Because of the megaphone of the Trumpistas, aided and abetted by the mass media, it is easy to forget how much falsehood is being forced upon us on a daily basis, some of which is then taken up by the opposition as though it is serious.  So let's remember some facts:

1.  There was no problem with illegal immigration in the U.S. before Trump (that illegal immigrants entered the country was neither here nor there–most "illegal" entries resulted in deportation).  Illegal immigrants are more law-abiding than citizens, and they make a substantial contribution to productivity and economic growth in multiple sectors of the economy (this is why even Trump backed off sending the immigration police into certain businesses).  The whole immigration "crisis" is a distraction ideology, obscuring what is actually happening:  capitalism requires jobs to be shipped overseas in order for companies to survive in the global capitalist marketplace.  Tariffs won't change that, full stop.  Immigrants didn't cause that, full stop.  Trump is as ignorant as Archie Bunker, but not nearly as amusing.

2.  There is no crisis of anti-semitism in the universities.  The "crisis" is that the younger generation rejects the bipartisan consensus in Congress that supports any Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, full stop.   There have been isolated anti-semitic acts, often by outsiders on university campuses, but that is not what the current war on universities is about.  As the legal scholar Cass Sunstein recently observed, during his 25 years as a student and then faculty member at Harvard, he has never experienced any anti-semitism.  But in his government service in Washington, D.C., he experienced a number of anti-semitic attacks, always from the political right. 

3.  The U.S. Constitution provides for three co-equal branches of government:  executive, legislative, and judicial.  The legislative branch of the federal government has collapsed, given the Republican cult of Trump, but the judicial branch has been doing rather well.  Federal judges, including Trump-appointed judges, are deciding against his lawless actions.  Attacks on individual judges, with implied (and often explicit) incitements to violence against them, is the stuff of tinpot dictators:  any political actor in the United States who does that should be impeached and removed from office.  Anyone who votes for politicians who do that is a disgrace to civilization.

4.  Legal residents of the United States enjoy the same constitutional rights as natural born citizens. When federal agents kidnap such individuals because of their lawful political expression, they are indistinguishable from the secret police in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia.  The only difference, so far, is that the courts have been able to save sone of the victims of this nakedly unconstitutional political persecution.

5.  Diversity, including viewpoint diversity, is not an academic value.  First:  Affirmative action did not come into being to promote "diversity":  it came into being to remedy the malign effects of American apartheid.  "Diversity" blather arrived on the scene in the late 1970s just when the attack on affirmative action was reaching a crescendo.  It succeeded in keeping affirmative action alive (by arguing that it was "good for business," including education), but at the cost of honesty and candor in hiring and admissions, and diluting its focus on the victims of apartheid.  Second, viewpoint diversity is irrelevant in serious academic disciplines; in less serious ones, it may be relevant, but there is no way to impose it without violating core academic freedom.  Academic disciplines presuppoes the unequal worth of different viewpoints, and the job of scholars is to assess those viewpoints, and discount the unworthy ones.  Here I find myself in full agreement with Stanley Fish:

I teach Milton’s poetry as an extension of his theology. Must I in the name of diversity devote time to feminist or postmodern readings of “Paradise Lost”?

Diversity is not a classroom virtue unless my class is labeled “Approaches to Milton.” Surveying what’s “out there” would be obligatory in such a course. In any other course my obligation is to tell what I think is the truth about the material. Cluttering up the syllabus with paths of inquiry I consider unrewarding just to be “diverse” would be pedagogical malpractice. It would commit the sin of substituting a political imperative for the academic imperative of getting it right.

This sin is cheerfully embraced by those who argue that because faculty members in the humanities and social science skew left, the imbalance must be redressed by recruiting right-leaning scholars. But this makes sense only if ballot-box performance correlates with classroom performance. It doesn’t. I am a slightly left-of-center Democrat, yet just about every position I take in academic disputes is the conservative one.

In any of its versions, viewpoint diversity is a sham and a cheat, a rhetorical engine for the political takeover of higher education. The Trump administration uses it as a Trojan horse. The president of Harvard should be ashamed of taking it seriously.