If Republicans Want To Govern, They’d Better Learn How To Hold The Left Accountable

The Republican reluctance (more like refusal) to hold Democrats accountable, uphold rule of law, and enforce the law made it possible for the Democrats to run roughshod over The Constitution, our freedoms, nothing short of a coup.

If Republicans Want To Govern, They’d Better Learn How To Go After The Left

For too long, conservatives have been loath to use government power to defend the republic from enemies within. That has to change.

By: John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist, December 15, 2023

Amid the controversy following recent congressional testimony on the problem of campus antisemitism by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio has introduced a bill that would drastically increase the tax rate on the largest university endowments.

This is something Vance has been talking about for some time now, and while it’s a good idea on the merits, it’s also a good example of how conservatives should be willing to use whatever political power they have to fight back against the left. Simply put, unless the right starts treating the left and its institutions like the hostile entities they are, our republic will not likely survive.

This is especially true when it comes to higher education, where the wealthiest and most elite schools have long enjoyed preferential treatment even as they poison the body politic by actively promoting not just antisemitism, but racism, gender ideology, and every other brand of cultural Marxism you can imagine.

The recent spectacle in Congress is a case in point. During their testimonies last week, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn refused to say the blatant antisemitism on their campuses since the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists — including explicit calls for genocide of the Jews — violates their schools’ policies on harassment.

Their equivocation, insisting that whether such antisemitism constitutes harassment depends on the “context,” elicited understandable outrage from donors. After a major Penn donor pulled a $100 million gift to the school that was made in 2017, Penn President Liz Magill was forced to resign — a rare instance of a leftist elite facing real-world consequences for defending her appalling ideology in public.

Vance, for his part, rightly sees these schools as threats to American values and our way of life that in no way deserve special treatment. Currently, the tax rate on endowments at places like Harvard and Penn is just 1.4 percent, making them effectively slush funds for the ultra-rich. His two-page bill would increase the rate to 35 percent on all endowments worth $10 billion or more.

The endowments at Penn, Harvard & MIT have a combined $95B+ in assets – yet only pay a 1.4% tax rate on net investment income.

Then they use these funds to push DEI and woke insanity.

My bill would tax the largest endowments at 35% – it's going to the Senate floor right now. pic.twitter.com/NtSuUtzluL

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) December 14, 2023

The point here isn’t to raise additional tax revenue (although the money raised could be used to pay down the deficit or help working, middle-class families or just be given back to the American people as dividends). The point is to acknowledge, through federal tax policy, that in their current form, these universities don’t serve the national interest. If they can’t be reformed, at least they can be punished.

That’s the right approach, not just to higher education but to every facet of what has become an all-consuming cultural and political war in this country. Conservatives can no longer afford to shy away from using the institutions they control to defend Western civilization and the Christian values that undergird it.

State legislatures that responded to the overturning of Roe v. Wade by passing strong restrictions on abortion, like Texas and Florida, have the right idea. Same with states that have imposed restrictions on transgender interventions and surgeries for minors (they need to take the next step, though, and impose those same restrictions on adults).

A crude but no less effective version of this posture toward the left is what one man did on Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa. Michael Cassidy, a Christian and former military officer, tore down and beheaded an altar to Satan in the state capitol. Why was a Satan altar even there? Because the left has managed to insinuate itself everywhere — even into the Iowa Legislature, despite a Republican supermajority. Under the banner of diversity and tolerance, we’re told we must accept altars to Satan in our legislative halls.

Cassidy begged to differ. “The world may tell Christians to submissively accept the legitimization of Satan, but none of the founders would have considered government sanction of Satanic altars inside Capitol buildings as protected by the First Amendment,” he told The Sentinel.

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AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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