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Breitbart co-founder Steve Bannon called on President Donald Trump to “cut out all the money” flowing to elite universities at the Harvard Conservative and Republican Student Conference on Saturday.

The all-day conference — hosted by conservative and Republican student clubs at four of Harvard’s schools, as well as conservative campus publication The Harvard Salient — featured panels of right-wing think tank fellows and legal scholars, including embattled University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Amy L. Wax.

Just steps from Harvard’s campus, Bannon took credit for Trump’s fusillade of orders restricting federal funding to universities. He said he had told Trump “we have to go into these elite institutions” and return them to “meritocracy.”

“Once you cut the money off, for them, that’s a bitch slap, right?” he said. “They’ll start paying attention. You have to root it out.”

Saturday’s event was sponsored by hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin ’89, a Harvard megadonor whose name adorns the College’s financial aid office and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Other sponsors included the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that developed Project 2025, and the Job Creators Network, a conservative business group that backed hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 cure.

Sharply dressed conference guests sat around banquet tables in a ballroom on the third floor of the Charles Hotel. Some were graduate students. At least two attendees from Quincy, Mass., showed up after hearing the event advertised on Bannon’s War Room podcast.

At a panel on immigration policy, Wax, who has long flirted with white nationalist rhetoric, said “it’s important to have a European majority.”

Two moderators — Harvard Law School student Dean Sherman and Harvard Republican Club president Leo A. Koerner ’26 — posed questions submitted by audience members. Reading one audience question, Koerner asked Wax, “How important is maintaining America’s white majority for our cultural cohesion and further success?”

A gust of laughter swept the room.

“I think our nation needs a demographically dominant group that represents its culture,” Wax said. “That group should be numerically and otherwise dominant — not exclusive, but dominant.”

The European cultural origin of many Americans, Wax said, is “the secret sauce of our success.”

Wax, who remains a tenured professor at Penn, is currently on suspension with half pay for making offensive remarks and inviting a white supremacist to speak in her class. She has sued the university for racial discrimination, breach of contract, and violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

George Mason University economics professor Garett Jones, who sat on the panel with Wax, proposed a “points-based” immigration system that would prioritize migrants from countries with higher savings rates, lower corruption metrics, and higher standardized test scores.

“Immigration policy, fortunately, can be used to dilute the influence of Americans who are likely to be in that mediocre-to-negative contribution category,” Jones said. “Bringing in new Americans is a way to make America better by changing the composition of the nation through bringing in folks who have the traits that would make our nation better.”

In his keynote address and a subsequent question-and-answer period, Bannon asserted his populist bona fides and took his weeks-long feud with tech billionaire Elon Musk to the podium. Echoing what has become a favorite refrain, Bannon denounced “the apartheid state of Silicon Valley” — an implicit dig at Musk, who grew up in South Africa.

As the two men compete for ideological influence in Trump’s movement and administration, Bannon has found himself at odds with Musk over tax and immigration proposals. Musk emerged in December as a fervent defender of the H-1B visa program, which allows high-skilled immigrants, including many of his companies’ employees, to work in the U.S.

But Bannon on Saturday also praised Musk’s efforts to tear down what he described as the “administrative state.” Musk — who helms the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency — has canceled diversity programs, issued mass buyout offers, and tried to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“DOGE is a weapon. It’s an armor-piercing shell,” Bannon said. “Just like Trump, DOGE is a blunt-force instrument, and it gives blunt-force trauma.”

Bannon said Democrats had shown “they don’t care about the people.”

“The Democrats are so messed up with the donor class and the credential class. You see — over here, that’s what they’re training: the credential class,” he said. “We took the working class.”

Corrections: February 10, 2025

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Harvard Law School student Samuel Delmer moderated a panel on immigration law. In fact, the panel was moderated by Law School student Dean Sherman.

A previous version of this article misspelled the name of George Mason University professor Garett Jones.

—Staff writer Sophia Y King can be reached at sophia.king@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Anneliese S. Mattox can be reached at anneliese.mattox@thecrimson.com.