(Daily Signal)—Real accountability is coming to higher education thanks to President Donald Trump.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced Friday that Columbia University agreed to pay $21 million to settle antisemitism charges following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks.
“Under the guise of promoting free speech, many universities have actually become a haven for antisemitic conduct, often in violation of the universities’ own time, place, and manner policies, as well as civil rights law,” EEOC acting Chair Andrea Lucas said in a statement. “The Trump administration is committed to combating antisemitism wherever it rears its head, including the workplace—and universities are workplaces too.”
This comes on the heels of an over $200 million settlement between Columbia University and the Trump administration.
Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the settlement a “monumental victory for conservatives” who for a very long time have criticized the operation of elite universities but have been unable to make them mend their ways.
Education Department Secretary Linda McMahon celebrates Columbia University bending a knee:
“This is a monumental victory for conservatives who wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left-leaning professors.”pic.twitter.com/fFyZ4qSBCM
— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) July 24, 2025
What’s significant is not just that Columbia will pay up. The school, according to the New York Post, reportedly agreed to “submit to independent monitoring to ensure it is complying with merit-based hiring and admissions requirements.”
The Post reported that Columbia also, “agreed to end all programming that discriminated against faculty or students—bringing it into full compliance with the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning race-based affirmative action—and create some yet-to-be-announced faculty positions in the name of broadening intellectual diversity.”
The school will have to provide all hiring and admissions data to the federal government to help ensure that they won’t be skirting the law like many schools clearly intend to do. Never underestimate higher education’s creativity in finding ways to racially discriminate.
The bottom line is that Columbia University’s settlement is a huge deal.
Columbia was set to lose over $400 million if they lost their legal dispute with the Trump administration. By settling, they keep some of their money, but agree to reforms (and avoid what could have been found in discovery during the case).
As Chris Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote on X, the Columbia settlement is a good template for how to deal with other publicly funded higher education institutions in the future.
This is an incredible accomplishment by the Trump Administration, and codifies many of the principles in our Manhattan Statement on Higher Education. Next step: require all universities to abide by those principles in order to qualify for federal funding. https://t.co/rw4ivX9MqW
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 24, 2025
If they want to keep getting taxpayer dollars, they need to demonstrate an actual, verifiable commitment to reform. For too long they’ve gotten away with violating both the law and the public’s trust.
As should be clear by now, elite universities have no intention of reforming from within.
Whatever arguments about the need for ideological balance or merit-based admissions, it’s clear that the universities will simply carry on unless faced with lawsuits or defunding. And that’s because they’ve become almost universally leftist institutions, where the only marginally “conservative” forces on campus are still to the left of your typical congressional Democrat.
They are well-funded, ideologically narrow credentialing factories for the global elite. Until now, they’ve faced virtually no accountability despite their dependence on U.S. taxpayers.
Besides ideological conformity and lunacy, higher education in America has truly become a racket. Some schools, like Columbia and Harvard University, sit on (until very recently tax-exempt) endowments in the tens of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, they expect the American people to bail out student loan debt, which is really a giveaway to the universities.
But times are a changing. The blank check Americans once gave to higher education has been rescinded. Now, the American people rightfully expect them to change or see their taxpayer funding dry up. The excuse that Americans must tolerate all their nonsense in exchange for critical research is a farce.
As Jay P. Greene, a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, wrote for The Daily Signal in March, if schools like Columbia fail to comply with the law, research grants can be sent elsewhere.
The American people have leverage over higher education and a president who is clearly willing to use it. It would not be surprising if after the Columbia settlement there will be a cascade of settlements by other universities, including the biggest one of all: Harvard.
Watch: President Trump tells me Harvard “wants to settle” after Columbia University agreed to pay $200M in fine. 💰
“The bottom line is we’re not gonna give any more money to Harvard… we want to spread the wealth to other schools,” he says to me.
He vows to “ultimately” win… pic.twitter.com/BV5IUjJyYv
— Iris Tao (@IrisTaoTV) July 25, 2025
The Wall Street Journal reported that the administration is in talks with Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, Brown, and Harvard to hash out similar deals as the one agreed to by Columbia. Remarkable.
The settlements certainly won’t solve all of higher education’s problems, but this could very well be the end of the beginning of the fight to restore education in America.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.