Elizabeth McGill steps down from her position as president of the University of Pennsylvania and the chairman of the Board of Trustees, Scott Bach, resigns as well. Harvard s President Claudine Gay and MIT s President Sally Kornbluth are also on the hot seat after they testified in front of Congress about anti-Semitism on college campuses and were grilled by Rep. Elise Stefanik, D-New York, who asked them, "Does this violate your university's policies against hate?" And none of them could answer the question, because of course, certain types of hate on campus is totally allowed, and certain types on campus are totally verboten. That's the way it works on campus, and that's how it works in college campuses, in fact. So, the President of Penn has now been ousted from her post, and Scott Bach s resignation took effect immediately as well, which means that no permanent replacement will be chosen until a permanent replacement is found. Bill Ackman's letter to Harvard s Board of Directors says it all, and he's got a theory about why Harvard should be mad at Harvard, and why Harvard is mad about it. And Bill Ackmann's letter says it's because Harvard's President is a bad leader, and not because she's anti-Semitic, and it's time for a new one to take over the reins at Harvard and replace her with someone who's not anti-racist and anti-bigotry-obsessed like her or anti-colonialist but because she doesn't understand what she's got in common with the Jewish people. And she's not Jewish, and she doesn t have a problem with that? she's a white, Jewish people who don't get to vote for Israel, and doesn't like it . and she's Jewish, right? And she s a white. And that's not the only one who has a problem, and so on and she s got a problem because she s not Jewish enough at Harvard s president, and her name s so she needs to be fired from Harvard s board, and can't get a job that s not black enough, she s , but she s Jewish enough, right ? can she do it, right, right ? and so much more? and more in this episode, and much more! on this episode of the podcast, featuring Rachel Maddow.
00:00:00.000Well, folks, the big news over the weekend is that the University of Pennsylvania's president, Elizabeth McGill, stepped down from her position as president of the university.
00:00:08.000So too did the chairman of the board of trustees, a person named Scott Bach.
00:00:11.000They're both leaving because McGill, along with Claudine Gay over at Harvard, as well as the president of MIT, they all testified in front of Congress where Elise Stefanik, who's the representative from New York, grilled them about anti-Semitic chants on college campuses, genocidal chants on college campuses, and she asked them pretty clearly, and over and over, why exactly doesn't this violate your university's policies against hate?
00:00:34.000What exactly would violate your university's policies against hate?
00:00:37.000And none of these presidents could answer the question, because of course, certain types of hate on campus is totally allowed, and certain types of hate on campus, totally verboten.
00:00:45.000That is the way that it works on college campuses.
00:00:48.000In fact, certain rational statements So, the president of Penn has now been ousted from her position.
00:00:52.000to the sea, Palestine shall be free, which means the obliteration of the Jewish state.
00:00:57.000Even when said directly in front of a bunch of Israeli Jews.
00:01:01.000So the president of Penn has now been ousted from her position.
00:01:06.000She resigned on Saturday, according to the New York Times, four days after she appeared
00:01:09.000before Congress and appeared to evade the question of whether students who called for
00:01:12.000the genocide of Jews should be punished.
00:01:15.000Support for McGill, which had already been shaken in recent months over her approach
00:01:18.000to a Palestinian literary conference and the university's initial response to the Hamas
00:01:21.000attack on Israel on October 7th unraveled after her testimony.
00:01:24.000This is according to the New York Times.
00:01:26.000By Saturday evening, one day before Penn's board of trustees was expected to meet and fire her, she said that she would quit.
00:01:31.000Scott Bach, the board's chairman, said in an email to the Penn community, That she had voluntarily tendered her resignation and an hour later he tendered his resignation as well.
00:01:39.000There are two other presidents who testified in front of Congress and who are also now on the hot seat.
00:01:44.000That of course would be Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of MIT.
00:01:48.000Now it is very unlikely that Claudine Gay goes anywhere.
00:01:51.000She has been touched by the hand of the diverse God and that means that she will go nowhere.
00:01:55.000However, When it comes to McGill, McGill did not fulfill any of those prerequisites.
00:01:59.000She was a white lady, and that means that she could be ousted pretty safely by the DEI contingent, and then she will presumably be replaced by somebody of more diversity.
00:02:07.000Apparently, McGill will remain as the university's leader until an interim president is chosen.
00:02:11.000She will also stay at Penn as a faculty member in the law school.
00:02:14.000Bach's resignation took effect immediately as well.
00:02:18.000The vice chair of Penn's board is a person named Julie Platt, and she chairs the Jewish Federation of North America's board.
00:02:22.000She's not expected to lead the Penn board permanently.
00:02:25.000Now, what's really fascinating about what's going on at these universities is that some of the activities of venture capital are now being used against a lot of these university boards.
00:02:35.000So a lot of these university boards are comprised of people who are major donors, and venture capitalists are part of that major donation group.
00:02:42.000One of the people who's been leading this charge is Bill Ackman.
00:02:44.000Bill Ackman is the CEO of Pearshing Square.
00:02:51.000He's not on the board, but he's certainly a donor to Harvard in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:02:55.000He pulled his donation and now he's going after Claudine Gay.
00:02:58.000He wrote a letter to the Harvard Governing Board of Directors.
00:03:00.000One thing to know about Bill Ackman, this guy is like Liam Neeson of Venture Capital.
00:03:04.000When it comes to hostile takeovers of other corporations and restructurings, he has one particular set of skills and he is putting them to heavy use today.
00:03:11.000The letter that he wrote To the Harvard Governing Board of Directors says this, Dear Members of the Harvard Governing Boards, In her short tenure as president, Claudine Gay has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history because of her failure to condemn the most violent barbaric terrorism the world has ever seen for supporting, rather than condemning, 34 Harvard-branded student organizations who hold Israel, quote, entirely responsible for Hamas's barbaric acts, for failing to enforce Harvard's own rules on student conduct, and for other failures of leadership,
00:03:39.000President Gay catalyzed an explosion of anti-Semitism and hate on campus that is unprecedented in Harvard's history.
00:03:44.000In light of Harvard's leadership position, President Gay's mishandling of October 7th and its aftermath on campus have led to the metastasis of anti-Semitism to other universities and institutions around the world.
00:03:55.000President Gaise's actions and actions have gravely interfered with the ability of students to continue to learn at Harvard and for its faculty to teach and do research.
00:04:02.000Classes are continually disrupted by protesters who use bullhorns and other disruptive methods, and the offending students suffer no disciplinary action.
00:04:09.000Literally as I write this post, says Bill Ackman, highly disruptive protests are underway inside Widener Library while students are trying to study for final exams and finish their term papers during the last two weeks of the semester.
00:04:19.000Winner Library is, of course, a massive historic library over at Harvard University.
00:04:28.000As a result of President Gay's failure to enforce Harvard's own rules, says Ackman, Jewish students, faculty, and others are fearful for their own safety as even the physical abuse of students remains unpunished.
00:04:37.000President Gay's absurd explanation for the lack of disciplinary action for the October 18th HBS incident was that the university cannot discipline students until the Harvard University PD and FBI investigations are complete.
00:04:48.000To date, I am unaware of any disciplinary actions taken for the October 18th incident nearly two months later.
00:04:53.000President Gay's principal response to address anti-Semitism on campus was to set up a task force.
00:04:57.000Within a few weeks of its formation, Rabbi Wolpe, the only rabbi on the task force, publicly announced his resignation from the committee.
00:05:03.000President Gay's failures since October 7th led to a congressional investigation of her conduct.
00:05:07.000This outcome on its own is an incredible embarrassment to Harvard.
00:05:10.000I've been unable to identify any former Harvard president being the subject of a congressional investigation since the establishment of Congress in 1789.
00:05:17.000President Gay's entire testimony was abysmal.
00:05:19.000She was disrespectful and condescending to Congress.
00:05:21.000She was a hostile witness, unwilling to answer direct questions from members.
00:05:25.000In words that will forever live in infamy, President Gay's response to the question, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules regarding bullying or harassment?
00:05:32.000President Gay said, quote, it depends on the context.
00:05:36.000And he goes on to talk about the destruction of Harvard University, about the evils of DEI practices.
00:05:42.000Those would be diversity, equity, and inclusion practices at the Harvard University Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and Belonging, which was formed under Gay's oversight.
00:05:52.000He points out that there has been tremendous discrimination, and he suggests, of course, that they search for a new president.
00:06:03.000Despite the fact that there is new evidence that has been uncovered by the journalist Chris Rufo, who has been excellent on university campuses, as well as Chris Brunette, about the fact that Claudine Gay, in her PhD thesis, apparently plagiarized multiple sections But that apparently is not going to be enough to discredit her either.
00:06:25.000Right now, 300, I guess the number's up to 500 as of this morning, faculty at Harvard are urging against gays removal.
00:06:32.000And one of the reasons that they are urging against that removal is because they don't want to hand some sort of victory to Elise Stefanik, who's the Republican congresswoman from New York.
00:06:41.000A bunch of the professors are suggesting that it's very important that gay remain Because after all, she is very diverse.
00:06:49.000And she does represent something very important for the university system.
00:07:59.000Why exactly are these institutions of supposed higher learning sticking with their embattled leaders?
00:08:06.000Why couldn't those leaders have simply condemned chance, like from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free?
00:08:10.000Or there's only one solution, intifada revolution, both of which are genocidal calls for the destruction of Jewry.
00:08:16.000To answer that question, there's another question we have to answer.
00:08:18.000What exactly is the purpose of higher education at this point?
00:08:21.000Obviously, universities serve a purpose that wouldn't have stuck around this long if they hadn't.
00:08:25.000But that purpose has shifted over time.
00:08:27.000Originally, if you go back to the Middle Ages, universities were an extension of church education.
00:08:31.000Those who completed what was called the trivium, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, dialectics is logic, and the quadrivium, math, geometry, music, and astronomy, moved on to universities.
00:08:40.000Over time, universities evolved into centers of learning, in which scholars would pass along age-old wisdom and search for new answers.
00:08:47.000Citizens who went to university were expected to become leaders in their fields and to be inculcated in the values of their societies at the same time.
00:08:54.000Over time, however, the centralization of a separate intellectual class led universities down two paths.
00:09:00.000The first path towards specialization in industry, the preparation of a professional class, the reason that you need a degree in order to serve as a scientist or as a lawyer, for example.
00:09:08.000The second path was towards social experimentation.
00:09:12.000Now, the path toward professional specialization has been quite often very positive.
00:09:15.000You get a lot of very brilliant minds in a room talking physics, you're going to get better results than if they were just all over the continent somewhere.
00:09:21.000Obviously, the science emanating from our universities has changed the world and it continues to do so.
00:09:25.000Which is why, when we were at UCLA, the people who were called South Campus majors, those would be the science majors, were considered the useful people.
00:09:32.000But all of this has also meant an increasing credentialization of society in which a university degree is considered an entree to the workforce altogether.
00:09:40.000Because again, those degrees were not restricted to being in the sciences, they were then extended out to the liberal arts.
00:09:46.000The second path, social experimentation, has been the way of universities since at least the mid-19th century.
00:09:51.000As religion started to fade in Western life, and as universities increasingly became battlegrounds for various replacement theories, social experimentation became the key purpose of the university.
00:10:02.000New theories, very fancy theories, of living from bureaucratic centralization, German progressivism, to broadening of social rights sprang from universities.
00:10:11.000Universities became the seedbeds of social change.
00:10:14.000The new purpose of the university and the education system in general was well summed up by the theorist John Dewey, who is considered one of the most important educational philosophers of all time.
00:10:24.000He's an early 20th century progressive, very much on the left.
00:10:27.000He argued that universities were designed to create a progressive citizen, a citizen ready to take part in the rebuilding of a great state unbound by history and religion.
00:10:36.000As Dewey said, quote, education has to undermine and destroy the accumulated
00:10:40.000and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages.
00:10:43.000When social life in general has become more reasonable, more imbued with rational conviction,
00:10:47.000less moved by stiff authority and blind passion, educational agencies may be more positive
00:10:54.000Then they will work in harmony with the educative influence exercised willy-nilly by other social surroundings
00:10:59.000upon an individual's habits of thoughts and belief.
00:11:02.000Experts, you see, would guide the life of the nation.
00:11:04.000This was early 20th century progressivism.
00:11:06.000You see it at the top levels of the Democratic Party today.
00:11:09.000That philosophy, sort of top-down intelligentsia rule, was not relegated to the United States, far from it.
00:11:15.000Dewey's own thought was an outgrowth of German progressivism, where similar ideas were dominant.
00:11:21.000It's no wonder that German universities actually represented a center of power for Hitler, as historian Neil Ferguson writes this week, go ahead and quote.
00:11:28.000A hundred years ago in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany.
00:11:32.000German academics acted as Hitler's think tank, putting policy flesh on the bones of his racist ideology.
00:11:37.000The intelligentsia, as Neil points out, also have an ugly habit of creating coalitions of the supposedly dispossessed to act as shock troops for their new ideas.
00:11:46.000Certainly that was the case in the 1960s, when universities in the West were reacting not against the supposed handcuffs of God and theology and religion, but now against the supposed evils of nationalism.
00:11:57.000Now the universities would be directed toward a new sort of social engineering, toward global citizenship, in which the atomized individual would be the prime mover, so long as that individual declared fealty to the intellectual movement of the time.
00:12:10.000Thus, Herbert Marcuse, who was one of the progenitors of the so-called new left in the 60s, posited on university campuses teaching from Berkeley a free sex lifestyle in order to create a non-repressive civilization.
00:12:21.000He preached the end of capitalism, which of course had led to Western power and nationalism and what he called fascism.
00:12:28.000He argued for the banning of alternative viewpoints, which stood against tolerance for his cause.
00:12:33.000Tolerance that represses non-tolerant ideas.
00:12:36.000No wonder revolutionary students during the 1968 para-student revolt carried banners reading Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.
00:12:44.000The chaos in the streets of the West during the 60s and 70s was born in the universities of the West.
00:12:49.000Well, today's universities promote a new sort of social experiment.
00:12:53.000This experiment is called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
00:12:56.000Unlike its more brash and open predecessors, DEI makes far more humble claims, at least publicly, to donors.
00:13:03.000They don't want free love or revolution or pacifism.
00:13:06.000They simply want more diversity, more inclusion.
00:13:10.000They want that in the entire body politic.
00:13:12.000They want more equity, modeled by the universities, of course.
00:13:15.000But here's the thing, the same people who stood behind the old revolution stand behind the new revolution.
00:13:20.000DEI is the result of something called critical theory.
00:13:22.000A belief that all systems of power are reflections, not of merit, but of exploitation.
00:13:28.000That all hierarchies are not a reflection of people being good at things and people being bad at things, but of the people at the top hurting the people at the bottom.
00:13:35.000And the only corrective to that exploitation is to completely restructure those systems of power by appeal to group identity and coalitional politics.
00:13:42.000Put together a coalition of the dispossessed to overturn the hierarchy.
00:13:46.000In this view, anyone successful must be denigrated as evil.
00:13:50.000If you're successful, not because you're good at things, it's because you're a bad person.
00:13:53.000Anyone unsuccessful must be upheld as good.
00:13:56.000Because, of course, they're a victim of the evil system.
00:13:58.000This oppressor-oppressed binary is the motivating feature of life on campus today.
00:14:05.000And it results in oppression and discrimination, just as surely as the German university's revolutionary idea resulted in oppression and discrimination.
00:14:13.000In both cases, that resulted in discrimination against the Jews, always.
00:14:18.000That is why the presidents of major universities struggled to answer basic questions about anti-Semitism in front of Congress.
00:14:24.000This new philosophy is focused entirely on that oppressor-oppressed binary.
00:14:28.000That binary cannot be allowed to fall.
00:14:31.000For if it falls, then so does the entire revolution, the entire ideological edifice that acts as the basis for the revolution against an American meritocracy.
00:14:40.000If a few Jews need to be threatened with swastikas and elimination, To preserve DEI, well, then that's the way it's gonna have to go.
00:14:46.000DEI is the purpose of the universities.
00:14:49.000Understand, it is not just something universities do.
00:16:56.000Because there is a newly formed anti-Semitism committee at Stanford University, right, to fight discrimination against the Jews at the university.
00:17:04.000And of course, the reason discrimination is happening against Jews at the university is the same reason that discrimination has been happening against Asian American applicants to universities, which is the Jews are considered disproportionately successful in the hierarchy of oppression.
00:17:16.000Therefore, they can't be included in the oppressed coalition.
00:17:20.000So, apparently, the faculty co-chair of the committee is a person named Ari Kelman, who's an associate professor in Stanford's Graduate School of Education and Religious Studies.
00:17:28.000In 2017, he wrote a paper with other Stanford faculty members, it was called Safe on the Sidelines, and he said anti-Semitism was not a problem on college campuses because, quote, different representation of campus culture come from the difficulties in defining what counts as political speech and what counts as anti-Semitism.
00:17:46.000When you're yelling about how Jews should be wiped out, that is just a form of political speech.
00:17:50.000This is what Claudine Gay and the rest of these idiots meant.
00:17:53.000What they mean, and they're not idiots, they're smart, they're nefarious, what they mean is that it is a form of political speech to call for the wiping out of the so-called oppressor class and the Jews are part of the oppressor class.
00:18:05.000That's what Kelman is saying here too.
00:18:09.000He served on the academic board of a group called Open Hillel.
00:18:12.000So Hillel International is a Jewish support group on campus, basically, where students, when I was at Harvard, it's a place where you go to get a meal, and it's where they have Sabbath services and all the rest.
00:18:23.000Well, Hillel International is pro-Israel.
00:18:25.000And this person has been working to open up Hillel International to wildly anti-Israel events because, of course, he is anti-Israel.
00:18:58.000You have three university presidents, all of whom are supposedly intellectuals who can't answer a basic question.
00:19:03.000So, was SNL's skit about the stupidity of our higher education officials, or was it about how Elise Stefanik, the person asking very simple questions, was the bad person?
00:20:00.000And keep in mind, if you don't say yes, you're gonna make me look good, which is really, really hard to do.
00:20:07.000Okay, so the entire skit, again, because they're protecting the university presidents, because of that, because of that, they cannot even get a laugh at the expense of university presidents, because to acknowledge that these university presidents are enmeshed in an ideology that is evil would mean to undermine the very basis for so much of the Democratic Party coalition.
00:20:26.000The Democratic Party could embrace just a broader agenda, an agenda that used to be what was called like the John Edwards kind of agenda, the two Americas, more kind of Class-based agenda as opposed to the racially-based agenda that is DEI.
00:20:41.000But they won't do that because they believe that since 2012, since Barack Obama won in 2012, the Democrats have believed that they have created a coalition of the oppressed that is electorally undefeatable, which is wild since they lost in 2016.
00:20:51.000But they're going to keep pushing this.
00:20:54.000The Democratic Party is going to keep moving along with this, which is why, of course, the headline from the New York Times is, quote, as fury erupts over campus antisemitism, conservatives seize the moment.
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00:22:30.000Okay, so what is the outcome of all this likely to be?
00:22:34.000So if you are somebody who doesn't like the DEI agenda, because it is bad, actually it's quite horrible, it's not going to be enough to just fire a few of the presidents.
00:23:10.000Way this can go, number one, is that you could just explode the DEI agenda.
00:23:14.000Which would mean that people would have to become less sensitive on campus.
00:23:18.000It would mean that, yeah, you can chant some really bad stuff about Jews, but it would also mean that you could say some, you know, reasonable things like boys are not girls on campus without being dragged into the dean's office.
00:23:27.000That you could be, quote-unquote, fatphobic by mentioning that being overweight is bad for your health without being dragged into the dean's office.
00:23:33.000In other words, the answer to this would be to get rid of DEI entirely.
00:23:47.000Obviously, the media and members of the intelligentsia are trying to move along with the idea that there need to be more controls over speech.
00:23:54.000See, the problem with what the university president said the other day, they were making the argument that free speech means that people have to be able to chant genocidal slogans against Jews.
00:24:07.000If I had not been banned from half the college campuses in America, I'd be open to that argument.
00:24:12.000If a bunch of other people had not been banned from college campuses, including students, the same university that said that Kyle Kashuv, a student at Parkland, Who, in a group text, when he was 16 years old, wrote a racial slur, had to be banned from Harvard because he couldn't be admitted because of that.
00:24:30.000That same university says that you can chant genocidal slogans on campus.
00:24:35.000If the idea is that this double standard is what is to prevail, we'll just add Jews to the double standard, that doesn't solve the problem at all.
00:24:41.000In fact, in many ways, it makes the problems worse because, again, the hypocrisy is perfectly obvious to everyone.
00:24:46.000And yet, that is precisely what is being called for by, wait for it, the intelligentsia.
00:24:51.000So a person named Claire O. Finkelstein, an Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at University of Pennsylvania, she has a piece titled, To Fight Anti-Semitism on Campuses, We Must Restrict Speech.
00:25:13.000But she says, As a result, universities have had to tolerate hate speech, even hate speech calling for violence against ethnic or religious minorities.
00:25:21.000University presidents are resisting this conclusion.
00:25:24.000Rather than confront the conflict between the commitment to free speech and the commitment to eliminating the hostile environment facing Jewish students on campus, many simply affirm their commitment to both, or by time, by setting up task forces to study the problem.
00:25:35.000Countering speech with more speech might just mean adding to the hateful rhetoric on campus and would not solve the problem.
00:25:41.000So instead, this person recommends that universities shut down more speech.
00:25:46.000Universities have a duty under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to ensure their campuses do not descend into quote-unquote hostile environments that effectively exclude students of ethnic, religious, or racial minorities from receiving the benefit of educational programs and activities on campus.
00:25:59.000In fact, Penn has already been sued by two Jewish students alleging the university has become an incubation lab for virulent anti-Jewish hatred.
00:26:05.000Though open expression and academic freedom are critically important values in higher education, says this professor, there are other values that universities must promote as well.
00:26:13.000For example, encouraging civil dialogue across differences, et cetera.
00:26:15.000Now, does anyone believe the universities have been promoting this stuff?
00:26:46.000This is why you're seeing, over at University of Wisconsin, insane battle right now between the Universities of Wisconsin and the Republican-led state legislature.
00:26:55.000So, the Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature, they wanted to curb DEI funding.
00:27:02.000The Board of Regents had agreed to vote on a deal between the University of Wisconsin leadership and Assembly Speaker Robin Voss that would freeze and cap DEI hiring in exchange for funding held up by the legislature.
00:27:12.000But then, the Board of University of Wisconsin rejected that proposal 9-8.
00:27:18.000They left $800 million in taxpayer funding of the University of Wisconsin system on the table and the future of the system's DEI offices in limbo.
00:27:27.000The Board also voted not to table the vote for further discussion, effectively killing the deal.
00:27:32.000So on Friday, it looked like they had a deal to basically freeze hiring in sort of the DEI centers of University of Wisconsin.
00:27:38.000Not even to just dismantle DEI entirely, which is what actually needs to happen in the Wisconsin legislature, but to just freeze hiring.
00:27:45.000And the University of Wisconsin Regents said no.
00:27:48.000They said no, we will leave $800 million in student funding on the table in order to preserve DEI.
00:27:55.000Because again, they have now made it clear that they're not interested in their students.
00:27:58.000They're interested in creating this brand new, magical, socially experimenting world in which DEI is the ultimate principle.
00:28:07.000According to Voss and his fellow Assembly Republicans, quote, That is how strongly these university leaders will hold on to DEI.
00:28:51.000First of all, I think you should have withdrawn your money years and years and years ago.
00:28:53.000I literally wrote in 2004 that people should be withdrawing their money from universities, not based on antisemitism, based on the evil ideology that was being promoted by the DEI crowd.
00:29:28.000Instead of doing that, why not instead use the money that you are going to use to give to a bunch of fat cat professors at Harvard University living on their pension and writing garbage about the intersectional identity of black queer women or something.
00:29:41.000Instead of that, why not take that money and, I don't know, hire some people out of high school so they can avoid completely the maw of the government educational complex.
00:30:22.000How about instead of that, if you've got a student who's about to go to a liberal arts university, the reason you as a parent are sending your student there, I don't blame you.
00:30:31.000The reason that you do that is because you are attempting to get your kid a job.
00:30:36.000But why don't business people all over the country get together and start hiring kids out of high school?
00:30:40.000At Daily Wire, I would much rather hire some kid who got a 1500 on his SATs and had a 4.0 GPA out of high school than after that kid had been through four years of a Barnard college program.
00:31:19.000Okay, speaking of free speech, in just one second, we'll get to Alex Jones, who's just unbanned on X. First, let's talk about the way that light comes into your house.
00:31:30.000So in our house, you know, the thing that I love best about our house, lots of windows, lots of light coming into the house.
00:31:35.000But what that means is that when I have the window coverings on, they can't look hideous.
00:31:38.000Because, let's be real, if you don't have any window coverings, well then everyone can see in your house whenever, and also all the heat, and it's... Just go to Blinds.com, okay?
00:33:06.000Sign up today at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
00:33:08.000Okay, meanwhile, speaking of free speech, so again, what the left wants on campuses is less free speech, because this will somehow make things better.
00:33:15.000And that, of course, is not true, because it ends up being free speech for some, but not for others.
00:33:26.000In fact, people forget this, because of the onlines.
00:33:30.000But way back when, in 2018, when Alex Jones was banned from social media, I actively stood up for Alex Jones.
00:33:36.000I think that Alex Jones should not be banned from Apple and Facebook simply because the standards that are being used by a lot of these social media companies are extraordinarily vague.
00:33:58.000And he was banned apparently over following around a CNN reporter and kind of harassing the reporter or asking questions.
00:34:02.000That was a really ridiculous reason to ban him from Twitter.
00:34:06.000But Twitter was doing this sort of stuff routinely and it was actually pretty terrible because they unpersoned him all at once.
00:34:12.000Now again, it's hard to find less of an Alex Jones fan than I am.
00:34:16.000The sort of soft peddling of Alex Jones that Tucker Carlson did on his ex show the other day I thought was absurd.
00:34:22.000I mean, Alex Jones did, for years, promote a conspiracy theory that Sandy Hook was a false flag attack in order to do a gun grab and that there were crisis actors who were being involved in that thing.
00:34:32.000We want total bans of all semi-autos, just as we knew they would do.
00:34:37.000You've heard me say, look for a big mass shooting at schools.
00:35:19.000I knew they jumped on it, used the crisis, hyped it up, but then I did deep research, and my gosh, it just pretty much didn't happen.
00:35:28.000Alex Jones promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which suggested that there was some sort of pedophile ring being run out of Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington, D.C., and one of his listeners then went crazy and decided to shoot the place up.
00:35:40.000Now, that's not Alex Jones' fault because Alex Jones didn't tell him to shoot the place up, but he was promoting that conspiracy theory and then had to apologize for it.
00:35:47.000I will warn you, uh, this story that's been the biggest thing on the internet is a rabbit hole that is horrifying to go down.
00:35:53.000Now, this is tied into Podesta with thousands of emails.
00:35:56.000WikiLeaks have come out with Podesta going to rituals where they drink blood.
00:36:02.000This is the kind of stuff Alex Jones does routinely.
00:36:04.000The attempt to turn him into a voice of reason is contra to what Alex Jones himself has said in his Sandy Hook lawsuit.
00:36:10.000He literally said, I act a part when I am on my show and I say things I do not think are true on my show in order to act that part.
00:36:19.000OK, so this is not a defense of Alex Jones as a human being, because frankly, I don't think Alex Jones is totally worth defending as a human being.
00:36:27.000I also don't think that everybody that I agree with, that's the standard for being on X. I don't think that's the standard for being on social media.
00:36:32.000I mean, hell, I've argued that people I think are a lot worse than Alex Jones should be allowed to be on social media.
00:36:38.000Because the problem is, once you have a gatekeeper, that gatekeeper is going to be a problem.
00:36:43.000The gatekeeper, you better trust that gatekeeper a lot, and I don't.
00:36:47.000I don't trust any of these gatekeepers very much.
00:36:49.000And so I'd rather have a platform like X with Alex Jones on it, And other ridiculous human beings, like Suleiman Ahmed, who's a liar with regard to, for example, the Israel-Gaza conflict.
00:37:00.000I'd rather have those people on X than not have them on X. Because, frankly, I don't think that I'm the sole repository of all truth, nor do I think that even if I'm right all the time, which of course I may, of course I think that, nor do I think that people don't have a right to view other opinions.
00:37:17.000So Musk, over the weekend, unbanned Alex Jones.
00:37:20.000He admitted that this was bad for business, because it is.
00:37:23.000And here was Musk then having a conversation with Alex Jones about all of this.
00:37:28.000Now, I will say, do I think this is a smart PR move by Elon Musk to do some sort of conversation with Alex Jones?
00:37:34.000I do think that there is a difference in kind between, of course you're allowed to use my platform and I, perhaps the most powerful person and certainly the richest person on earth, I'm going to have a conversation with you sort of allowing you to soft pedal all of your ridiculous and ludicrous nonsense.
00:37:48.000I don't think those are the same thing at all.
00:37:49.000I think there are plenty of people who ought to be on X that I personally disagree with, but I also don't think are worthy of like a great conversation because I just don't think that they're wonderful people and I really don't think they're within my Overton window.
00:38:00.000But my Overton window is not X's Overton window and nor should it be, by the way.
00:38:04.000Because if you want a platform to remain a platform, it has to include even people you don't think are inside the Overton window.
00:38:10.000In any case, here was Elon having a conversation with Alex Jones over the weekend.
00:38:15.000Look, I honestly don't really know you and you don't know me, but one of the questions I really have to just get out of the way, and you've probably talked about this already before, is the whole Sandy Hook thing.
00:38:23.000and and you know because I it's not like obviously if you know if somebody's
00:38:32.000denying or that murders of children that's not cool at all you know and so
00:38:40.000just what exactly did you say and and and what what is going on with that
00:38:45.000situation you know I just I would like to actually hear what did you say and yeah.
00:38:52.000The internet exploded and it was a top story off and on for years with all these professors and former school safety people and all of them Saying they believed it was a drill.
00:39:07.000And I simply covered them covering that.
00:39:10.000What was entered in court against me in both cases where I was found guilty by judges, like in New York, there's a judge in Trump's case, not even a jury, his real estate case.
00:39:21.000And, and then years later, after Trump got elected and after I was deplatformed, it made me bigger.
00:39:30.000And so suddenly I would wake up and there would be sometimes 100 articles or more a day, every major news channel saying that I was currently saying nobody died, currently sending people to their houses, currently peeing on graves.
00:39:45.000I don't even know these people's names.
00:39:49.000Now, now, and I'm, and I believe their children died and I understand all that, but I'm saying, imagine, I was not deplatformed, no mention of the school shooting in Connecticut for like six, seven years.
00:40:05.000Then they go back to my timeline and it turns out it was a big New York PR firm, Democratic Party.
00:40:12.000They run hundreds of articles, sometimes a day, but a week for over a year.
00:40:18.000Suddenly it becomes a big story again.
00:40:21.000Okay, so, um, that is not a good explanation, because it has literally nothing to do with what he originally said about Sandy Hook, which is what Elon was asking him about.
00:40:27.000By the way, the exact quotes from Alex Jones about Sandy Hook are, quote,
00:40:30.000My gut is, with the timing and everything that happened, this is stage.
00:40:33.000And you know, I've been saying the last few months, get ready for the big mass shootings.
00:40:45.000You got parents laughing, ha ha ha, and then they walk over to the camera and go boo hoo hoo, and not just one but a bunch of parents doing this, and then photos of kids that are still alive they said died.
00:42:02.000The removal of him from these supposedly neutral services is ridiculous and not based on any hard and fast policy.
00:42:09.000If they wanted to say, The hard and fast policy is if you lose a billion dollar court case on defamation, then you don't get to be on the platforms.
00:42:15.000Fine, at least that's a standard, but you don't have any standard.
00:42:16.000You're just arbitrarily applying a standard.
00:42:19.000And the problem is when you arbitrarily apply that standard, then the reactive right tends to say,
00:42:24.000okay, you arbitrarily applied the standard, therefore you're rational and good,
00:42:28.000which is what Tucker did with Alex Jones the other night, right, he had him on his show,
00:42:31.000and he spent like an hour and a half trying to make Alex Jones not only look good,
00:42:37.000And I don't know why Tucker is doing that.
00:42:38.000I think Tucker, again, is much more mainstream, legitimate voice, and much more intelligent than that.
00:42:44.000So I'm not sure what game he's playing there.
00:42:45.000But again, that game, which is Alex Jones is like a rational, reasonable person.
00:42:51.000That is not the same question as does Alex Jones belong on X. So Elon Musk, totally right to put Alex Jones back on X. By the way, I think you should broaden it out to include people I absolutely despise and think are terrible.
00:43:00.000And if they are removed, if they are returned to X, I think that that will be, you know, again, a good thing in the sense that X ought to be an open platform.
00:43:10.000I'm saying that, even while I say that that will include people who are viciously anti-semitic, racist, horrible people who I really, really don't like.
00:43:16.000Because if the argument is that these are platforms, then the platforms have to be platforms.
00:43:21.000They cannot, in fact, just be publications by another name.
00:43:24.000By the way, when we're talking about Alex Jones, okay, Alex Jones's lawyer said in 2017 during a custody battle that his footage could not be entered into the evidence Because Alex Jones is playing a part.
00:43:36.000So he said that all of the crazy, which was being used by his ex-wife as a rationale for custody, they said, actually, he's not crazy.
00:43:49.000We'll get to the latest in the Israel conflict again.
00:43:52.000The lack of clarity from the Biden administration is creating significant risks in the Middle East because this is what they do.
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00:45:09.000Israel is seeing tremendous military success.
00:45:11.000One of the things that's happening is as they go into these areas that were supposed to be clear of civilians, they're arresting everybody who's a military age male in these areas.
00:45:18.000And then one of the things that they're doing is the same thing that the United States government does, by the way, when it arrests people very often.
00:45:24.000They have them undress and they make sure that they don't have contraband
00:45:27.000on them, in this case, weapons on them, suicide vests on them. And of course, the media are latching
00:45:31.000onto this. So the same media that have been doubting Israel's word about, you know, like
00:45:35.000women being raped and brutally murdered, that same media is like, oh my God, I can't believe that
00:45:39.000they're undressing these men before they arrest them. This is literally one of the
00:45:43.000things that they are doing, which is totally Hamas is engaging in some of the worst human rights violations ever, and Israel is arresting people and not just shooting them, keeping them alive, will release many of these people, but they undress them temporarily to make sure they don't have bombs on them, and the media are like, oh my God, what a human rights violation.
00:46:27.000These are members of Hamas who are going up to a humanitarian aid truck and they're just removing all of the resources and they're reloading it into the Hamas trucks.
00:46:51.000But the White House is still doing this ridiculous routine where they believe that if they send mixed signals, somehow this is going to tick off terrorists less or something.
00:46:58.000So, Antony Blinken He has to uphold the lie that so much liberal foreign
00:47:05.000policy has been based on for the last, I don't know, since the end of World War II, which is that
00:47:10.000there is a community of nations, that everyone really, the default is that everyone gets
00:47:14.000along and war is an aberration, as opposed to the world is a really mean and nasty place
00:47:18.000and sometimes you have to go and you have to kill the bad guys.
00:47:22.000So instead, it's all this sort of weird happy talk combined with the underlying understanding that all of liberal foreign policy is based on a lie, which is that everyone is friendly, the UN is a wonderful place, and all of the rest.
00:47:35.000So, Anthony Blinken yesterday, he was asked about Israel's continuing military operations.
00:47:40.000Israel, by the way, has killed fewer people with every bombing than any modern military in history in an urban area.
00:47:46.000They've dropped, at this point, hundreds of thousands of bombs at this point.
00:47:51.000They're killing about 0.8 people per bomb dropped, which is a way lower ratio than, say, Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever else you're talking about urban combat.
00:48:01.000Again, the United States' position so far has been Israel needs to defeat Hamas, and then we want to look to the Arab world as though we are tugging Israel's chain, because if we don't, Israel will just go hog wild, which, of course, is not true.
00:48:12.000The reality is that a cold and collective policy by the West of, if you screw with us, you find out, would be better.
00:48:20.000Not passionate, not overweening, but F around and find out is an excellent foreign policy.
00:48:26.000That is the kind of foreign policy that ends with, wait for it, deterrence.
00:48:41.000We're focused on what is their intent, and do they have in place, are they taking necessary measures to make sure that they're acting in adherence with international humanitarian law and international law?
00:49:12.000If Hamas got out of the way of civilians instead of hiding behind them, if it put down its weapons, if it surrendered.
00:49:20.000Okay, so, um, he's right about that last part, but notice how he responds every time the media goes, but we've seen the results, oh my god, people are- Yes, it's called a war, and Hamas is overtly violating the laws of war, but the minute that Martha Raddatz says the thing, then Blingham, well, you know, we're seeing a gap, we're seeing- Name a war where you don't.
00:50:03.000It should be blown up and the earth should be salted beneath it.
00:50:06.000It is a horrible place, but Tony Blinken can't just say the obvious because to say the obvious would mean undermining the international order.
00:50:14.000Can we be clear about how foreign policy has historically worked over the course of the last several centuries?
00:50:17.000The only thing guaranteeing any level of solidity in foreign policy during the 18th and 19th centuries was British hegemony over the waters.
00:50:26.000And then, that hegemony waned, and we got World Wars I and II.
00:50:30.000Then the only thing that guaranteed any level of world peace was the United States having hegemony, largely over the waters.
00:50:36.000And as that begins to wane, we are getting chaos.
00:50:39.000This notion that the United Nations has been the thing standing between the world and global war since 1945 is the dumbest load of garbage I've heard in foreign policy talk in a long time.
00:50:48.000Anyway, here's Antony Blinken trying to uphold the precious, the UN.
00:53:08.000First, what we've seen coming from the Houthis directed at ships in that area is a threat not just to Israel, not just to us, but to dozens of countries that are engaged in shipping that depend on this corridor for goods moving about every single day.
00:53:25.000And this has actually implicated the interests directly of well over a dozen countries with crews from all sorts of different places.
00:54:01.000If you're gonna do that, you have to make them find out.
00:54:04.000That is the only way to make that happen.
00:54:07.000Now, the real reason why the Biden administration is so concerned about all of that is because, of course, they're deeply afraid that if they're mean to the Houthis, that somehow they're going to lose Muslim votes in Michigan.
00:54:15.000First of all, if you're mean to a terrorist group and you lose Muslim votes, maybe that's just the price of doing business.
00:54:20.000Honest to God, if you as a party can't stand up to Muslim terrorists because you're afraid that Muslims in Michigan aren't going to vote for you if you stand up to terrorists, maybe there comes a... That is kind of an amazing condemnation of your party, is it not?
00:54:33.000We're told constantly by the media that the right has to dissociate from white supremacists.