question is, could we find resources to support them, such that we don't have to euthanize them?" she questioned. Although it is possible that researchers will secure sufficient external funding to save the animals, Fortune said that there is no alternative funding source that could sustain the entire research program.
Putting aside the $53 billion in resources Harvard sits on, understand that these animals were bound for death anyway. They live in steel cages and often have gruesome experiments performed on them, something PETA has attacked. That being the case, it’s highly unlikely that these animals then get to retire to nice homes or zoos. But still, the “shoot the monkey” threat is real.
The Trump administration is right to call out Harvard’s greed and outrageous sense of entitlement. And it speaks volumes that Harvard, having been exposed, responds not with shame, but by threatening to slaughter animals.