A Schism in the Harvard Right

Last week, a schism in the Harvard right revealed itself.

The Harvard Republican Club recently took to X with an incendiary and hyperbolic post implying Harvard had been “captured” by Muslim students who had hosted a weekend Eid Bazaar Festival in the courtyard of Quincy House.

Food trucks serving chicken and rice and ice cream, vendors selling jewelry and clothing, a skin care booth and a henna artist — these were the horrors that prompted the HRC to publish a patently Islamaphobic vilification of an entirely benign cultural celebration.

I feel assured in positing that, had this been an Easter celebration, we would not have seen such a reaction from the HRC.

But just as striking as the naked prejudice in the HRC’s rhetoric was its subsequent condemnation by the leaders of a different conservative group on campus, the Harvard Salient. In the same week, we saw both the worst depravities of Harvard’s MAGA right and a laudable stand against intolerance — a stand we must hope augurs the return of respectable campus conservatism.

In a 2024 op-ed in The Crimson, former HRC president Michael Oved ’25 wrote that the success of the HRC and the Republican party “is contingent on a diverse coalition.” If such an ideology once motivated the HRC, obviously no longer; it is hard to see how denigrating an Islamic celebration would further such a goal.

The HRC observed what no rational person could see as anything other than an ordinary religious celebration, yet they probably found within themselves cause for their own kind of malignant celebration: what a choice opportunity to stoke the outrage machine!

Is this the level of sophisticated conservative intellectual thought that the HRC thinks befits Harvard? It seems as though their intended audience was not Harvard at all, but external actors, to which they might have hoped to demonstrate performative outrage towards the amorphous pluralist enemies of the far right.

It is not because Harvard is “woke” that the HRC finds our University’s students and administrators “hostile.” As this episode demonstrates, it is because the HRC represents a particularly intolerant strain of the right that most students justifiably find repellent.

It is remarkable that the Harvard Salient, Harvard’s primary conservative student publication, published a piece that not only called out “staggering” lies in the HRC’s post, but went on to claim that the current HRC leadership was “illegitimate” and no longer represents Harvard’s conservative community, and attacked the John Adams Society for effectively excluding women from its membership. “Republicans are not Nazis,” the piece read.

Earlier this year, the board of directors of the Salient suspended the magazine following revelations about the use of slurs and Nazi imagery within the organization. Following the exodus of most of its staffers, the Salient is now under new management; yet, its former spirit appears alive and well in the HRC.

Such skirmishes are occurring throughout the GOP as the coalition that brought Trump to power in 2024 has shown signs of fracturing. Radical wings of the right — notably, Nick Fuentes and his antisemitic so-called “Groyper” movement — believe that Trump hasn’t gone far enough, while more traditional conservatives, well-typified by the Salient, seek a return to a more traditional, intellectual conservatism.

That latter kind of conservatism is a valuable contribution to campus discourse; the intolerant outrage politics of the HRC is not.

Though I certainly do not agree with everything published in the Salient, it is imperative that Harvard has a publication that represents an intellectually serious and morally upstanding conservatism. I resent that I echo a College slogan, but intellectual vitality is actually important — and so it is “vital” that the dominant strain of conservatism on campus is a credible and inclusive one.

We can only hope that this Salient article’s response to the HRC — and other recent pieces that introduce thoughtful, intellectual counterpoints to Harvard’s predominantly liberal landscape — represents an evolution towards a more thoughtful and productive conservative presence on campus.

As the Salient notes, the founders understood the importance of religious tolerance, for “once the civil rights of one religious community are restricted, no religion, whether Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, is safe.”

Perhaps the HRC ought to spend more time in their classes rather than spreading hateful messages on their socials — then they might learn that their intolerance is not only neither “conservative” nor “republican,” but fundamentally un-American.

Andrew W. Shlomchik ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Greenough Hall.