Crazy rant letter to Harvard. Response is mockery.

Secretary of Education Linda A. McMahon's letter to Harvard is real.

It was direct from her office over her signature.

The marked-up responses are not real.

At least they are not the official response from Harvard. Other people are posting these, because it is both funny and easy to do.

Versions of the response are circulating. You may have seen this one:

Or this one:

Don't fall for the claim that this is Harvard's official response. It is citizen trolling. Secretary McMahon's letter says the federal government will stop making grants to the university, implying, and perhaps herself believing, that the federal government is essentially providing generalized gifts to Harvard, maybe funding the football team or dining halls. In fact, the federal government contracts with Harvard, especially its medical schools and teaching hospitals, to carry out research on projects of national interest. It is more a matter of paying a contractor to do work of mutual benefit to the mission of Harvard as a center for research and of the National Institutes of Health to fight disease. Or NASA's mission. Or the defense contracting that Harvard does and doesn't talk about.

It isn't clear that Secretary McMahon understands that. Or that she cares.

The mockery brings her letter to public attention for its extraordinary sloppiness, its incorrect capitalizations, its misused words, its skipping around from subject to subject, its slipping into ALL-CAP emphasis. It reads like a Trump "Truth" written with thumbs in the early morning, and sent with minimal proofreading.

More important is what the letter reveals about the real motivation for the attack on Harvard, Columbia, and other universities. It isn't about being offended by pro-Palestinian protests on campus or by the universities ignoring antisemitic language as part of a larger university tradition of allowing free expression of unpopular ideas -- the original complaint.

This is a generalized political attack. Universities are the enemy. They are institutions coded and positioned as liberal, as Democratic, as the source of resistance against Trump's larger populist MAGA project. Trump has an agenda and it is carried out by loyal partisans. It must overcome obstacles, including laws, courts, Congress, respected institutions, and public opinion that might slow the work. Getting it done in this second term of office requires making clear that friends are helped and enemies are attacked from any direction possible. Universities are the enemy, right along with the news media, with lawyers who represent clients that oppose Trump or his allies, with former Trump administration officials who crossed or slow-walked Trump, with businesses that might dare to embarrass Trump by splitting out a surcharge required by a tariff.

Pardon friends. Prosecute enemies. Scare people into compliance or silence.

The points of attack in this letter are ones chosen to create populist resentment. Who is admitted and who is not, the politics of international students, the size of the endowment, the presumed antisemitism. This is a political rally speech designed to get cheers from people who hate the libs.

In that respect, a mocking reply in the form of marked-up errors is a response in kind. It is a fun response, but it isn't useful for Harvard in the great political and culture war that it finds itself. No one likes being mocked, and this is exactly the kind of smarty-pants show of contempt that creates ill-will, as in Hillary Clinton's "deplorables."

It becomes a schoolyard shouting match:

McMahan: You are rich elitists and you aren't as good as you think you are!

Response: You are too stupid to write a coherent letter!

There are more people who write sloppy letters and don’t want to be shamed for doing so than there people who notice the rampant errors. This is probably a "win" for Trump.

The McMahon letter needs to be taken seriously for what it is, a formal letter outlining the political case against Harvard and institutions like it, written as a political rant.

Here is the letter as written, taken from screen shots: