The hollow cynics and the true believers

This profile of Stephen Miller’s anti-higher-ed button woman May Mailman is a study in the particularly empty banality of some manifestations evil:

When President Trump wants to rattle academia, he turns to his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. And then Mr. Miller turns to May Mailman.

Ms. Mailman, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, is the most important, least-known person behind the administration’s relentless pursuit of the nation’s premier universities. The extraordinary effort has found seemingly endless ways to pressure schools into submission, including federal funding, student visas and civil rights investigations.

Her hand in deploying these levers of power was evident from the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term. As his ambitions around reshaping higher education expanded, so did her remit. She is credited as an animating force behind a strategy that has intimidated independent institutions and undercut years of medical and scientific research.

The policies Ms. Mailman helped devise — and is now leveraging as she leads the White House’s negotiations with colleges — have sent shock waves through higher education, dividing faculty and alarming some students who see an effort to silence dissent. The aggressive tactics could have far-reaching implications for the future of academic freedom, the admissions practices at the most competitive colleges and the global reputations for some of the crown jewels of the nation’s university system.

[…]

Ms. Mailman wrote the executive orders Mr. Trump signed on his first day in office that redefined the federal government’s stance on sex to acknowledge only two genders and dismantled policies aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. By June, these changes had forced the University of Pennsylvania to align its athletic policies with the administration’s view that transgender girls and women should be banned from participating in women’s sports.

Miller, needless to say, has been a caldron of hatred and resentment for a long time. Mailman is something different, which is not to say better:

Ms. Mailman said she did not join the second Trump administration to take down Harvard, where she mostly enjoyed her time as a graduate student.

Instead, she was recruited by Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Mr. Miller because of her various roles in the White House during Mr. Trump’s first term. For the second term, she would help with the transition, write Mr. Trump’s deluge of initial executive orders and help set up a process for turning his campaign promises into policy. She had always planned to depart after six months, she said.

It’s not just that she benefitted from elite higher ed and wants to destroy it. Unlike Clarence Thomas, she doesn’t even have a catalog of resentments from her time there — she liked it, it benefitted her enormously, and she is living proof that the idea that conservatives are somehow repressed or excluded from the Ivy Leagues is deeply silly. It doesn’t matter, because if it’s Stephen Miller’s fight it’s the fight for the soulless careerists looking to get ahead through his patronage:

At the law center, Ms. Mailman quickly immersed herself in issues that animated Mr. Trump’s campaign and would deeply inform the domestic agenda in his second term, such as rolling back protections for transgender people. She fought against Biden administration policies that had extended discrimination protections to transgender students. And she focused on the University of Pennsylvania, where Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer, had broken records on the women’s team in 2022. Ms. Mailman also represented Allie Coghan, who sued her University of Wyoming sorority in 2023 for allowing a transgender woman into their chapter.

Ms. Mailman’s work with the group, where she is returning after leaving the White House, landed her on the “hate and extremism” section of the website for GLAAD, one of the country’s leading L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups.

It’s possible that she harbors a longstanding hatred for trans people, but my guess is not, that she’s just been pulled along in this particular anti-civil-rights campaign. (Which, to be clear, is not any kind of mitigation.).

And now the punchline:

Ms. Mailman said her views on gender aligned with the philosophical underpinnings of her politics, which she described as a kind of libertarianism that abhors political correctness.

Ah yes, the kind of “libertarianism” and opposition to “political correctness” that wants to put the federal government in charge of university curricula and in doctor’s offices. Which, to be fair, it the most common actually existing kind of both, the Wilhoit’s Law variant.