The Great America Show - December 17, 2023


IS HARVARD THE NEW BUD LIGHT？


Episode Stats

Length

25 minutes

Words per Minute

147.30484

Word Count

3,804

Sentence Count

237

Misogynist Sentences

6

Hate Speech Sentences

7


Summary

Cornell Law Professor William Jacobson joins Lou Dobbs on the Great America Show to talk about the growing anti-Semitism on American college campuses, and what it means for the future of our universities and the country. Join the conversation by using the hashtag on social media, and find and to join the conversation.


Transcript

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00:01:14.940 Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs and welcome to The Great America Show. Hope you're having
00:01:23.160 a great weekend. If it weren't so serious, I'd have to say the country has gone, well,
00:01:29.260 more than a little nuts. Whether it's a Democrat staffer caught filming gay sex acts in a Senate
00:01:35.420 hearing room or Congresswoman Lauren Boebert deciding to vote for the reauthorization of FISA and Section
00:01:43.500 702 so the FBI and CIA and their Democrat pals can continue spying on American citizens.
00:01:52.220 Or the mad Marxists on MSNBC, realizing they've been caught by Jews who didn't believe how many of
00:02:00.080 the so-called progressives and the Democrat Party are Jew-hating bigots who hate Israel and side with
00:02:07.380 Hamas and Iran, who side with Iran's Hamas terrorists who massacred Israelis on October 7th,
00:02:14.340 killing, raping, torturing, beheading babies, and whose sponsors and supporters in this country.
00:02:21.280 Who would have ever imagined there are so many? Tens of thousands of them on campuses, on bridges,
00:02:29.460 streets, demonstrating, and demanding that the Israeli Defense Forces lay down their weapons and
00:02:35.940 just be friends with all who mean to exterminate them, to wipe Israel off the map, to claim all
00:02:42.240 between the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. You don't have to be a scholar to understand that
00:02:48.960 would mean the obliteration of Israel. And the Israelis, for some reason, aren't willing to
00:02:55.120 negotiate or surrender their existence. Thank God. The Biden regime, led by a puppet of the Marxist
00:03:03.100 left, impaired and compromised, are pushing pure propaganda to obfuscate the moral clarity
00:03:10.360 that surrounds this conflict, happily without success. The madness is that they try. Biden to Netanyahu?
00:03:19.740 How about that two-state solution? No, thank you. Biden's demand in the aftermath of October 7th.
00:03:28.880 The shame is that they tried. But in so doing, they've exposed who and what they are to the rest of us.
00:03:36.020 Further evidence of unstable minds and atmospherics in our nation's capital. Biden, with his poll numbers
00:03:42.900 spiraling, his mad rule is without question dissolving. The House Republicans, though, at the same time decide
00:03:50.560 they like, they really want more spying, more surveillance by the deep state on American citizens.
00:03:58.340 The Republicans want to impeach him, but at the same time assure his friends the power, the tools,
00:04:05.040 to spy on all of us. 147 Republicans voted for the surveillance state. That, too, is absolute madness.
00:04:15.340 The good news is the Republicans were, if not principled, not courageous, at least able to muster a
00:04:22.080 unanimous vote to formalize an impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden. Well, somehow, somehow, the Supreme Court
00:04:30.600 also decided to rule on the extent of President Trump's immunity from the likes of deep state and
00:04:37.320 Marxist-dim persecutors like Jack Smith. Our guest today is Cornell Law Professor William Jacobson.
00:04:45.080 Professor, I want to say welcome to The Great America Show. It's great to have you with us.
00:04:50.620 I am sorry that it's under these circumstances, frankly. Harvard, MIT, Penn, Cornell, the Ivy League is
00:04:58.820 under duress without any question now about the subjects you and I have been talking about for
00:05:04.400 some time, and that is anti-Semitism on the campuses, universities, and colleges across this
00:05:10.880 country. I want to start with your thoughts first about the fact that President of Penn resigned her
00:05:17.640 post. The president of Harvard has received the full support of the Harvard board despite charges of
00:05:25.500 not only anti-Semitism and now plagiarism, suppressing free speech, and actually playing a role, at least,
00:05:34.360 in the ousting of a law professor who was defending Weinstein in his sordid sexual harassment cases.
00:05:44.400 Your thoughts about it all? Yeah, well, it really, I think, is a reflection of the decline of our
00:05:50.320 elite academic institutions. You see a philosophy characterized in different ways. You could call
00:06:00.560 it critical race theory. You could call it diversity, equity, inclusion. You could call it whatever you
00:06:06.040 want, but it is elevating politics over academic substance. It is centering race in the middle of
00:06:15.020 everything, and it has a very fundamentally anti-American flavor to it, anti-capitalist flavor
00:06:22.200 to it. And unfortunately, in this kind of toxic mix that's going on in academia, the most radical
00:06:29.680 elements have chosen to single out Jews as the object of their hatred, something that we know has gone on
00:06:36.280 many times in history. And the people who should be the adults in the room, the presidents of universities,
00:06:43.760 have proven that they are not adults when it comes to these matters. And that's really what we're
00:06:48.880 seeing. You can't judge what's going on now in the narrow scope of the last 30 or 60 days. You really
00:06:57.000 have to view it in the scope of what has happened to academia in the last 20 to 30 years.
00:07:03.700 You know, I've often thought, and I know this is going to be controversial for some people, but to have
00:07:09.000 academic programs on ethnocentric subjects is to me a dilution of academia. Then to take that to
00:07:21.640 another step and have actually political activist education, whether it be the Kennedy School,
00:07:28.740 whatever it may be, Stanford, whatever it may be, the university, instead of the fundamental
00:07:37.040 university subjects that one associates with that of producing, graduating men and women of true
00:07:46.320 education in the classical sense. It is, I frankly think that it is a crime for these universities
00:07:54.820 to be charging 50 to what, 80, $85,000 a year for the education that's being provided. Your thoughts?
00:08:03.580 I think that's right. I mean, I think we are not educating people, at least at these elite
00:08:08.660 institutions. Notice, and other people have commented on this, we don't see these protests
00:08:14.740 and these riots in favor of terrorists at community colleges, where students are more likely to actually
00:08:20.820 want to learn something that will help them in their life. We're seeing them at the most elite
00:08:25.440 institutions. And I think it's a complete failure of the system. We have elevated identity politics
00:08:32.660 over merit. We have elevated equity, meaning equalizing outcomes and manipulating outcomes
00:08:40.840 over equality, where everybody is treated fairly. And so that's what we're seeing go on. And it's
00:08:46.760 really tragic. We're not graduating the future generations that we need to keep this country
00:08:52.520 strong. We're graduating people who have been schooled in an ideology of tearing down our society.
00:08:59.820 If you look at all of these ideologies that are creating this toxic mix on campuses, it's a hatred
00:09:06.140 of our system and a desire to tear us down. Of course, they don't understand what the consequences
00:09:11.820 of that will be. But understanding is not really what it's about. These are essentially what you would
00:09:18.580 see in many cases at a North Korean rally, just people chanting slogans. They don't even necessarily
00:09:24.920 understand. There have been a number of people who've interviewed students on campuses chanting
00:09:30.280 from the river to the sea. And they can't tell you what river and what sea. They just mind-numbed
00:09:35.960 chanting of these genocidal doctrines. And so it's really scary. It's a time where I hope what has
00:09:43.920 happened the last month and two months on campuses is a massive wake-up to our country that what's happening
00:09:50.540 on campuses poses a a long-term threat to our country. I think you're right in both instances.
00:09:58.300 It's a long-term threat. It's it should be a wake-up call. But at the same time, we have watched these
00:10:05.420 these universities and many of them not. I'm not talking about the Ivy League or just the private
00:10:11.060 universities. I'm talking about state universities as well, bringing in federal funds, huge, huge sums of
00:10:18.600 money. We're talking about billions upon billions of dollars here. More money, and certainly in the
00:10:25.300 instance of Harvard, than some people are charged for tuition. It is the federal government has a an
00:10:32.980 immense stranglehold on these institutions, whether it's acknowledged or not. And and the fact that they do
00:10:39.580 have that stranglehold is not to the benefit of the the American nation and our way of life. It is
00:10:48.340 we have watched this Palestinian radical Islamist fervor build up in our universities. And without
00:10:58.240 comment, it seems, let alone attempt at restraint on the part of any of these universities. We'll be
00:11:03.380 right back with Professor William Jacobson of Cornell. We're back with Professor William Jacobson and
00:11:15.180 Professor of Law at Cornell. Let's let's turn to this to keep it as specific as we can. Your thoughts
00:11:24.880 about a university in a university that had witnessed their president do what Claudine Gay, the president
00:11:33.940 of Harvard University, had done before the hearing in a U.S. in the U.S. Congress, who is accused of
00:11:40.960 plagiarism, who is accused of constricting, constraining free speech, who is accused of outing,
00:11:49.980 ousting a professor who just happened to defend the Harvey Weinstein. What what is your reaction to
00:12:00.960 that? And how in the world could any board of trustees, corporate board of any university support
00:12:08.740 that? Well, it's hard to understand in any reasonable corporate fiduciary sense. She was a
00:12:16.660 failure in her relatively short term so far as president. And you need a president precisely to
00:12:24.460 deal with times of crisis, such as has happened the last 60 days. And she's been unable to deal with
00:12:31.060 it. In fact, the dealing she's had with it have made the situation worse, not better. They're an
00:12:36.460 embarrassment to Harvard. I've read someplace that they've lost over a billion dollars in pledged
00:12:42.860 donations because of it. And then it comes out that she legitimately plagiarized in multiple papers,
00:12:52.340 you know, other authors and the Harvard board in their announcement that they are sticking with her
00:12:58.360 acknowledged that their review found four instances of lacking attribution in her papers.
00:13:06.320 There are other people who found more and but they don't feel it was serious enough.
00:13:10.800 And they're going to allow her to issue corrections to her papers. I mean, this isn't saying really
00:13:16.400 it is. I don't mean to laugh about it, but this isn't saying you have somebody who's a complete
00:13:20.760 failure, who embarrassed the university, who cost them a billion dollars, who gets caught
00:13:25.720 plagiarizing and they're going to stand with her. And I think the problem is they're between a rock and
00:13:30.980 a hard place. I mean, she was appointed because she was a strict adherent and promoter of diversity,
00:13:38.860 equity and inclusion ideology. I mean, a paper leaked out recently that she had written,
00:13:44.280 you know, that she was going to push that into every aspect of the university.
00:13:48.220 The diversity is in a hard place. If they fire a black woman president who was hired because she is
00:13:56.580 a devotee of diversity, equity and inclusion, you can imagine the uproar they're going to face from
00:14:01.840 the student activists and from the faculty activists. But if they keep her on,
00:14:06.020 it's immensely damaging long term to the brand of Harvard. And maybe they think they're above it.
00:14:13.060 Maybe they think their brand can't be permanently tarnished because it's Harvard. Well, you know what?
00:14:19.100 The people who branded Bud Light thought the same thing and they found out differently.
00:14:24.320 I think that they are in an extremely difficult position. And I think that this will seriously hurt
00:14:32.600 the Harvard brand, the Ivy League brand. And I think that the nation is waking up to the fact that
00:14:38.400 these elite institutions and I work at one of them are doing tremendous damage to the country.
00:14:44.580 It's it is to me, I guess it's just simply reflex. What would what would the Harvard board have done
00:14:53.440 if the president was a white male and done precisely the same thing? Because what we're getting into
00:14:59.800 is the politics of both condescension and patronage. It is to me, it is just inexcusable.
00:15:11.980 And it puts the lie further to diversity and equity and inclusion. These are these are nonsense
00:15:21.440 inventions of identity politics. And until the country understands what it is, that you're going
00:15:31.320 to have people going around mouthing it, making programs out of it and conjuring it up in some
00:15:38.000 sort of, you know, in every imaginable way. What are your thoughts about the necessity to get rid
00:15:44.760 of ESG, DEI, all of this nonsense? Yes. I mean, while you were talking, I was thinking back,
00:15:52.980 you know, there's a book, I think it was in the late 70s, called Harvard Hates America.
00:15:58.440 And it was such a great it was a bestseller was a big hit at the time. People have probably forgotten
00:16:04.060 it. But Harvard Hates America. And it's absolutely true. They sneer at, you know, ordinary citizens,
00:16:10.840 they consider themselves above. And the way they're acting now, I think, is a perfect example.
00:16:15.420 As to DEI and ESG and all of those, you know, ESG is more of a corporate thing. And I think from
00:16:23.440 an investment point of view, it's nonsense. But, you know, DEI is a an academic thing. It's a campus
00:16:30.900 thing. I mean, it's moved beyond campus, but it's basically a campus thing. And, you know, regardless
00:16:35.740 of whether you're a Democrat or Republican or regardless of who you support in the Republican
00:16:40.420 primary, what they're doing in Florida, what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida is part of the
00:16:45.720 answer. It is defund these bureaucracies, defund these government salaried bureaucracies
00:16:51.060 who are causing such monumental pain. I mean, we've been at my website and I've been screaming
00:16:57.500 for years that DEI is poisonous. It breaks people into identity groups. It forces them to be treated
00:17:03.760 not as, you know, fully human individuals, but as humans who are merely part of a greater
00:17:09.720 group, a group identity. It pits people against each other and it pits people against their
00:17:14.480 country. Get rid of it. It has to be gotten rid of. You can't tweak it around the edges.
00:17:19.620 I couldn't agree with you more. We're going to take a quick break. We're talking with Cornell
00:17:23.500 Professor William Jacobson. Stay with us.
00:17:26.200 We're back with Professor William Jacobson. Professor, just a short while ago, short, what,
00:17:37.400 two months ago, Cornell was in the midst of its own controversy. Has there been an improvement?
00:17:44.460 Has there been, what is the environment now? Has the campus settled down and are you moving to a
00:17:52.260 better path? Well, it's certainly not as bad as it was six weeks ago when there was a professor who
00:17:59.460 announced he was exhilarated while when he heard of the Hamas attack. There were student groups
00:18:05.380 chanting, you know, from the river to the sea and Intifada Intifada, which is the bloody suicide
00:18:11.940 bombing campaign against Israel. There was a student who appears to have become radicalized while at
00:18:19.760 Cornell, who actually posted threats to shoot and shoot up the kosher dining hall, was arrested,
00:18:28.200 charged in federal court now. It was a bad scene and a completely incompetent response from the
00:18:36.780 administration that really they just reacted to pressure from alumni and the media couldn't figure out
00:18:43.640 the right thing to do the first time. So it's not a great situation. I think the, I have zero
00:18:49.600 confidence that the administration is going to do anything other than try to wait it out and try
00:18:55.700 to avoid having to take any meaningful action on campus. They just announced a new policy that
00:19:03.120 because, you know, of the presidents who testified in Congress couldn't say that calling for genocide
00:19:08.980 is against campus policy. They announced the policy, yes, calling for genocide is against Cornell's
00:19:16.420 policy. But the way they define genocide is not the standard definition of genocide. You know,
00:19:22.960 the UN, the Holocaust Museum, the United States Congress, they all have definitions of genocide,
00:19:29.460 which do not limit it to the complete eradication of a people. Yet Cornell announces that a call to kill
00:19:39.040 all members of a group, all members of a group, is a call for genocide and will not be tolerated on
00:19:46.240 campus. Well, that's just a dodging. Nobody defines genocide that way. That's a subset of genocide and
00:19:53.520 nobody's calling for that. And so they create this fictitious, phony definition of genocide, which is not a
00:20:01.160 standard definition that they know is not what people call for. And what they're doing is they're trying
00:20:06.300 to do it to avoid having to deal with the problem on campus of people calling for violence against
00:20:11.380 Jews, because if they don't call to kill all Jews, then it's not a call for genocide, according to the
00:20:17.240 Cornell administration, which, of course, is absurd. That whole thing tells me they are not serious about
00:20:22.320 this. They're treating this as a public relations exercise, and they think they can wordsmith their way
00:20:28.440 around it. But I can tell you, alumni are very upset. I think parents are very upset. I think students
00:20:34.520 are very upset and Cornell is just going to try to rope a dope it and wait it out and hope we go on winter
00:20:40.560 break. And when everybody comes back in six weeks, it's all forgotten. I don't know if that will happen, but I
00:20:45.980 think that's their strategy. Is there enough independent thought within the students of Cornell for those
00:20:54.340 students to come back organized and to meet the threat of DEI, CRT, or critical legal theory, whatever
00:21:03.840 you want to call it, and to take it head on and the administration?
00:21:09.040 Yeah, I don't think the current students will rise up, so to speak. I think that they feel very bullied.
00:21:17.040 I think they feel that to speak out means they will be targeted. We have mobs of students running
00:21:25.960 through the campus with bullhorns chanting for violence. I think it's a lot to ask a sophomore in
00:21:32.760 college to stand up to that. But what will happen with future applications in future generations,
00:21:40.600 I mean, Harvard will always fill its class, and there'll always be more people who want the name
00:21:44.840 and want the diploma and don't care about it. But I do believe we are developing in this country
00:21:50.360 something of a red-blue divide at the university level. People will have choices. They can go to
00:21:57.440 the University of Florida or many other universities in red states, public universities, and they're not
00:22:04.300 going to find this level of DEI indoctrination. In fact, it's being defunded. Or they can go to
00:22:09.920 schools in New York, public universities, or California, and they will be inundated with it,
00:22:15.640 where they can go to private elite colleges, where they will be inundated with it, and they're going
00:22:19.380 to have to make choices. I think just like people vote with their feet moving south, if you look at
00:22:24.720 all the demographic maps showing trends of where people move, it's all north to south. Nobody's
00:22:31.040 moving north. And I think you'll see that in academia. It may take a few years to play itself
00:22:37.540 out. And I don't dismiss the Ivy League credential being an allure for people. But I think you will
00:22:45.840 see people moving to other, you know, locations for academia, for academics, just as you see them
00:22:53.480 moving to other locations for other things in life. Yeah, I think there was a time when every parent
00:22:58.340 would have been very proud to have their kids going off to an Ivy League school. I think now those very
00:23:04.980 same parents would be very proud if those those students were going to a school south or west,
00:23:12.780 wherever it is necessary to go, that provided a great education and no indoctrination. You get the
00:23:20.320 last word here, Professor. Thanks for being with us today. Yeah, my last word is this is an opportunity
00:23:26.440 for change. The complete implosion in the public perception of the elite institutions is a chance
00:23:34.160 for for change for the better to strengthen our country and to strengthen the institutions. And
00:23:40.120 don't let this moment pass. It's a moment created by the institutions. They are, you know, self-destructing
00:23:47.480 in front of our very eyes. They have enormous hypocrisy. They're losing credibility. And we shouldn't let that
00:23:53.900 pass, you know, to to use a famous political phrase. Don't let a crisis go to waste. And the
00:23:59.740 crisis on campuses is something we can't let go to waste. We have to turn it into a better situation
00:24:04.880 because otherwise it's just going to get worse. Thank you very much, Professor. I'm going to take
00:24:09.440 this opportunity to tell everybody, let your representative, let your congressman or congresswoman,
00:24:15.900 your your senator know exactly how you feel about what is happening with taxpayer dollars and these
00:24:21.280 these left wing Marxist institutions that have been created to indoctrinate our children rather than
00:24:27.840 educate them. The capital switchboard is 202-224-3121. 202-224-3121. And let our elected officials know
00:24:42.380 what you expect of them. And I want to just to make one final urging here before you send a child off to
00:24:49.560 one of these left wing institutions. Please check out your local community college. The educations they provide,
00:24:57.640 in my opinion, are the greatest bargain in this country. It is a great, great resource for everyone. And, you know,
00:25:07.440 please consider it because not only will you not be saddled with debt that has been in the money of which has been spent
00:25:15.520 to fund some left wing professor, you'll be getting a bargain and also assuring your son or daughter
00:25:22.100 gets a good education and isn't saddled with a debt that will be a significant part of their life
00:25:28.100 paying off. Again, Professor, thanks for being with us. We appreciate it and look forward to our next
00:25:33.520 talk. All the best. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. Please be with us through the week.
00:25:40.000 Please join us each and every day. Follow me on Twitter and true social at Lou Dibes. And again,
00:25:45.540 thank you, everybody. God bless you. And may God bless America.