Aaron Sabarian, founder of the Washington Free Beacon joins me to talk about the radicalization of his time at Yale and how it shaped his life and how he became a conservative voice on campus. We talk about how he got started in his career, and the radicalizing moments that shaped him into the person he is today.
00:00:45.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:51.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are gonna fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:14.000Hey, everybody, we have a very special conversation with you today.
00:01:19.000A very smart person who honestly deserves some of those awards they keep giving out to those fake journalists.
00:01:48.000So I came into Yale, uh moderate Democrat, and then kind of went through a uh series of sort of incremental radicalizing moments that pushed me.
00:01:59.000I don't know how far right they pushed me, but they definitely pushed me further and further right.
00:02:04.000And by 2020, I certainly felt more comfortable within right-wing institutions than left-wing ones.
00:02:11.000What what were those radicalizing events?
00:02:13.000Yeah, so I mean there were really two at Yale.
00:02:16.000The first is that um Yale has this thing called the Yopolitical Union, which is comprised of all these little kind of debating societies, political parties.
00:02:23.000And I came in thinking, well, I'm a moderate Democrat, so I'll join the party of the left, right?
00:03:09.000Much more so so right at the start, it just seemed like there was a sort of vibrancy to the conservative intellectual scene that was was lacking on the left.
00:03:16.000And then the the second big radicalizing moment was um the there were all these protests in 2015 over cultural appropriation, Halloween costumes.
00:03:26.000There was a there's a famous video in which uh uh at the time he was an administrator, he got encircled in the courtyard of one of the residential colleges at Yale and and basically accosted.
00:03:37.000I mean, he wasn't he wasn't physically hurt, but he was surrounded by these jeering students who were saying, you haven't made this a safe space, you know, this is supposed to be a home, free speech doesn't matter, so on and so forth.
00:03:48.000And then things just kind of spiraled out of control from there.
00:03:50.000And I guess the maybe sort of two point fifth radicalizing moment is that during that time I was the opinion editor of the Yale Daily News, the campus paper, and so I had to sit there and feeled all of the op-eds from real I mean of all sides of the campus debate, but from the protesters.
00:04:09.000And it's like I remember sitting next to a girl editing her piece that was literally arguing that demands for rational debate were a form of white supremacy designed to police the emotionality of women of color.
00:04:21.000And in some ways, the creepiest part of all this is that this girl, I had had a I had a class with her.
00:04:28.000She's very it's like in terms Of just raw IQ, very smart, but she was saying this just absolute and I kind of had to sit there and pretend that I thought it was a valuable perspective and edit it and say, yes, yes, your voice matters and and edit it, make it better.
00:04:42.000Um, seeing up close what the alleged best and brightest actually thought uh was pretty radicalizing.
00:04:52.000Aaron Powell And now she's probably like a circuit court judge or something.
00:04:55.000I yeah, I'm not sure exactly what she's doing now.
00:04:57.000But uh I mean I know she went to law school, so that's you never know.
00:05:01.000Yeah, or she's like an FBI agent or something.
00:05:03.000But no, that's the that that that I think is an important thing to spend a little bit of time on is that this was not University of Wisconsin Madison, no offense to them.
00:05:13.000But this is this is the pipeline for our nation's decision makers.
00:05:25.000Well, but it was what I thought was funny, you know, that the the students in that episode, uh the fake students, you know, are are trying to defend abortion rights or whatever and say kind of normal liberal things.
00:05:37.000Honestly, what they're saying in South Park, the kind of fake, you know, parodies of liberal students was a lot more reasonable than what the kids at Yale were actually saying in 2015, right?
00:05:47.000It's not like they were saying, well, you know, women's right to choose, and who are you to decide when life began.
00:05:52.000No, I mean this was full-on, you know, you cannot debate anything or disagree with any minority or you're racist.
00:05:59.000I mean, and it really the sort of Fox News caricature was in fact accurate.
00:06:04.000I mean, it there really was no daylight between how I think kind of conservative media portrayed those kids and how they were in behavior.
00:06:14.000Has it gotten worse or better since 2014 at Yale?
00:06:19.000Uh it probably I would assume that in 2020 it got pretty bad.
00:06:24.000I think it kind of recovered a bit post-2015, then 2020 probably hit a nadir.
00:06:29.000And then you know, now with Trump in office, I I expect that there is slightly more intellectual freedom in the classroom.
00:06:37.000I do get the sense conservative kids on campus are a bit more involved.
00:06:45.000I I will also tell you that the undergrad, as bad as that was, was never as crazy as Yale Law School, which went through a period of just absolute insanity, where from what my friends who attended it told me it really was like Sophia communism.
00:07:14.000Why is it that Yale would get to a place where you have to feel the nap-ed where someone says I I wrote I wrote down like that that basically I can't I should be able to dismiss or have a higher elevation of my opinion based solely on immutable characteristics.
00:07:34.000Why has that been taken seriously at our nation's illegal.
00:07:54.000So people would just pretend to go along with it, right?
00:07:58.000And would never pretend to believe it.
00:08:01.000And and one very illustrative example is that as the opinion editor of the YDN, I also had to write sort of the the editorial that was the paper's position, and we would have meetings where we would decide what the paper's position should be.
00:08:16.000And during the meeting where we were supposed to decide what to say about the protests, it became clear right away that if you spoke up and said, hey, I think this is going too far, what about free speech, you were gonna immediately be shouted down as a racist.
00:08:28.000And so no one did, but I had people come up to me afterwards and say, after we had basically democratically quote unquote decided to vote vote to endorse the protests, a lot of people told me, look, I I didn't really agree with that.
00:08:41.000I have issues with the protests, but I felt like I couldn't speak.
00:08:43.000Yeah, I I remember one girl in particular literally said that almost verbatim to me.
00:09:17.000It m metastasizes into media and medicine is another big one.
00:09:21.000I mean it all of them really corporate America, but I think medicine is that is a story that that has not fully, I think, been been appreciated.
00:09:30.000Just how I did a lot of reporting in the We have these stories, by the way.
00:09:51.000And and so I I mean these ideas about kind of race-based redistribution that were inculcating in the academy did not stay confined to a critical race theory seminar at Harvard Law School.
00:10:04.000I mean they became government policy in not just you know a city or or county, but in like multiple U.S. states um at least three New York, Utah, and Minnesota all had these race conscious triage schemes where basically the way it worked was that if you were not white, you automatically got two extra points added to your COVID risk score.
00:10:28.000And two points was about the same weight they would give to things like obesity or diabetes.
00:10:34.000And so if you held everything else equal the nonwite person was going to win every time and there was really very I mean there was not any serious scientific argument that, you know this was an exact way to quantify risk or that all non white people were really at you know that much more risk of developing serious COVID.
00:10:55.000I mean this was all nonsense but they did it anyway.
00:10:59.000And they only stopped after I reported on it and then people threatened to sue them.
00:11:04.000Aaron Ross Powell Yeah I have the story I mean it's incredible.
00:11:06.000So just to be clear that life-saving COVID drugs were given in a rationed way against white people to prefer black or Latino people or or as they say Latinx ethnicity.
00:11:20.000Yep yep and I would I would note too that it it literally in some of these schemes just lumped in every single person who wasn't white which like even if you thought that maybe one particular racial group for some genetic reason was at a much higher risk of COVID and there could be some reason why we really should take that into account that's not what they were doing.
00:11:39.000They were just saying well of these groups which in fact had very different rates of COVID mortality they're all not white so we'll just kind of create a category for nonwise and give them extra voice.
00:11:49.000In your story in Minnesota health officials have devised their own ethical framework that prioritizes black 18 year olds over white 64 year olds for COVID drugs.
00:12:03.000Now I think this was monoclonal antibodies if I'm not mistaken.
00:12:07.000Which actually was a very effective treatment.
00:12:10.000Remember this was in January 2022 so we're about a year and a half into the whole thing.
00:12:15.000And monoclonal antibodies were very promising immediate developments to kind of to help.
00:12:22.000So this is not just some trivial thing.
00:12:24.000But an 18-year-old black kid in downtown Minneapolis like an 18-year-old Somalian kid could get monoclonal antibodies easier than a 64 year old veteran that fought in Vietnam.
00:12:35.000Yeah so holding constant all of their health conditions right that's true.
00:12:40.000But of course the thing is that age was the biggest predictor of COVID mortality by far.
00:12:54.000I mean, how did we as a country, thankfully, I want to get into that in a second, have we actually turned the page on it, but this parasitic ideology, what do you want to call it, woke mind virus, whatever, it went into medicine where we are less likely to give out life-saving drugs just because of some sort of oppression framework we're working from.
00:13:16.000I mean, I think there's a lot of reasons why it became such a powerful force in medicine.
00:13:21.000One of them is that the field of public health kind of...
00:13:24.000from its inception was was based in sort of what you might call proto-woke premises, right?
00:13:30.000because the whole idea behind public health, right, is that there are social forces that affect the spread of disease.
00:13:35.000Now, of course, that's true and uncontroversial at a sufficient level of generality, but you can see how if that's your mindset to look for social forces that influence uh epidemiological patterns or influence the spread of disease, you're going to be more open to these kinds of DEI critical race theories that that prescribe rationing drugs based on race, right?
00:14:04.000Um then the other, and again, this is a little more speculative, but I I get the sense that to to become a doctor, you have to jump through all of these hoops and it it may select for a certain kind of person who's smart but perhaps also somewhat conformist and just as willing to kind of do whatever uh the check whatever boxes they're told to check.
00:14:26.000Um and unlike, say, law, which has its own problems, but at least in law, you know, when doing legal training, there's some emphasis on getting the other side, debating.
00:14:36.000There's nothing like that in medicine, so I just think medicine hasn't developed really any antibodies against wokesome.
00:15:03.000I mean, they didn't even try to hide it.
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00:16:41.000And that's because I mean this is not a racist thing to say, but black Americans tend to be more overweight in the you know 40s or 50s, especially black women than their counterparts.
00:16:50.000So that's that's just that's just because of statistical facts.
00:16:53.000Yes, yes, and and there's also probably difference I mean, it's also class differences, right?
00:16:59.000Like I think I mean, one thing that's interesting is actually one of the states of Utah later claimed that one of the reasons they abandoned the scheme is that it wasn't even working to get the drugs to minorities.
00:17:09.000And reading between the lines, I well, right, and of course it that wouldn't make it okay, but I think the whole premise is so sinister.
00:17:16.000But it I would just point out that, you know, it it may well have been that the problem here was that, you know, the people they wanted to get the drugs to just weren't coming in the door.
00:17:26.000And so all they really ended up doing was kind of erecting barriers for white people.
00:17:29.000It didn't even do accomplish its desired goal.
00:17:41.000And if your goal was to reach them, there probably were ways you could have done it, but sort of this crude scheme of racial preferences was not.
00:18:36.000It it it's it's really amazing how even in red states this stuff uh has has spread very far.
00:18:42.000You see this in universities too, where people have this idea that the DEI programs are much worse at Ivy League schools than they are at, you know, public schools in red states.
00:18:53.000Um there's a great uh another journalist named John Saylor who's done really good FOIA work um FOIN just all of these red state universities, and they put things in writing like, you know, we don't want to hire a white man.
00:19:10.000So it's yes, it it really any kind of this is a bit of an overgeneralization, but but generally institutions that are not directly subject to the levers of electoral power, or that um state governments have kind of taken a hands-off approach to that it got its hooks in to all of them, right?
00:19:46.000Control Hollywood, you control the schools, you control the music, you control you control the NFL, but you also have to control our monoclonal antibody distribution.
00:20:05.000Well, I mean, one thing about wokism is that it doesn't really acknowledge kind of a the distinction between the public and private sphere, right?
00:20:14.000You hear people say everything is political, right?
00:20:16.000And so all the institutions of civil society are are seen as sites of political contestation.
00:20:23.000Look, uh another this is changing now, but for a while when civil rights law was exclusively really used by the left as kind of a uh uh tool of social engineering, uh that was another thing, right?
00:20:39.000There were there were legal pressures that I think helped uh accelerate and reinforce the woke takeover.
00:20:46.000I don't want to reduce it all to that.
00:20:48.000But like, you know, hostile environment complaints, right, do create incentives for corporations to censor speech and to do these sorts of trainings that morph into DEI.
00:20:57.000Um I do think that is changing now because there are new civil rights enforcers in town and they have adopted a very different interpretation of the civil rights laws.
00:21:05.000And so we're seeing now that uh civil rights law does not necessarily have to lead to wokeness, but I think that until the right sort of seized the levers of the civil rights state and started using it very aggressively, it just the civil rights bureaucracies were all populated by progressives, and that was a big that was a big kind of bureaucratic mechanism that pushed it.
00:21:28.000Yeah, I mean, and part of the the civil rights regime is built on disparate impact, which is can you comment on that?
00:21:37.000So for for many years, you know, although quotas were officially outlawed, there was this concept called disparate impact, which was that if you do a kind of race-blind test, employment test, but it has a disparate impact, you know, more uh whites than blacks pass the test,
00:21:54.000then the test, unless you can prove like beyond a reasonable doubt, basically, that it is sort of in essential, that it is de like you know, inextricably tied to the job qualifications, and that this is really the only way to assess people, unless you can prove that, which is very high bar, the test was basically unlawful, right?
00:22:15.000And now that is starting to be changed because uh President Trump has issued an executive order uh revoking one of his most important liability.
00:22:23.000Yeah, disp going after disparate impact.
00:22:25.000It's possible that some of the Supreme Court cases that kind of solidified this concept will get overturned Depending on what the litigation is.
00:22:32.000But yeah, I mean, for many years there was this this phrase called goals and timetables where the government would say, well, you know, you don't have to you don't have to adopt quotas.
00:22:40.000You just have to have goals and a timetable for reaching them.
00:22:44.000And, you know, if you don't, that could be evidence of unlawful discrimination.
00:22:48.000We're not saying it is evidence, it just could be.
00:22:50.000And so of course, in in practice, that means that you kind of do have to have at least some approximate racial balance which leads to some of these discriminatory policies.
00:23:00.000Continuing on on the whole medical theme, you have another story that was published in May of last year, uh, which is a failed medical school, how racial preferences supposedly outlawed in California have persisted at UCLA.
00:23:18.000So at UCLA, um to my knowledge, this is maybe the first time this has ever happened that multiple members of the admissions committee basically came to me and and told me anonymously about the affirmative action they were doing and provided various emails and even some internal data that kind of backed up that there was um a lot of racial preferences going on.
00:23:44.000And the reason they came forward was that they just thought it was intrinsically unjust, but B, they were really worried because they were seeing medical students uh start to really fail basic tests of medical competence and show up to their clinical rotations not knowing anything.
00:24:18.000No, no one who was worried about this was wearing a MAGA hat.
00:24:21.000I'm sure they all voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris or almost all of them did, right?
00:24:25.000But they were worried because they just saw kids showing up and they couldn't, you know, name basic arteries and stuff, and they were not the catholic.
00:24:35.000And they were failing um these things called the the shelf exams, which you take after each clinical rotation.
00:24:40.000There were some cohorts where like uh 50% of the kids would fail.
00:24:46.000And that that had never happened before.
00:24:48.000It would there was a huge spike in the failure rate on these exams.
00:24:52.000Um and this all happened after a kind of new dean of admissions came in and really pushed uh the DEI very aggressively.
00:25:00.000Um your reporting says up to half of UCLA medical students now fail basic tests of medical competition.
00:25:08.000Yeah, it's not half of all UCLA medical students.
00:25:12.000What it is is basically they're in each clinical rotation, you it's a little hard to explain, but basically, basically there were certain classes at UCLA, certain rotations where like half of the kids in that small cohort were failing.
00:25:27.000And you know, and then you also see that the overall failure rate goes from like very low to something closer to like 20 or 25 percent.
00:25:37.000Um, you know, look, probably the average graduate of UCLA medical school is still very good, but there are far more people who are not up to snuff than there used to be, and that's really what those statistics are captured.
00:25:49.000Well, what are the implications of this?
00:25:51.000I mean, well, you know, the obvious one is well, you know, someone makes it through and then they take out your appendix and your kidney inside of your appendix.
00:25:59.000Yeah, you know, that's the kind of nightmare.
00:26:02.000I mean, I mean, the other thing that may happen is that some of the folks graduated, they they may be good enough to be very basic, kind of primary care doctors and and competent at sort of more basic fields of medicine, but they're not going to go into high-level research.
00:26:17.000And the problem with that is part of how medicine advances and and what these schools are supposed to do is to be engines of medical innovation.
00:26:25.000Um so if all of the schools um do this sort of heavy affirmative action, and fewer and fewer of the graduates are really uh qualified to do the kind of cutting-edge research that pushes the frontiers of medicine forward.
00:26:43.000You know, you may not see it's not necessarily that the surgeons are gonna like kill you.
00:26:48.000I mean, that might happen, but I think that's that's probably not really the main concern, at least in the immediate term.
00:26:53.000The the deeper concern is that you just see this kind of slow and hard to quantify, but nonetheless very real decline in kind of the quality of academics.
00:27:30.000Yeah, and and the other thing I would say to you that that there's another dynamic here, which is maybe only say 20% of the kids are really struggling and the rest are fine.
00:27:39.000But because you don't want to flunk those bottom 20%, you have to make the classes easier for everyone to avoid the bottom 20% flunking out.
00:27:47.000So the top kids don't get the same quality of education.
00:27:50.000So they might still be good, but they won't be as good, right?
00:27:54.000And so there's this kind of progressive mediocritization of the medical profession driven by this sort of bottom 20% dragging kids down.
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00:29:30.000What is the it says the admissions committee routinely gives black and Latino applicants a pass for subparametrics for people who served on it said while whites and Asians need perfect scores to be considered.
00:29:40.000What is the like steel man that argument for me?
00:29:43.000Why does an anesthesiology department need a DEI office?
00:29:50.000I mean I mean at some point, I mean you're super smart.
00:29:52.000You went to Yale, you're part of the debate club.
00:29:57.000We're trying to figure, you know, we need your body weight, we need to figure out how long, you know, the mixture of these very, very powerful chemicals.
00:30:06.000The the argument you would hear is that somehow the white anesthesiologist will murder the black people.
00:30:14.000And so if we don't correct the implicit biases, we won't really get the most qualified anesthesiologist.
00:30:19.000Yeah, look, like it's it's it's silly.
00:30:59.000And you know, there's another detail in the story where she apparently, uh according to at least one or two people said that so when they do residency admissions, which is a different thing, that's for when they're actually admitting basically like trainee doctors who've already graduated medical school, they have a this sort of rank list of who they want to admit, and she advocated for bumping a white candidate down um many slots because she thought, well, we already have you know enough white people.
00:31:25.000And uh I don't I think that ultimately was was reversed, but still, I mean she was explicitly saying we should, you know, move the rank of different candidates around based on race.
00:31:35.000To do and these And the residents would be actually performing anesthesiology.
00:31:39.000So Yeah, I just again of all the places have DEI office.
00:31:42.000If you want to have the DEI office at the Department of Labor, I'm gonna fight that, but you can maybe make like a stronger anesthesiology.
00:31:52.000Not not where I would put a D that that's that's the if anything other than making sure the patient wakes up is the mission statement of an anesthesiology department, uh no good.
00:32:02.000After a Native American applicant was rejected in 2021, Lucero chewed out the committee and made members sit through a two hour lecture on native history.
00:32:36.000I mean you know, I we haven't even gotten to what they did to their curriculum at UCLA, which was to make all the kids take a required structural racism and health equity class.
00:32:46.000And in that class, I mean, they literally learned uh one of the readings said that fat phobia was medicine status quo and said that the concept of obesity enacts violence on fat people.
00:33:00.000Basically said doctors just a treadmill is violence.
00:33:02.000Right, shouldn't treat obesity as a health condition.
00:33:04.000And this was in a required class for UCLA medical students.
00:33:07.000And so one of the put some of the pushback I got on the piece about racial preferences was you don't understand.
00:33:13.000They made these changes to their curriculum and they had a little less time in class, so maybe that's why the the performance went down, but it's not about the racial preferences.
00:33:36.000Again, I I we can make fun of it and we should.
00:33:39.000God forbid Peeps, someone's gonna die because of this, and people die all the time under general anesthesia.
00:33:42.000Again, anesthesiology one is someone's gone under anesthesiology a couple times, like it's no joke.
00:33:47.000In the anesthesiology department where Lucero or Lucero helps rank applicants to the department's residency program, she's rebuffed calls to blind the race of candidates, telling colleagues in January 2020 email that despite California's ban on racial preferences, quote, we are not required to blind any information.
00:34:05.000So this is a great case for Harmete Dylan to come swooping in from the US Office of Civil Rights, right?
00:34:12.000And and I believe they're already looking into it uh yeah, I think it's HHS's Office of Civil Rights that's looking into it, but HHS has opened an investigation and there was also a lawsuit um from students for fair admissions, and that's the same group that uh did the Harvard lawsuit.
00:34:26.000She said here's the Department of Act.
00:34:27.000You're right, knocked down a white person and said, quote, uh white male me may be knocked down several spots because, quote, we have too many of his kind.
00:35:37.000Yeah, the honestly, this is like real life horrifying if people have to get medical care in the UCLA system.
00:35:44.000The focus on racial diversity has coincided with dramatic shift in racial and ethnic composition of medical school, where the number of Asian matriculants fell by almost a third by 2019-2022, according to public available data.
00:35:55.000No other elite medical school in California saw a similar decline.
00:35:59.000There maybe there was one that, you know, saw something kind of close.
00:36:02.000But I think I think most of the I think it was really when I double checked the data, it was quite noticeable how much UCLA could be.
00:36:08.000But so like I mean look I I I need to just voice this.
00:36:11.000If we're also afraid of being called a racist, is it conceivable that just a again this says a third to half of the medical school, this is a professor that told you is incredibly unqualified.
00:36:20.000Is it possible that just a super unqualified doctor is slipping through the cracks that's like a black woman and eventually she's gonna have to make life saving decisions.
00:36:28.000But that's where we're heading like they we're all afraid to say anything because she might report you to the race Yeah I mean look and the way and I would say too you know the the the way also to avoid having a if there's a you know qualified black female doctor the way to avoid people questioning her qualifications and the way to avoid sort of placing her under this constant cloud of suspicion is to stop doing racial preferences that sort of rationalize the suspicion.
00:37:29.000Harvard president Claudine Gay hit with six new charges of plagiarism.
00:37:34.000So you were one of the ones that to that took down Claudine Gay in addition to Elista Fonick and her wonderful performance.
00:37:42.000How does a Harvard University president p plagiarize herself to the top yeah I mean so look what she did was clearly covered by Harvard's plagiarism policies which were written in a very exacting way.
00:38:00.000I think I don't know you know what you were told growing up but I always had sort of the fear of God put into me when it came to plagiarism in high school and then and then in college they really would say just you know if it's more than a few words right that you know even if it's not verbatim but it's paraphrase that could be plagiarism and that's a very serious offense.
00:38:21.000And so I would in college read over my papers and think, is it plagiarized?
00:38:27.000You know, I have to make sure I'm changing enough of the language I have to be sure I'm putting it in my own words um everything cited.
00:38:32.000And look you know uh of all the plagiarism scandals there have been hers was not the worst but she was probably in the it w not the worst in terms of the severity of the plagiarism but it was plagiarism.
00:38:46.000It did violate Harvard's policies and she was the president of Harvard University, right?
00:38:52.000And so subject I think presumably to kind of the highest possible standard for academic integrity.
00:38:57.000And she oversaw an institution that then you have internal documents reveal pervasive because she's gone now reversal perva reveal pervasive pattern of racial discrimination at Harvard Law Review.
00:39:10.000Yeah so uh some of the discrimination comes is in the selection of editors for the law review but the lion's share of it is in the selection of articles.
00:39:21.000I mean those are you know the Harvard law review is influential it matters who's published there.
00:39:25.000The law review articles really do shape the state of the law to some extent right you know how how important legal academia is can be debated but to the extent it matters this is a pretty powerful journal right it matters what they publish.
00:39:39.000And they are not selecting articles just based on merit or subject matter diversity, but explicitly based on both the author's race um and in many cases the race of the authors cited in the footnotes.
00:39:58.000And that was in fact part of their rubric for evaluating to get published in the Harvard law review you have to have like half of your authors be basically basically there's this initial That's that's our well and so here's the thing right and this this often is the case with any kind of regime of racial preferences it doesn't just happen at one kind of stage of decision making it happens at every stage.
00:40:19.000So there's an initial kind of screen out process um where they're told to consider author diversity and that process which is done by just a few editors weeds out like eighty percent of submissions.
00:40:32.000And then everything that remains is subject to this additional screen where the you know some editor reads it and kind of writes a short memo, and there's a there's a template that they're supposed to fill out about the pros and cons of each article, and one of the things they are supposed to look at, or at least they were as of uh a year ago, was uh the racial diversity of the sources cited.
00:40:53.000Racial, gender, all kinds of diversity.
00:40:56.000What what if you have a really good citation from a white man?
00:41:01.000That I yeah, I mean they they literally and they they would literally say things like they would literally say things like I'm very you know, I'm disappointed that the piece didn't have much uh uh diversity in terms of its sources cited.
00:41:13.000That was a real negative, and they would give it a uh poor recommendation based in part on that lack of diversity.
00:41:20.000I mean, you can we published uh over 2300 pages of documents of these internal memos so people can judge for themselves and you can just see what they said.
00:41:29.000And in some cases, it's kind of an afterthought or they don't really take it into account, but there are quite a few cases where the editors explicitly penalize pieces for the diversity of the citations.
00:41:43.000Um, I I I got a tip from someone who shall remain nameless that it was going on at the Harvard Law Review and then started doing some digging and managed to get my hands on a lot of these documents.
00:41:54.000Um I generally like to do in my reporting is to publish as many primary source documents as possible.
00:42:01.000Because often, right, the immediate response is oh, you're making it up or you're exaggerating.
00:42:05.000And I just look you can you can look at the entire tranch of documents, right?
00:42:13.000And so the hard Harvard Law Review is an independent nonprofit and legally distinct from the university.
00:42:21.000It operates out of a Harvard building.
00:42:22.000It's tended by Harvard janitors and employs only Harvard students and editors.
00:42:27.000It's also advised by administrators, professors at Harvard Law School, including the dean and some student editors, are on federal financial aid.
00:42:35.000And so someone is planning to sue over this, is that right?
00:42:49.000Um, but they're also now sub under three different federal investigations um by the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Justice Department.
00:43:00.000And obviously the the deal that the administration is trying to reach with Harvard could resolve those investigations.
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00:44:31.000Now, again, it some of them are probably trying to course correct a little bit just because they're so scared of Trump, but I think that um I don't think this is particularly aberrational.
00:44:44.000How much of it is put in writing may vary depending on the institution, but again, like I said earlier, there's there's uh red states, state schools.
00:44:53.000You can find tons of this stuff in kind of every in every part of university decision making.
00:45:39.000Most people are chosen through the or about half of them are chosen through this sort of holistic review process that takes into account their grades, this kind of writing competition, and then also their personal statement and kind of DEI factors.
00:45:54.000Says, quote, having read the article pretty thoroughly, I think a huge missing piece was that of how race fits into policing and misconduct.
00:46:08.000Yeah, well, this is another important point, which is that they don't just screen the articles based on the race of the author or even the race of the sources cited.
00:46:17.000They also look at just does the article talk enough about race and gender.
00:46:22.000So my favorite one actually is they this is in another article I wrote about this.
00:46:26.000They nixed, I think an article that was a feminist analysis of antitrust law.
00:46:30.000That sounds as woke as it can get, right?
00:47:30.000And in fact, in some of these memos, they explicitly say recommend publishing scholars because they say by being published in the Harvard Law Review, they will advance their career.
00:47:41.000So they basically say we should publish so and so because by doing so we will advance the career of a young scholar of color.
00:47:48.000That's part of their calculus when deciding who to publish.
00:47:54.000And the law review right has also adopted several policies, while not racially discriminatory, seem designed to ens ensure uh editors to the party line.
00:48:03.000One resolution passed in 2023 called for quote indigenous inclusive citation practices.
00:48:36.000Yeah, I know I mean, you might be right.
00:48:38.000I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the I don't I don't think they have the benefit of the doubt.
00:48:41.000So I want to close uh with some time, and we have a little bit of time here because this you know, we're talking about the university, you're talking about your reporting, and President Trump is certainly clamping down on them.
00:48:51.000And a lot of the activity happening on campuses that gets the headlines is this Jew hate stuff, the anti-Israel stuff.
00:48:58.000And there's been a debate on the right of what should we do to respond to this campus activity.
00:49:04.000And it's quite split, it's all over the map.
00:49:07.000As you know, I resolutely reject all this Jew hate stuff, and I want to talk about that, you know.
00:49:11.000But I think we'll actually more interestingly, let's make this a starting point.
00:49:15.000There are some, not all, there are some in the Jewish community of whom I respect them greatly, but I fundamentally disagree.
00:49:20.000They say now is the time for a Jewish civil rights, where we need kind of a new DEI style regime.
00:49:27.000People like Jonathan Greenblatt, who I don't love, obviously or respect, He's kind of come out and said something similar.
00:49:32.000What what what are you what are you thinking about this while balancing the disturbing rise of anti-Semitism with constitutionally protected speech?
00:49:40.000Yeah, I don't think it makes any sense to try to add Jews to the list of to kind of bring Jews under DEI's protective umbrella.
00:49:49.000I think that's going to backfire um for lots of reasons.
00:49:53.000I mean, one is just DEI's the worldview is bad on the merits and should be rejected, right?
00:49:59.000Um and we don't want to reinforce its premises.
00:50:02.000Um you know, I I also think there frankly is a dynamic where especially for people on the right, it's very important, I think, to be consistent about this stuff.
00:50:12.000And when you're not and you're hypocritical, people see the hypocrisy.
00:50:15.000And while I don't think that the hypocrisy is like the main or it's it's not it's not why anti-Semitism is rising, but it's not helping.
00:50:25.000Like it's not helping, I guess I would say.
00:50:28.000And uh you know, look, the other thing I would say too is just this is not this is not effective.
00:50:34.000I mean, this is not how you get rid of the problem.
00:50:36.000The way you get rid of the problem is by admitting students who actually want to study um and are not scholar activists who are going to go out and take over public spaces and violate laws, right, instead of just going to class.
00:50:52.000I mean, it's really an admissions problem.
00:50:56.000So the some people are saying, though, that hey, we need to some people in the government have alluded to this, not President Trump, but we need to make anti-Semitism like illegal, basically.
00:51:08.000And I'm I'm paraphrasing, but you've seen that kind of yeah.
00:51:11.000So that's that's not well, first of all, you can't make ideologies illegal because of the First Amendment.
00:51:18.000But let me here's here's the the other comeback to this.
00:51:30.000And the diversity training was organized around a single vignette about anti-Semitism.
00:51:36.000It was something silly where like someone complains that it's hard to schedule events around the Jewish holidays in the fall.
00:51:42.000And that's scene framed as an example of maybe maybe not even anti-Semitism, but insensitivity, and they spend all this time talking about it.
00:51:50.000Whatever it's kind of a silly anti-Semitism.
00:51:55.000It's not, it's not, it's it's also if for one, it it's it's not the kind of thing that actually upset Jewish students, right?
00:52:00.000What upset Jewish students at Columbia was calls to kill them, which actually happens.
00:52:05.000Yeah, well, I I mean the you know, Zionists deserve to die, right?
00:52:10.000That's that's that's what actually was at issue, not you know, someone being a little insensitive about whether you organize an event on Young Shapura Sakot, right?
00:52:19.000But then the other key thing to see is that this training was facilitated by a diversity consultant who has written all sorts of ridiculous things, including that she never she even wrote a blog post, I think, saying that she doesn't ask if someone if she sees a man attempting to go into the women's restroom, she won't stop him or ask questions because she doesn't want to inadvertently commit a microaggression.
00:52:44.000I mean, that's who Columbia decided to do uh tap for this training.
00:52:49.000During the training, she explicitly accuses President Trump of committing a microaggression when he complimented the president of Liberia on his English.
00:52:56.000She says that the terms crazy uncle and grandfathering can be offensive and up-and-coming lawyers should not say them.
00:53:04.000I mean, it has all the kind of hallmarks of a stupid crazy DEI training.
00:53:09.000It's just that the vignette they chose was about anti-Semitism, right?
00:53:13.000So not only is it not addressing the real anti-Semitism problem on Columbia's campus, it's also reinforcing the crazy DEI stuff that Trump I think has rightly been against.
00:53:26.000So yeah, I I I think it is there there is a role for the federal government to play in fighting anti-Semitism, you know, content neutral civil rights laws that just say that you can't uh, you know, deny Jewish students access to the street.
00:53:40.000Well yeah, when you're trying to block classes, of course that's illegal, you know.
00:53:45.000I mean, the whole thing is just ridiculous.
00:53:47.000Yeah, there's all sorts of levers you can use, but you know, demanding additional anti-Semitism training, I I just I think that's gonna backfire.
00:53:55.000Look, also, like has anyone ever enjoyed sitting through one of these trainings?
00:53:59.000And does anyone ever come out of it thinking, I'm I'm so glad I had to do that.
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00:55:19.000What why are we seeing a rise in Jew hate in this country?
00:55:22.000Um again, another thing we could talk for hours about.
00:55:26.000I think some of it is just the result of us getting more and more distance away from the Holocaust and this kind of uh basically phylosemitic consensus we had breaking down.
00:55:36.000I also think, and I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding is that among evangelicals, uh I I think there used to be this kind of pre-millenarian, like uh idi eschatology in which there's sort of this idea that like it was important to support Israel because the end of days was imminent.
00:55:53.000I should say I'm I am Jewish, so I don't know.
00:55:55.000No, you're you just said it better than the other.
00:55:57.000Yeah, I'm not an expert on this stuff.
00:55:59.000You use it very, pre-trib, pre-millennial theology is.
00:56:02.000But that, and I think a lot of people.
00:56:04.000The state of Israel is fundamental to that.
00:56:06.000And I think a lot of people, including frankly, many progressive Jews sort of held their noses at that and sneered at it and thought, well, that's you know, stupid, weird theology.
00:56:14.000But you know, one of the benefits of that theology was that it meant that the predominantly Christian American right of cover was very yes, very pro-Israel.
00:56:23.000And it's a good example of, you know, Chesterton's fence, the idea that you don't always want to tear things down when you don't quite understand the function they're serving in society, right?
00:56:30.000I think that you kind of got rid of that theology and it maybe opened the door to some not good stuff.
00:56:38.000And honestly, look, uh yeah, I mean, obviously the the war in Gaza has has increased the salience of the issue.
00:56:45.000Um obviously just the internet allows all sorts of radical ideologies to spread.
00:56:50.000Um yeah, you know, I have to say I I struggle with this because I just fundamentally have always thought that like hardcore anti-Semitism is just so sort of irrational and not rooted in reality that I mean it rots the brain.
00:57:08.000Yeah, trying to even you're trying to explain the thought process of uh you know, the the the logic of something that is fundamentally irrational.
00:57:18.000I mean, it is not logical, so it can be hard in some ways to provide a rational explanation.
00:57:24.000But I will I will just say I will also say though, I do not think the main cause, frankly, is college students at Columbia.
00:57:32.000I think they are more a symptom and a reflection than a cause.
00:57:36.000I think the cause is much deeper kind of demographic and yeah, the Columbia problem's actually really simple.
00:57:41.000It's actually we've imported a bunch of Muslim students that hate Jews and have a many of which hate the West.
00:57:46.000And then you couple that with a bunch of secular people that are looking for meaning and they look at everything through in a pressure, oppression, oppressed dynamics.
00:57:54.000The assumption that Israelis are are white and the Palestinians are brown.
00:58:07.000No, I'm at a I but you see you see even like Ethiopian Jews who are have some of the darkest skin you can ever you've ever seen who are wearing the full orthodox garb in Jerusalem.
00:58:17.000Like it's it's it's a it's an amazing country, right?
00:58:19.000But just the whole racial imaginary that we project onto that region, it's totally wrong.
00:58:24.000So what are what would you say are one or two of the biggest lies about what's happening right now?
00:58:29.000Again, we're taping this So we don't know things can change, but let's just say more broadly with Israel that you wish could be corrected that are just falsehoods that are spread that you kind of pound your table and you're like, I can't believe people believe this.
00:58:42.000I mean the rate the race thing is is a big one in terms of the left, right?
00:58:47.000That's that's a big issue on the left where they they project this they they try to basically project American racial categories onto a region that just totally rejects them and resists them.
00:58:56.000Um I think on the right, you know, it on the left, people will just take they'll take something crazy from Israel out of context, like something really bad that one person said and and and say, oh,
00:59:12.000you know, clearly Israel wants to do X, Y, Z. It's like, well, you know, if some obscure government minister says something nuts, right, like we don't, it's not fair to regardless of which party's in power, you know, it's not fair to conflate, right, you know, one crazy person in, you know, an obscure government position with the an entire political party or with the entire country, certainly, right?
00:59:37.000Um The other thing I would say too, though, is uh so much and I think this is more the fault of of the Americans who talk about it than it is Israelis, but there they're you know, they're to go back to the anti-Semitism training.
00:59:49.000There's this this impulse to say, well, anti-Semitism, it's another ism, frame Jews as victims and kind of add Jews to the list of victim categories.
01:00:01.000I just don't think that that's compelling.
01:00:08.000Yeah, and I think and I think Israel is actually like a very cool country.
01:00:11.000And if they talk more about the coolness and the tech and the military, right, you know, one reason I think you do see some of the anti-Semitism percolating on the right in in some cases is that you know, if you think about how to reach like young men who are turning right.
01:00:30.000It probably probably would would make them more pro-Israel.
01:00:33.000But also, right, you know, how not to reach them, you don't want to do this kind of hectoring school marm, like you have to be, you're you're a bigot for X, Y, or Z, just because people have been sort of trained understandably from all the DEI to react with suspicion to any kind of accusation of bigotry.
01:00:49.000Again, there is real anti-Semitism, it's a problem, but you know, when you lecture people, I just don't think that's a good idea.
01:00:54.000Yeah, and I think some and this is where I get some pushback.
01:00:57.000I was just debating the other day privately with a very nice woman who you would know I'll tell you off camera.
01:01:02.000And she was insistent that you can't if you are anti-Israel, you're anti-Semitic.
01:01:07.000And I said, Well, what do you mean by anti-Israel?
01:01:09.000And so, and she was getting to the place where like you must support the Netanyahu government, otherwise you're anti-Semitic.
01:01:17.000I mean, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of people.
01:01:19.000There's a lot of conservative American Jews who think the Netanyahu government mishandled the war and would prefer like Natali Bennett, who's actually to Netanyahu's right.
01:01:36.000But like and here's another thing I would say, I don't know how I I have no idea how they would do this, but one thing I've been doing since since April is actually taking Krav Maga lessons.
01:01:46.000Rav Maga is the martial art of the Israeli defense forces.
01:01:50.000I think every young Jew should learn it.
01:01:52.000Yeah, but but also just like young people, it's it's it's good exercise.
01:01:56.000You feel like a badass after you do one of the moves correctly.
01:02:00.000You're basically learning to be like a real-life action hero who can actually defend yourself and your loved ones from an aggressor.
01:02:07.000And like I would just think again, if you're trying to reach, you know, young men who are tired of being scolded and and tired of gold rhetoric.
01:02:18.000Don't just just talking too much about anti-Semitism.
01:02:21.000Again, I'm not saying don't talk about it at all, but like if you want to make people just think Israel's cool, like talk about Krav Maga.
01:02:29.000Talk about like the badass stuff that comes out of Israel.
01:02:32.000Like, I feel like a lot of young guys, if they see think Israel and they think, oh, cool fighting system that teaches us how to, you know, defend ourselves against criminals, it's like, okay, that's that's the kind of message that like a y, you know, a young like 18, 20 year old guy is gonna like, right?
01:03:52.000Um Yeah, I mean, that's basically what I would say.
01:03:58.000Look, and the other thing I would say though, too, is just uh unfortunately, you know, anti-Semitism's always been with us.
01:04:09.000It's not a rational force, and we no longer enjoy the kind of golden era where you could just take this very pro-Israel and and phylosemitic consensus for granted.
01:04:50.000Um yeah, and and I think for for young people interested, uh It's the most important type of report.
01:04:57.000Yes, I would say it there's also a temptation on the right in particular to want to go into opinion journalism, which we've sort of overindexed on.
01:05:32.000It takes a little work, but like you just you interview people, you get people to give you documents, and you just you report it accurately.
01:05:38.000You don't have to editorialize, you let the facts speak for themselves.