💬 The Rubin Recap: The Sunday return to normalcy

Making America’s colleges (closer to) normal again

I’ve said for a long time that the wokeness that has reared its ugly head in our lives over the last 10 years did so because it was introduced and nurtured on American college campuses almost entirely without being challenged. And then those college students graduated and brought that warped worldview into the real world, where they were able to bully many of the country’s decision-makers into adopting that worldview.

But it’s not just the students who bought into the bizarre ideas who are to blame. The institutions — faculty and administration — are at fault just as much, if not more. American universities overwhelming consist of faculties and administrations that are liberal, many of them far left. Conservatives have been an afterthought on college campuses for decades. But under Obama and Biden, the suppression of conservatives and their views was put on steroids.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve heard me talk about what it’s like trying to speak and present a conservative-leaning point of view on a college campus. Conservative speakers for a while were shouted down, often unable to even make remarks at an event or hold a conversation. Free speech and meritocracy completely went out the door. The inmates were running the asylum.

Well, as of January 2025, there’s a new warden running the asylum, and his name is Donald Trump. Last week, the Trump administration sued Harvard University again. This time the Justice Department said Harvard failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students in the wake of Hamas’ terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, saying the university “defied federal law and violated Title VI repeatedly by discriminating against Jewish and Israeli students without remorse.”

This legal action comes about a month after the Trump administration sued Harvard for not turning over data on its enrollment practices. As you probably know, Harvard has openly been discriminating against Asian and white students for years. No matter how these legal challenges play out, going after Harvard — one of the nation’s oldest universities that enjoys one of the richest endowments in the country — is bound to trigger a sea change at other universities around the nation who are up to similar antics.

It should be no surprise that the person behind Trump’s pressure campaign against these schools is Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Justice Department Harmeet Dhillon, who I recently interviewed on The Rubin Report. “If Harvard has stopped discriminating,” Dhillon said of last month’s lawsuit against Harvard, “it should happily share the data necessary to prove it.”

Hot damn!

And this week, Dhillon struck again, ordering the medical schools at Ohio State University, Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego to turn over admissions data to ensure that DEI has been rooted out — and that meritocracy is the guiding principle for admissions. As Elon Musk has pointed out numerous times, lowering the standards to get into medical school is likely to result in increased mistakes made by doctors and possibly patients dying who otherwise might not.

What the Trump administration is doing is only the beginning of a change that has been long needed on college campuses. Some colleges cost close to $100,000 a year. Are you really going to pay that much for some university to indoctrinate your child — that is if your child can even get in because other students were prioritized for arbitrary attributes, like skin color? My kids are very young, but I can’t imagine thinking college will be good for them if universities aren’t brought back to some semblance of normal.

The Trump team is starting that process. Think of it as Normacly 101. And if it takes hold and is seen through during his remaining three years in office and gets continued support from whichever Republican hopefully succeeds him, we might one day see a return to normalcy on college campuses in America.

Jan Jekielek exposes the lurid illegal organ harvesting going on in China

Did you realize that the U.S. over the last 50 years has essentially built China into what has now become our biggest international adversary? Probably not. And even worse, along with China’s growth, some truly gruesome things are happening there. That’s were veteran journalist Jan Jekielek comes in. He wrote the book Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary, which pulls the curtain back on the organ harvesting and trafficking that’s been happening in China for decades now. Healthy, living people are routinely having their organs removed without consent — all types of organs, even the corneas from their eyes — and in some cases die to due vital organs being removed. Why is such a human rights atrocity happening there? Jekielek explains the extent of the scandal, which sounds like the plot of a dystopian sci-fi movie, and why it started in the first place back in 1999.