For well over a century, Harvard was considered the crown jewel of American education. Presidents came from its halls, and Nobel laureates filled its lecture rooms.

It was the kind of place that turned ambition into achievement and ambition into legacy. It symbolized something enduring: excellence, discipline, and elite leadership. The very name carried an air of unimpeachable credibility.

Those days are gone. Long gone.

What was once a training ground for future statesmen and scientists has become a bloated, self-satisfied bureaucracy. Harvard’s leaders now prioritize activism over academics, show greater loyalty to foreign interests than their own government, and are more focused on preserving a brand than protecting the country that created it.

If in doubt, consider Harvard’s outright defiance of the Trump administration’s call to rein in campus activism, antisemitism, and ideological extremism. The response from the administration was swift.

“I think all the world would gain by setting commerce at perfect liberty.” —Thomas Jefferson (1785)

This included reinstating the name “Mount McKinley” to the highest peak in North America, Alaska’s Denali.

In 2015, 40 years after the state of Alaska had restored the mountain’s native name, the Department of the Interior did the same. Nobody in Alaska wanted the name restored to McKinley, so why did Trump include this among his first actions?

Short answer: His admiration for McKinley’s Tariff Act of 1890, intended to protect domestic markets and workers by leveraging an average duty increase on imports from 38% to almost 50%.

McKinley would later revise his stance and advocate for more tariff-free international trade, which is not inconsistent with what Trump ultimately seeks — a level playing field.

Thus, as he said he would, Trump ordered tariffs on imported goods from every country that imposes tariffs and/or other trade barriers on U.S. exports — and some that don’t.

The most noticeable impact of those tariffs has been in the equity and bond markets – a barometer for economic outlook.

If you are fortunate enough to have accumulated some investments or retirement assets, the prospect of tariffs has taken a heavy toll on those assets — for the moment anyway.

As of the close yesterday, the Dow was down 11.51% year-to-date, while 10-year Treasury yields were back above 4%.

But that is about to change. Today, and likely for the rest of this week, expect major equity market recoveries because, after firing a loud shot across the bow of those subjected to last night’s global implementation of his tariffs, Trump has proven once again that the strategic “art of the deal” often depends on being unpredictable — the art of “organized chaos.”

When Donald Trump announced his intention to “take back” the Panama Canal from China, I had to chuckle. My old friend Linc, who had died in 2005, was having the last laugh after all.

As editor of the Daily Inter Lake newspaper in Kalispell, Montana, for 18 years, I got to meet hundreds of people whom I would never have come across otherwise when they came to visit me at my office. One of the most memorable was an octogenarian named Linc France.

Linc (short for Lincoln) was an American original. For decades he had run Linc’s Automotive in Columbia Falls. His 2005 obituary noted that “He could fix anything. If he didn’t have the tool, he could make one.”

Despite ending his formal education in the 8th grade to help support his family, Linc was knowledgeable about many topics and was also civic minded, having served on the Columbia Falls City Council and volunteered for various charities such as Meals on Wheels.

When Linc came to visit me in his blue jeans and flannels with a trucker cap above his piercing eyes, I would sit back in my chair and prepare to be both amused and challenged.

Generally, he would be dropping off a hand-written letter to the editor, and he would ask me to give it a once-over. Most of the time, the letter was about the Panama Canal.

President Jimmy Carter had signed the canal over to the nation of Panama for the contractual obligation of a single dollar back in 1977, and Panama took full control on Dec. 31, 1999, but by then most Americans weren’t interested.

On Feb. 28, 2003, Linc wrote a letter we titled “Canal could be sign of worse to come.” It was indeed prophetic:

For decades, Americans have been led to believe that our legal system is built on principles of justice, fairness, and the rule of law.

But that’s not the truth. The truth is very ugly.

The judicial system we have today has been hijacked—weaponized against the very people it was meant to protect. And at the core of this corruption?

The American Bar Association (ABA) and the entire legal cartel that controls our courts.

The ABA is not a neutral, apolitical institution.

It is a radicalized, ideologically captured organization that wields enormous influence over judicial nominations, legal education, and the entire practice of law.

Republican senators, including Eric Schmitt, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley, Bernie Moreno, and Mike Lee, have now called for President Trump to remove the ABA from the judicial nomination process entirely.

That’s a step in the right direction—but let’s be honest: removing the ABA from judicial nominations isn’t enough.

The bar itself must be abolished.

The Bar Controls the judiciary—and that’s the problem.

The entire legal profession operates as an exclusive club, one that exists not to protect individual rights, but to maintain power.

Lawyers and judges are trained by the same corrupt institutions, taught the same convoluted statutes, and conditioned to believe they serve “justice” when, in reality, they serve a bloated, bureaucratic system designed to suppress liberty.

It’s not a justice system—it’s a control system.