The Government Doesn't Need to Choose Between Funding Harvard and Trade Schools But Pretend They Do For Cynical Reasons
The Trump administration recently proposed redirecting the substantial funding that Harvard receives to trade schools.
It was a cynical move designed to appeal to the MAGA crowd’s contention that the left only cares about people on the very top and the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, while they care about the hardworking, patriotic working-class that make our country great.
They want people to think that Democrats only care about woke billionaires, Women’s Studies majors at Ivy League universities and liberal arts colleges, while the nineteen billionaires in Trump’s cabinet care about the patriotic white working man, who has been treated very badly and very unfairly and must be avenged.
Here’s the thing: Trump can give trade schools all the money they want. It’s not as if the government has three billion dollars that must either be used to teach people to be plumbers or fund cancer research at what is universally regarded as one of the finest institutions in the world. It’s not an either/or proposition. It seldom is.
The right wants people to see Harvard and similar institutions as hotbeds of anti-American subversion where trans Marxist extremists who hate our country, our customs, and our way of life, and infect their students, many of whom are Communist spies, with those beliefs.
Incidentally, if I were a foreigner who hated the United States, I wouldn’t work hard throughout school so that I could spend years, even decades, in the US, and invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in an American college. That instead sounds like the behavior of someone who loves our country and wants to be part of it, but what do I know? I only hold a worthless Comm Arts degree from a solid Big Ten University.
It's not just Harvard: MAGA wants people to think that non-trade schools teach America-hating, trans for everyone and the evils of whitey rather than teaching useful skills that will allow them to make a living and contribute to society.
I’m a loony lib, and even I have to acknowledge that it was a bad look when he said this.
I marvel at Trump’s ability to point in a direction and get his cultists to hate whatever he wants them to despise. He could post on Truth Social about how double-A baseball players are enemies of the people who travel the country trafficking drugs and sex and spreading perversion and subversion, and his followers would begin agitating for an investigation into the evils of minor league baseball.
Minor league super-fans would begin burning their merchandise in protest and publicly renounce their fandom. Trump would start referring to minor league baseball as our “UN-national non-past-SLIME,” and MAGA would immediately assume that athletes trying to make it into the major league baseball had joined “editing for clarity” as something they should now hate.
They promote the toxic notion that if you are not making money, then you are a parasite and a bad person who should feel ashamed of yourself, when the reality is that the people making the most money are generally parasites and bad people.
Being a billionaire when people sleep in the streets and die of starvation is inherently amoral. If you are a good person, you’ll give away so much of your unimaginable fortune that you’ll never come close to having a billion dollars.
It’s an old trick: pit “good”, hard-working, patriotic Americans who love their country against “bad”, lazy, America-haters. You see this all the time on the internet when MAGA cultists post endless memes about how no undocumented migrant should get a penny of federal money while veterans sleep in the streets.
There’s nothing keeping Republicans from donating as much money as they’d like to unhoused veterans. There’s similarly nothing to keep the national government, particularly a military-fetishizing administration like Trump’s, from allocating so much money for the care of veterans that the idea of someone who served their country going hungry or homeless is inconceivable.
As with trade schools and Harvard, there is not a finite amount of money that must be allocated to either care for veterans or benefits for undocumented migrants.
Trump had an opportunity to put his money where his loud mouth is by providing for veterans. Instead, Hegseth had the military budget increased by fifteen percent and the budget for the VA cut by almost twenty percent. In other words, more money for weapons that kill and fewer resources for PTSD-haunted veterans who want to kill themselves.
Republicans like to gush about soldiers while aggressively working against making their lives better or preparing them for life after warfare.
Right-wingers can do wonders for the trade schools and struggling veterans they profess to value so much. But they don’t, because their disingenuous rhetoric is not about compassion; it’s about politics and cynically scoring points with culture war bullshit.
You can pre-order my upcoming book, The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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