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{shortcode-471488a28f98f055581c84571bdaf7c7378242a3}teve Bannon opens his speech with the force of fury.

“Days of thunder,” he declares in a booming, gravelly baritone, drawing on his favorite description of the triumphant start to Donald Trump’s second administration. If any attendees at Harvard’s Conservative and Republican Student Conference had started to doze off during the prior panel on economic policy, by now the audience is completely alert.

Bannon, the architect of Trump’s 2016 campaign, is himself almost Trump-like, cracking jokes and working the crowd with a down-to-earth charm. “I was told I was supposed to keep it low-key today, because you guys are — you’re the thinkers and debaters, right?” In a sea of suits and ties, he stands out in an unassuming brown work jacket. An open RedBull is perched on the podium beside him, but it’s not as if he needs it. “You like what you’ve seen so far?” he asks, to cheers and applause. “That’s thought in action. Christmas every day.”

In the crowd — by now, almost 300 strong — are representatives from Harvard’s right-wing student groups: the Harvard Republican Club, the semi-anonymous Salient magazine, and various conservative and Republican organizations from the University’s graduate schools. For the second year in a row, they have banded together to host the conference, now Harvard’s largest organized space for right-leaning students and faculty.

Dotted among them are prominent faces from the MAGA universe and the rare conservative outliers in liberal academia. Economist Oren M. Cass, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns, is there, as is Andrew N. Ferguson, Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Trade Commission. So is Amy L. Wax, the self-described “race realist” law professor whom the University of Pennsylvania sanctioned for making “sweeping and derogatory generalizations” and “discriminatory and disparaging statements” against minority racial groups.

Even Kenneth C. Griffin ’89, the Republican hedge fund billionaire and Harvard donor who publicly broke with the school over campus antisemitism last year, is listed as a top sponsor. (He was not in attendance and, according to the organizers, had no role in setting the conference agenda.)

Bannon and Wax made Crimson headlines for their appearances at the event — Bannon for calling on Trump to cut the flow of federal money to Harvard, and Wax for embracing a “European majority” in America. The attention came much to the consternation of many conservative student group members, who felt that the conference was simply an open forum for political dialogue and that the speakers’ remarks were not representative of campus conservatives as a whole.

But the real significance of Bannon and Wax’s speaking slots is the fact that they happened at all. Trump’s 2016 victory sparked demonstrations in Harvard and across Boston, and prominent University leaders publicly denounced many of his policies — effectively placing Harvard in the “resistance” against his administration. When former Harvard professor Charles A. Murray ’65, who argues for the existence of a genetic link between race and IQ, spoke on campus in 2017, dozens of undergraduates protested outside the lecture hall.

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“I don’t think this would have necessarily happened five years ago that you would have had these sorts of views, or even these personnel, on stage,” says former Trump administration official Jeremy Carl, the author of a recent book on anti-white racism who spoke on a panel with Wax at the conference.

Today, the current has shifted, and the conservative movement on campus has wind in its sails. The conference, held Saturday, Feb. 8, went uninterrupted by protests, and Harvard’s overwhelmingly liberal student body has shown none of the same organized resistance to Trump that they did eight years ago.

Authors for the Salient, who once wrote anonymously behind pseudonyms of great minds are increasingly attaching real bylines to their articles. The Harvard Law Republicans are no longer dormant, and membership in the Harvard Business School Conservative Club and the Harvard Republican Club has ballooned. Even the conference itself has graduated from the Sheraton Commander to the Charles Hotel, a power center in the heart of Harvard Square.

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Perhaps no one seems as optimistic as Michael Oved ’25, the ever-cheerful former president of the Republican Club who helped raise funds for the conference — including, he says, by securing Griffin’s sponsorship. Beaming down from the podium, he celebrates these changes in his opening remarks: “I can unequivocally say that it’s never been a better time to be a Republican at Harvard.”

Despite the wide ideological variance within the loose conservative coalition on campus — old-school Republicans grandfathered in to Trumpism, technofuturists, Christian postliberals and paleoconservatives, Bannon-esque populists, disillusioned former Democrats, and less ideologically driven voters fed up with the status quo — Harvard conservatives are largely unified behind the view that liberal institutions have gone much too far in their embrace of progressive ideals. The backlash against post-Oct. 7 campus protests under Claudine Gay’s leadership has transformed itself into a serious political project: Already Trump has taken aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, pro-Palestinian activists, and federal research funds flowing to the University, with promises of more to come.

While Harvard’s leadership has found itself on the defensive, its conservative students — though still a minority share of the student body — are having a field day. The prestige associated with Harvard and its extensive alumni network positions this generation of new right-wingers to join Trump’s project of restoring an American “Golden Age.” Several conservative undergraduates, including Oved, told me that they and their friends have aspirations to work in the Trump administration. According to Wired, one Harvard undergraduate — Ethan Shaotran ’25 — is already assisting with the Elon Musk-led effort to gut the federal bureaucracy. (Shaotran did not respond to multiple interview requests.)

And some students, especially those influenced by conservative and Christian political thought, see their role more expansively: as the intellectual vanguard leading a reconstitution of the American political order.

It’s still a honeymoon period for Trump, and already, fault lines within the MAGA coalition are beginning to reveal themselves. But that’s far from top of mind for a conservative campus movement emboldened like never before. When I ask Republican Club member Carter A. Stewart ’25 to describe the campus attitude toward Republicans, he puts it succinctly: “We’re winning.”

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‘I Was Scared to Say I Was A Republican’

“I want to defund — and I mean, totally defund — all these universities. These universities work against working class people,” Bannon tells me in his tenth-floor suite at the Charles, a few hours before his keynote speech. “All federal money, all taxpayer money ought to be stripped out immediately.”

In person, Bannon projects the energy of the grizzled commander of a MAGA army. He’s just come from the Salient offices across the street, where he taped two episodes of his podcast, “Bannon’s War Room.” They are episodes 4,255 and 4,256: “WarRoom Takes On Harvard.” (His podcast, Bannon tells me twice, is the second-most popular political podcast in the U.S. behind the “Obama guys” at “Pod Save America.”) At the beginning of our interview, he asks me, “Are you a conservative, or are you just doing it as a journalist?”

When I respond that I’m only a reporter, he quips, “So you’re over here to see the exotic animals.”

Like Trump, a real estate mogul with an Ivy League degree, Bannon has seen the inner workings of the system up close and lived to tell the tale. After a seven-year stint in the Navy, Bannon got his MBA at Harvard Business School — “the West Point of capitalism,” he says. He joined Goldman Sachs as an investment banker, quickly becoming a vice president before leaving to start his own investment firm.

Watching the “hostile takers” in the finance world strip down companies and move their manufacturing offshore marked the beginning of Bannon’s skepticism towards the establishment, but it wasn’t until the 2008 financial crisis that he made the full turn toward populist nationalism. “I had really the awakening that, ‘Hey, this system is completely, totally rigged, and the backbone of this country, working class people, are being forgotten about,’” Bannon says.

Bannon was early to the MAGA movement, and a common view among current Trump supporters is that even Trump’s own appointees held him back from thoroughly implementing his agenda during the first term. Left-wing social politics were also present in full force, reaching their zenith in 2020 as millions of Americans, horrified by the murder of George Floyd, mobilized en masse as part of the Black Lives Matter movement.

At Harvard, University leaders expressed shock and sadness at Floyd’s death, and administrators pledged to increase their programming around systemic racism, including a required course at the Kennedy School and diversity and inclusion initiatives in STEM fields.

Some students pinpoint their redpill moment, so to speak, to around this period — and especially in reaction to Covid-19-era restrictions and shifting official public health messages around masks, testing, and the pandemic’s origins.“I think that the massive institutional failure that was Covid unleashed a lot of the feelings that people already had,” says Stewart, the Republican Club member, “and directed them towards these establishments that are corrupt and full of people who don’t really know what’s going on.”

Still, to be a conservative at Harvard before last year was, at best, disheartening. Right-wing students felt like they couldn’t fully express their views for fear of ostracization, or worse, outright hostility. “When I was a freshman,” Oved says, “I was scared to say I was a Republican.” The little organized conservatism that existed was seen as concerned with “theories and plans and ideas,” as Stewart puts it — not necessarily on building genuine right-wing momentum at Harvard.

The University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss, an enormous influence on conservative scholars including Harvard’s own Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, believed that dissident thinkers in unfriendly times escaped to the world of philosophy. There, Strauss argued, they could write — often in coded terms — about political beliefs that cut against the status quo.

This was, for years, the tactic of many conservative Harvard students, many of whom Mansfield taught before his 2023 retirement: right-wing discourse was centered in explicitly intellectual circles like the Abigail Adams Institute and the secretive, Latin-inflected John Adams Society. Early issues of the Salient after its 2021 revival reflected this approach, emphasizing anonymous engagement with timeless questions.

For many of the few open conservatives on campus, even supporting Trump was a bridge too far. The Harvard Republican Club spurned Trump in 2016, calling him a “threat to the survival of the Republic.” Four years later, it issued a half-hearted endorsement, praising many of his policies while also detailing a list of his shortcomings, including diminishing the “dignity and distinction” of the Oval Office.

Trump’s denial of the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol further marginalized his supporters on campus. “I crossed him off my list entirely,” Mansfield told The Crimson in 2023. Pressure from hundreds of affiliates caused the Institute of Politics to sever ties with IOP alum Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) in 2021 over her support of the efforts to overturn the election, and the Republican Club itself signed a statement condemning the riots.

Even today, some campus conservatives hesitate to sign on to the debunked election fraud theory. When Bannon, during his speech, repeats the claims that former President Joe Biden received votes from nonexistent voters, some audience members clap enthusiastically — but others remain conspicuously silent.

From Marginalization to Empowerment

{shortcode-3f3e57005be88db1897fbe0aab6a26f27b883007}ut as Trump made a gradual return from political exile to renewed dominance over the Republican Party, Harvard’s own conservative movement was picking up steam. A handful of dedicated conservative students, like Oved and Harvard Law School student Matias J. Mayesh, threw themselves with zeal into creating social spaces for like-minded classmates to meet and engage.

Oved, who ran HRC in 2024, brought a slew of right-leaning business leaders and political officials to its events in an effort to appeal to the less politically engaged. Both students helped organize the inaugural Conservative and Republican Conference last year. (Peter A. Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley investor and a guru-slash-patron of the New Right, headlined the event.) “People get friendlier with each other,” Mayesh says. “I just think it’s positive.”

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Other students attribute the widening of Harvard’s right-wing spaces to the power of Trump himself. “If we’re looking at broadening the tent, the tent was only broadened to the right,” the current HRC president, Leo A. Koerner ’26, tells me over coffee at Faro Cafe. Koerner, who also chaired the John Adams Society last fall, admits he probably wouldn’t have been an HRC member in 2016. By Trump’s third campaign, the vibe was different. “We had a lot more athletes, we had a lot more guys who were slightly fed up, and they were like, ‘Okay, this is kind of fun,’” Koerner says.

The group’s 2024 endorsement contained none of the waffling or moral hang-ups from its 2020 letter. Rather, the policy-laden document, which made no mention of the Jan. 6 attack, amounted to nothing less than a full-throated embrace of Trump’s agenda. “I think moving the energy towards Trump, pushing the club to the right, has been a huge part of making it work and making it grow,” Stewart says.

The shift toward building real conservative power manifested even among the explicitly intellectual circles. In an interview on Bannon’s podcast at the Salient offices, Harvard Law School student Samuel Delmer describes a shift in the John Adams Society from the 2015-era “libertarian conservative, kind of ‘normie con’” ideology to becoming “really, really MAGA.” And compared to 2021, current issues of the Salient, while still drawing on conservative intellectual traditions, show an increased focus on the real possibilities of political change

For a while, Harvard itself stayed mostly insulated from the growing right-wing resentment of elite institutions. The University lost its high-profile Supreme Court battle over affirmative action in the summer of 2022, but Gay was sitting comfortably in the presidency, filling liberal students with hope for a progressive future on campus.

All that changed on Oct. 7, when Hamas’ attacks on Israel unleashed a wave of pro-Palestine activism on campus. Under Gay’s leadership, administrators’ comparatively timid response to what many saw as growing antisemitic sentiments among left-wing students fueled backlash — led in large part by Rep. Stefanik, conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo, and hedge fund billionaire Bill A. Ackman ’88. Gay was summoned to Capitol Hill in December 2023 to answer for the school’s handling of pro-Palestine protests, but her infamous testimony only reinforced the increasingly widespread view that Harvard had lost its way. The final straw came when Gay was accused of plagiarism spanning her entire academic career, calling into question her basic fitness to serve in the role. She resigned within weeks, just two days into 2024, but the damage to Harvard’s reputation was done.

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For critics of the University, it was becoming increasingly clear that the problems plaguing Harvard all traced back to the same source: DEI. To them, it was DEI that divided the world into the oppressors and the oppressed, with Jewish people falling decidedly in the former category; it was DEI that marginalized conservative voices and fueled a culture of ideological orthodoxy; and it was DEI that subverted meritocratic ideals to allow individuals they saw as unqualified, like Gay, to rise to positions of influence in the name of social justice.

“When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values,” Ackman wrote in the Free Press the day after Gay’s resignation. “Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves.” A longtime Democratic donor, he would go on to endorse Trump that July.

At the conference, I notice Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, who is suing Harvard over campus antisemitism, sitting at my table during the first panel. I introduce myself and ask him how campus culture has changed since Oct. 7. “Just as I was entering this room, many students have told me that they have collectively sighed a sigh of relief,” he says. “Many feel that a new page is being turned.”

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Kestenbaum graduated from Harvard Divinity School last summer but is in Cambridge for the conference and a visit to Harvard Chabad. Like Ackman, he is a former Democrat — he supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2020 — but has become something of a cause célèbre for the pro-Israel right. He has testified before Congress on campus antisemitism, appeared on Fox News several times, and even secured a speaker spot at July’s Republican National Convention, where he issued a full-hearted endorsement of Trump.

Today, he tells me, he’s just come in from D.C., where he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to the United States — days after Netanyahu and Trump held a press conference in which Trump called for the U.S. to assume control of Gaza.

To Kestenbaum, the resurgence of Trump has opened the floodgates for conservatives to freely critique the University. “Things you could not criticize just a year ago, like diversity, equity, inclusion, like the blatant antisemitism, like the blatant anti-Americanism being propagated in many of these classes — now, not only can we start talking about them, but we can actually start to change the conversation,” Kestenbaum says. “We can change the policies. We can change the structure of Harvard.”

For its part, Harvard has been forced to play ball with its right-wing critics. Conservatives had long insisted that political self-censorship was pervasive and serious, but the post-Oct. 7 uproar sparked genuine soul-searching among faculty and administrators. The crisis culminated in a remarkably blunt faculty report assessing the state of the classroom environment. “Whatever the causes of explicit and implicit censorship on campus,” the authors wrote, “it is clear that Harvard hasn’t found a way to address them robustly.”

The University adopted a policy of not commenting on hot-button political issues, and Harvard College has invested heavily in its Intellectual Vitality Initiative, looking to promote practices of constructive disagreement among undergraduates. Some conservatives at Harvard see the changes as confirmation of their victories.

“A lot of administrators are like, ‘Alright, yes, we have to make space for conservatives,’” says John A. Burtka IV, the president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and a speaker at the conference. “Even at a place like Harvard, I think the pendulum is sort of swinging back.”

However genuine Harvard’s growing embrace of viewpoint diversity may be — many of the people I interviewed questioned whether it wasn’t just a cynical attempt to woo back donors — it’s clear the University has a lot on the line. (Harvard spokespeople declined to comment for this article.) Trump has already tried to slash National Institutes of Health support for indirect research costs as part of his currently unsuccessful effort to freeze all federal funding, threatening more than $100 million for Harvard. Vice President JD Vance, when he was a Senator, floated raising the endowment tax to as high as 35 percent.

To many outside the MAGA movement, this seems like a coordinated attempt to hobble the University, and I ask Stewart whether he is pessimistic about Harvard’s long-term prospects. Not at all, he responds. “People are gonna get fired to fix Harvard, but it can be fixed,” he says.

“One hundred years ago, this was a place where people used to have serious ideas and considered life and took life very seriously,” Stewart says. “And it can be like that again.”

‘The Tip of the Spear’

{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}he aspirations of Harvard’s young conservatives don’t stop at internal reform within the University. Rather, the same factors that have manufactured generations of left-leaning leaders — access to powerful alumni, exclusive internships, and the power of the Harvard name — are poised to allow this class of students an express ticket to genuine political influence. The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, had a table at the conference, but the real plum jobs are in the new administration.

“I want to work at the Trump White House,” Oved tells me. “So I hope you don’t make me seem like I’m not a Trump guy, because I am. And you can put that on the record.”

Burtka, who runs the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, says many alumni of his organization — which focuses on right-wing education in the liberal arts — are now populating consequential roles in Trump’s orbit. The Ivy League right, he says, is the “tip of the spear.”

“I would say a lot of students, probably a lot of alums, are certainly going into the administration,” Burtka says. “If they’re not going in now, in two years or four years, I think they’re ready to do that.”

Beyond Oved, who says he’s more concerned with conservative economic policies than cultural issues, other right-wing students see themselves as the harbingers of a completely new Trump-age politics. “I think the idea is that we’re trying to create a vanguard that will continue to push things to the right, right? And I think that that is what MAGA is all about,” Delmer, the Law School student, says on Bannon’s podcast.

“We’re really trying to open up the New Right space, I think, at Harvard,” Delmer says. “And that is the objective of the conference.”

Bannon, among the loudest and most aggressively populist voices in Trumpworld, has recently made headlines for denouncing Musk as a “truly evil person” and branding the tech moguls who cozied up to Trump after the election, including Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, as self-interested “broligarchs.”

I wonder aloud to him whether a class of Ivy League-educated Republicans is bound to reproduce the same elite politics against which he has rebelled. But Bannon assumes an optimistic view, telling me that it’s natural that students go on their own journey before joining the populist front. “I’ve never been the, ‘Wear the suit and be part of the Young Republican Club’ type,” he says. “But I like the fact that it takes courage to do that here, because the culture’s so overwhelmingly against it now.”

It’s a theme that emerges whenever I bring up the tension between Trump’s populist roots and the elite trappings of Harvard. Many point out that major MAGA power players — Bannon, Vance, Trump himself — sport degrees from Ivy League universities.

“You sort of go through the fire and, A, you kind of know what you believe by the end of those times, if you’re constantly defending it. And B, you just are a little bit more bold,” says Carl, the right-wing author who spoke at the conference. Carl himself holds degrees from both Yale College and the Harvard Kennedy School, and understands firsthand what growing up in that educational environment can do to conservative students. “Some of the hardest core people you could imagine in the movement are the sorts of people who went through Yale, who went through Harvard.”

Burtka, who looks to great leaders of the past to understand modern politics — his book, “Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill,” is handed out to conference attendees at the registration table — says the leadership of elites is nothing new, even in populist movements.

“If you’re gonna go to Rome, look at Augustus,” Burtka says. “Totally elite.”

“He was an executive who aligned himself with the common person and actually sort of made it his aim to sort of constrain the oligarchs,” Burtka continues. “This movement of an individual elite or several elites that align with the common people in opposition to the more entrenched, aristocratic classes, is, like, a pretty classic move in politics.”

In my conservation with Koerner, the HRC president, I bring up Patrick J. Deneen, the New Right political theorist who calls to replace the ruling class with a new elite more connected to the disillusionment of everyday people. I ask Koerner if he sees this process of elite replacement in action at Harvard.

“It’s not going on currently. If it is going to go on, it will come out of places like this, and it will come out of institutions that were built among students from this place, but not by this place,” Koerner responds. “It will not be the IOP.”

Stewart also embraces a vision of creating a class of right-wing thought leaders within Harvard. “That’s what we’re trying to do here. That’s why we read what we read. That’s why we learn the things we can learn from Harvard,” he says. “But most of the work is just independent. It’s us trying to figure out, ‘Okay, what are the things we need to get done, what are the ideas that matter, what are the ideas that don’t?’

“We built that all on our own,” Stewart concludes, “and now we’re in a position where we can use it.”

Bannon’s address to the conference emphasizes this turn from intellectual debate to real political influence. He throws in a nod to the ancient Greeks: “As Aristotle said, it is action in which character is revealed. The fear of God’s punishment is the theater of action. That’s where you're going to end up. That’s where this education should lead you.”

Insist that “they’re not going to stamp me out,” he implores the crowd. Tell them: “I am going to rebel.” He receives a raucous standing ovation.

— Magazine writer Elias J. Schisgall can be reached at elias.schisgall@thecrimson.com. Schisgall was an Associate Managing Editor of The Crimson’s 151st Guard. Follow him on X @eschisgall.