Harvard Says Yeah No

Research grants save lives. And for Christ's sake they're not Trump's to withhold so he can buy a Tesla for Laura Loomer.

Harvard is so filled with money and egomaniacs that I didn’t think the day would come that I’d be cheering it on as if it were little David with his handmade slingshot.

But here we are. So I made a tiny-dollar donation to my grad-school alma mater today, the first donation I’ve ever made to an institution that, since 1636, has never needed my crumpled singles.

It was a token of one alumna’s gratitude. As you’ve surely heard by now, Harvard looked hard at Trump’s caps-locks shakedown—“bow down before me or I’ll seize for myself the money allotted to you by the people’s representatives in Congress”—and said, simply: yeah no. Harvard, as it said in a letter, “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”

Yeah no.

The yeah no is one of the great locutions of American English. A positive and a negative combine to form much more than the sum of their parts. The yeah no is a “no” that is both more decisive and more deliberative than a no alone. You stop the hard sell before the words are out of the goon’s mouth, before he’s even said, capish?

The yeah no says mmhm, bud, we capish. We hear you. We get it. And there’s no way in hell.