I am beginning to think that Trump’s war on higher education is not about fighting anti-semitism

As Harvard considers whether is wants to follow Columbia and agree to Trump’s shakedown, they might want to consider this:

A Justice Department attorney who has defended the Trump administration’s crackdown on Harvard over allegations of antisemitism once praised Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and submitted an undergraduate assignment written from the Nazi leader’s perspective, according to an article in The Boston Globe.

Michael Velchik, the government lawyer, received both his undergraduate and law degree from Harvard. After Harvard sued the Trump administration over the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding, Velchik defended the move in federal court: “The choice was made, let’s not give federal taxpayer dollars to institutions that exhibit a wanton indifference to antisemitism,” he said at a July hearing.

But the Globe reported Tuesday that three anonymous individuals familiar with the matter said that, as a senior at Harvard, Velchik turned in a paper in the voice of Adolf Hitler in response to a prompt in his Latin class asking students to submit an essay written from the perspective of a controversial figure. The essay rattled the instructor, who asked Velchik to write a new paper, according to the article.

After graduating, Velchik told a peer that Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography and manifesto, was the book he had enjoyed reading the most while spending a year traveling, according to an email obtained by the Globe. The email did not mention the Holocaust.

“[I]s it bad that my favorite class at harvard was nietzsche and my favorite book i’ve read this year is mein kampf?” Velchik wrote in the June 2013 email. The article stated that he later wrote a brief review of the book that called it “fascinating” and mused that Hitler “excelled as an orator” and “understands the importance of propaganda.”

In the quaint-by-comparison first Trump term, Darren Beattie attending a white nationalist conference was enough to get him fired. In Trump 2.0, white nationalism is more like a job requirement.