by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review:
Back when I was a young child my grandfather enjoyed watching professional wrestling on his old black-and-white television, so I occasionally did the same.
In those distant days, television wrestling possessed almost no money nor prestige and was barely even considered a real sport, probably tied with roller derby as occupying the bottommost-tier of audience viewership. Wrestling matches were only carried on one of the lowest-rated local television stations, unaffiliated with any network, whose managers desperately sought out anything they could find to fill their available broadcast hours.
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The notion that wrestling might someday become a multi-billion-dollar national business enterprise would have seemed totally outlandish and ridiculous. Although a 1975 Hollywood science fiction film called Rollerball envisioned a future America in which a lethal version of roller derby had become the #1 sport, no one ever suggested anything similar for wrestling.
Although I’ve never watched a single wrestling match since the black-and-white shows of my childhood and those memories have faded, I think that they may have often featured tag-team contests, in which pairs of wrestlers faced off against each other.
If so, then our national headlines are now proclaiming a heavyweight wrestling match to determine the future of American higher education and perhaps our entire society as well. President Donald Trump is facing off against Harvard University in the greatest political bout of this young century, with each of those primary contenders backed by their chosen seconds.
Trump is a noted author, with more than twenty published volumes to his name, many of them high-profile bestsellers on business strategy, politics, and negotiation. But I’m not entirely convinced that he’s ever actually read a single book cover-to-cover in his entire life, even including any of his own, and if he did, I suspect that the last one may have been decades ago, perhaps filled with many colorful pictures.
Meanwhile, his main opponent in that match is America’s oldest university, now approaching its 390th year of existence, long ranked as the world’s wealthiest and most prestigious institution of higher education.
Trump’s loyal team-mate is his Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the billionaire wrestling-lady, while Harvard is backed by Columbia University, still smarting from the brutal beat-down it recently received at the hands of the Trump-McMahon team before Harvard had entered the lists.
Although wealthy and very prestigious, Columbia still probably ranks a bit below the the longstanding Harvard-Yale-Princeton triumvirate. Therefore the threatened loss of $400 million in annual federal funding a few weeks ago brought the university to its knees, forcing its administration to surrender on all the main points demanded.
Teams of federal agents were allowed to raid student housing and drag off any non-citizens suspected of criticizing Israel, the administration agreed to create a special unit of 30 campus security officers tasked with suppressing any public displays of anti-Zionism, and its prestigious Middle Eastern Studies program was placed in “academic receivership,” presumably intended to ensure that it became entirely pro-Israel in its teachings.
All these concessions were made by Acting President Katrina Armstrong, who afterwards resigned due to that horrific pressure she had endured, becoming the second president of Columbia to do so in just the last eight months.
So based upon this painful recent history, we are clearly seeing the sort of grudge match that has become wildly popular in pro-wrestling, with Columbia eager for its share of revenge now that it has mighty Harvard on its side.
In pro-wrestling as in other spectator sports, the onlookers can side with one of the champions or the other, or else merely enjoy the battle without taking sides.
Given Trump’s ignorance and the stupidity of his policies, most recently demonstrated by his Looney Tunes tariff proposals, I certainly couldn’t see myself cheering for him. But instead of remaining neutral, I’ve found myself entirely in Harvard’s corner.
My position might seem a bit strange given the harsh criticism that I’ve leveled at my alma mater over the years, even on some of the very matters that the Trump Administration is fiercely attacking.
