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May 2, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:20
Time To DEFUND The Universities
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Well, folks, the professors at Columbia are fighting mad at the administration because the administration dared to call the cops on the good little cosplay terrorists.
Take, for example, Columbia professor Joseph Slaughter.
Here's what he had to say.
I can understand that the building occupation is a different matter than a completely peaceful, non-violent encampment that had existed on the campus for the last ten days or so.
But the fact that the building can be occupied is due partly to the gross mismanagement of this administration.
It has escalated consistently for the last seven months.
These students have been attempting to get what they understand to be a human rights message about justice for Palestine out for seven months, and at every turn they have been met with repressive actions to shut down their ability to speak, to demonstrate, to try to make their voices heard in what they see as the greatest human rights crisis of the moment.
Yes, the administration is at fault.
According to the faculty, according to the faculty, the good little cosplay radicals, the good little cosplay pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism radicals, they must be protected by the university.
That's the job of the university.
Which does raise the question, what is the purpose?
of these universities anymore.
Well, the purpose of Columbia was originally clear when it was founded as King's College in 1754.
According to the very first president of King's College, William Samuel Johnson, quote,
the chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage the children
to know God in Jesus Christ and to love and serve him in all sobriety,
godliness and righteousness of life with a perfect heart and a willing mind
and to train them up in all virtuous habits and all such useful knowledge
as may render them creditable to their friends and family, ornaments to their country
and useful to the public wheel in their generations that they may be qualified
to make orderly and tractable members of this society, In short,
Columbia University was founded to teach eternal truths, to pursue the knowledge of nature and nature's God, to create good citizens and good men.
The social changes of the 1960s hollowed out the mission of Columbia University, mainly by fostering an entire generation of pseudo-revolutionaries devoted to overturning the status quo.
By 1968, Columbia University was faced with a choice to continue to promulgate its original mission of fostering virtue and good citizenship in accordance with eternal knowledge, or to become an activist training center.
And it opted to become an activist training center.
With an adjunct school attached.
In 1968, the president of Columbia University was a guy named Grayson Kirk.
He gave a speech in Charlottesville, Virginia.
There, he tore into the spate of university unrest, plaguing the country.
He said, quote, Our young people in disturbing numbers appeared to reject all forms of authority from whatever source derived, and they have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destruction.
This is 1968.
That statement proceeded to touch off an extraordinary crisis at Columbia University, when Mark Rudd, a leader of the Radical Students for a Democratic Society, led a student takeover of multiple campus buildings, including Hamilton Hall.
Sound familiar?
Professional activists from around the country, including Tom Hayden and Stokely Carmichael, quickly descended on the campus.
Again, sound familiar?
One week later, the police were called in.
Hundreds of people were arrested.
Some were wounded.
Weeks later, another student takeover broke out.
The university promptly canceled finals, dropped charges against the offenders, and finally capitulated to student demands to divest from cooperation with the Pentagon, the Defense Department.
Kirk was then forced out.
His eventual replacement was a guy named William James McGill, a committed man of the left who'd gotten famous at UC San Diego, having hired Erbar Marquez, one of the heroes of the left.
He quickly pledged to, quote, cement the rapport between students, faculty, and administration.
In 1971, McGill said the university should take the lead in enforcing the federal government's equal rights mandates because, quote, no other part of society is as responsive to social change as we are.
In 1972, when protesters took over campus buildings again, he literally refused to call the cops, preferring to, quote, ride this one out.
Well, fast forward about half a century, and universities are now full-scale left-wing activism centers.
The current president of Columbia University, its 20th, is an Egyptian-American economist named Manoush Shafiq.
In an interview with Columbia Magazine, upon taking this role, Shafiq explained what a university is for, quote, The problems the world is facing today are so complex and so pressing that new ideas are needed to address them.
Great universities like Columbia excel at generating new ideas.
Supporting faculty and students who want to get their ideas out into the world will help, but there's more to it.
The chaos we are now seeing at the universities, from ignorant radicals masquerading as incisive, revolutionary truth-tellers, it's not a bug of the college system.
It is now the point.
Our universities increasingly treat activism as the main focus.
They are left-wing activism centers.
In fact, they recruit for it.
Just look at the leaders of Columbia's radical pro-Hamas protests.
Take, for example, Kaimani James, who we discussed last week.
This is a student protest leader recently suspended from campus for saying that, quote, Zionists don't deserve to live.
By the age of 18, Kaimani James had been featured by the Boston Globe for his activism declaring, quote, I hate white people.
His college admittance essay compares, quote, chewed gum hiding beneath the surface of my desk to, quote, our education system rooted in systemic racism.
The same activism was the basis, presumably, of the admittance of Johanna King Slutsky.
That would be the student protest leader, who we discussed yesterday on the program, who became infamous for suggesting that the university provide, quote, humanitarian aid to the trespassing students to prevent their imminent starvation.
Prior to joining Columbia, she, quote, worked as a political strategist for leftist and progressive causes, according to her university biography.
Now she's a PhD student, quote, particularly interested in theories of the imagination and poetry, as interpreted through a Marxian lens.
Sounds highly employable.
Great skillset there.
Or take Cameron Jones.
That'd be the fashionably garbed, bare midriffed, keffiyeh-wearing, off-Broadway background dancer for King Slutsky during her press conference, playing a part from Springtime for Sinwar.
Jones is a lead organizer of Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a radical anti-Israel front group.
It is not Jewish.
It is not a Voice for Peace.
It is funded by George Soros and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Prior to joining Columbia, he was a, wait for it, political activist for various left-wing campaigns.
He is, per his LinkedIn, quote, particularly interested in the intersection of public policy and activism and how both are required to affect significant change in our society.
These students were likely not selected to Columbia for their brilliant academic performance.
I really doubt they did well on the SATs.
And it wouldn't matter even if they did, because Columbia threw out the SATs years ago and made that permanent last year.
These people were selected for their activism.
So were many of Columbia's faculty and administrators.
Take, for example, Professor Mohammed Abdu.
He was certainly no great addition to the Columbia faculty based on his famous scholarship on, quote, Islam and queer Muslims.
That's literally the name of one of his papers or his writings in the Anarchist Development in Cultural Studies journal.
He is, of course, a longtime activist.
He was hired months after declaring that he was with Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad after October 7th.
That wasn't a mistake.
It was part of promoting the university's mission of social change.
Because that's what these universities now are.
These universities are, in fact, little indoctrination machines generating activists.
That's what they are for.
They recruit activists and then they promote those activists.
Why?
Because this is the jet fuel of left-wing movements.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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The reason these administrators are selecting for these people is because these people are the vanguard.
This is why they're negotiating with them.
It's an inside-outside game in which outside agitators Make a lot of trouble.
And then inside, the administrators say, well, we have to negotiate with them.
We have to deal with them.
And unfortunately, this is now the position of the Democratic Party writ large.
Joe Biden is in the same exact position as Manoush Shafiq.
This is why, presumably, Kareem Jean-Pierre won't answer if Joe Biden has been silent on all of the campus chaos because he's scared of young voters.
The answer is, yes, not only is he scared of young voters, he sees them as the future.
He sees them as the most passionate, most dedicated members of his coterie.
Here's Kareem Jean-Pierre trying to dodge questions.
I'll speak more broadly.
I can't speak to youth and support and voters.
That's not something I can do from here.
The President has taken a lot of policy actions here that he knows that young people care about.
And a lot of those actions are popular with those young folks, whether it's giving a little bit of breathing room with student debt relief.
We made an announcement today, matter of fact, and we are going to continue to do that because we think it's important.
as families or as an American and you're coming out of college and you want to build a family by home,
you have the opportunity to do that and not be crushed by student debt. The President understands
how important it is to deal with that issue. Climate change, something that young people
really truly care about. One of the crises that the President said he came into having to deal with
was the climate change crisis. As the President has taken more, has taken aggressive, aggressive...
What is this Jackie was creed and babbling about?
Look I can't speak to youth voters or their support.
What we're going to do is continue to take actions that we believe helps all Americans
and all communities.
Okay, what you're actually going to do is avoid all questions as to why you keep patting
radical protesters who are doing violent things and taking over buildings while you're patting
them on the head.
We know the answer why you're patting them on the head.
Again, they're the vanguard of the revolution.
Because these are the makings of the future Democratic Party.
These are the activists being trained at Columbia University.
Now remember, most people are sending their kids to Columbia University because they want the credential.
Because Columbia is a very, very famous school.
Just like Harvard, just like Yale, just like Princeton.
These are all very famous schools.
They're supposed to earn you more money when you get out.
The credential is supposed to mean something.
And the reason the credential means something is because of the parts of the university that are not the activist parts of the university.
Not the dumb sociology department with 47 associate professors.
The reason Columbia is a famous university is because of, say, its physics department.
But most of these people are going to Columbia, and they're going to poli sci, and they're going to sociology.
They're coming out with a couple hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt, and they're learning how to be activists.
So basically you have an activist leech that is living off The university, the actual university, and destroying it.
So what have these universities become?
They're basically now Hannibal Lecter.
They are wearing around the face of the university, but it's been completely hollowed out and turned into a radical activist center.
And it has nothing to do, by the way, with Gaza or with Hamas or with any of these people.
Hamas is just a great way of showing how loyal you are to the cause, as we've discussed before.
If you can pick literally the worst example, of a group in the world, meaning a group that clearly its
own suffering is its fault.
Hamas's suffering is its fault. The suffering of people in Gaza is Hamas's fault.
If you can somehow blame the Jews or blame Israel or blame the West or blame the United States,
man, that is showing fealty to a really stupid cause.
It's all part of an intersectional coalition to tear down the entire system.
Which, by the way, the New York Times is now reporting Jeremy Peters today, quote, talked to student protesters across the country, and their outrage is clear.
They've been galvanized by the scale of death and destruction in Gaza.
They will risk arrest to fight for the Palestinian cause.
For many, the issues are closer to home, at the same time much bigger and broader.
In their eyes, the Gaza conflict is a struggle for justice linked to issues that seem far afield.
They say they are motivated by policing, mistreatment of indigenous people, discrimination toward black Americans, and the impact of global warming.
In interviews with dozens of students across the country over the last week, they described to a striking degree the broad prism through which they see the Gaza conflict, which helps explain their urgency and recalcitrance.
So, again, it has nothing to do with Gaza.
It has nothing to do with Israel.
That is just the stand-in for a broad panoply of anti-Western causes.
And again, the left is getting behind this.
In that Columbia University video that we played just a few moments ago, you can see students who are marching with UAW posters.
That would be like the United Auto Workers.
The hell do the United Auto Workers have to do with anything?
Well, the answer is the UAW came out in support of the protesters.
Why?
Because the intersectional left marches together.
They are the revolutionary vanguard and they all march together, which is why the proper solution for all of this is to kill dead federal funding of student loans.
Kill it dead.
Seriously.
Because the original premise of federal funding for student loans is that universities were places where you learned a skill set and became a good citizen.
And now a huge number of departments no longer produce a skill set and are producing the opposite of good citizens.
People who believe in virtue.
They're producing good little radical activists who wear Abercrombie keffiyehs while pushing around Jews.
And the answer there is just remove the funding.
And that's what Congress actually should do.
What Congress actually should do today is they should say the minor in West Virginia has no interest in subsidizing the student loans of a gender studies major at Columbia.
This doesn't mean people wouldn't go to college, by the way.
You know what it would mean?
It would mean privatization of student loans.
You know why that would be good?
That would create an actual incentive structure for people to think before they take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to major in something dumb.
So, to take an example, when I went to school, I took federal student loans for poli-sci at UCLA.
Why?
Because they were there, they were available, just like anyone else.
Then I got to Harvard Law School, and the vast majority of my loans were loans that were payable to a private source.
Why?
Because private sources were perfectly willing to give me a loan to major in law at Harvard Law because my income trajectory was really, really good.
And so they knew they'd get the money back.
One of the weird things about an education loan is there's no collateral.
That's why the federal government keeps stepping in to subsidize these dumb student loans.
Which means that when you default, it's the taxpayer who pays.
But the reality is, most of these degrees are a waste of time.
Most of them are a waste of money.
They're a subsidization scheme for activist training centers at Columbia and Brown and Princeton and all the rest of these places.
If you privatize the student loan industry, maybe kids and their parents would for the first time actually have to consider what their kids are learning in school and whether it is worth the money.
Maybe income trajectory would then be linked to actual skill set.
As with everything else, federal funding of things makes it more expensive, it makes it worse, and that's precisely what has happened with our colleges and universities.
Because it turns out if you're majoring in physics at Columbia, somebody's gonna give you a private loan for that.
Because you have a pretty good job trajectory.
If you're majoring in gender studies, ain't nobody gonna give you a private loan for that.
Because that is not a good job trajectory.
And that makes more sense.
Because you should be responsible for your decision making when it comes to how you go to college and what subject you choose to major in.
It should not be the federal government deciding to subsidize all of its favorite activist trainers at these major universities.
That's what Republicans should be doing in Congress.
Instead, Republicans have decided to push what I think is a badly thought out bill.
We'll get some more on this in just one moment.
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So there is a bill that passed through the House.
It passed through with 70 votes against by Democrats, 21 votes against by Republicans.
The kind of group that voted against ran the gamut from people who are overtly anti-Semitic like Ilhan Omar, to people who are sort of like borderline anti-Semitic, to people who are just strong free speech libertarians.
The reason is a badly thought out bill.
I'll explain.
I'll explain also what the House thought it was doing here.
So, there is a bill called H.R.
6090.
That's the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2023.
The bill, which is led by Representative Michael Lawler, who's a Republican from New York, has 13 Democratic co-sponsors.
It will codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of anti-Semitism in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Okay, so let's explain what's going on here.
Okay, right now, the reason that you are seeing a lot of angst from administrators on college campuses is because federal funding is tied to fulfillment of the Civil Rights Act.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dictates there cannot be discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry, ethnic characteristics, or national origin.
Environments of harassment on these basis can remove your federal funding at a university.
So if, for example, there were to be giant rallies at a university that suggested that all black people should be re-enslaved, and the university did nothing about that, that is already illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Now, there's been a lot of talk about the fact that that is a violation of free speech principles.
It absolutely is.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a full-scale violation of free speech principles.
As Christopher Caldwell wrote in his book, The Age of Entitlement, this is replete throughout the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is chock full of violations of the Constitution.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, for example, criminalizes private accommodations discriminating on the basis of various categories.
Private accommodations, like you own a bed and breakfast.
It criminalizes that, right?
You're now called a public accommodation, and now the federal government can step in and fine, regulate you, criminally prosecute you.
It's a violation of what used to be a divide between private property and public property, which is why I've always had massive problems, I've talked about this for years, with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
I also have massive problems with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, because Title VI of the Civil Rights Act is very unclear.
It obviously violates free speech principles because it says that if you create, quote, a harassing environment on, for example, a college campus or in a business that takes any sort of federal contract, the federal government can then remove money from you.
And now, that being said, the Supreme Court has already cleared Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and there appears to be no actual momentum inside Congress for getting rid of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Now again, if you got rid of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, what would actually happen at campuses?
Okay, you would have some rallies that were really bad, or maybe you wouldn't, because it would turn out that now colleges and universities would have student codes, and they would enforce their student codes.
One of the great lies about universities generally, it's one of the reasons I don't like public universities nearly as much as I like private universities, generally speaking, mainly because public universities, you run into all sort of viewpoint and free speech concerns.
Universities, believe it or not, were not meant to just be repositories of everyone's thought are equivalent.
Universities, as we talked about at the very top, Columbia College, Columbia University, when it was King's College, was designed to foment particular views.
There's nothing wrong with that.
In fact, that's quite good.
The idea that a university actually promulgates virtue and does not take a morally relativistic stance about good and bad, that to me is a good thing.
The problem with classical liberalism in general, which is sort of the idea that all viewpoints are to be treated with equal fervor, classical liberalism only works so long as there are boundaries to the classical liberalism.
Meaning that if everyone shares a basic notion of virtue, then yeah, we can have arguments within that basic notion of virtue about what's good and what's bad.
But if that completely disappears, classical liberalism turns very quickly into simple moral relativism, where we're supposed to treat neo-Nazism, communism, and constitutional conservatism as exactly the same thing on a college campus.
I don't think the universities have an obligation to do that.
I don't.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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Okay, with that said...
When it comes to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act has been used by administrators on college campuses to protect their favorite intersectional minorities.
Only.
So, as we all know, if these were protests right now that were being held on college campuses, and they were calling for, say, killing black people as opposed to killing Israelis or killing Jews, if they were chanting for the elimination of an entire state, an entire Muslim state, for example, if it said, Saudi Arabia ought to be wiped off the map completely, you know that the administrators would shut that down forthwith, right?
Because there are groups that rank high on the intersectionality hierarchy, and those groups are preferred.
Those groups are the ones you're not allowed to discriminate against.
So Title VI has been unevenly applied for literally decades, which is why you can see open anti-white discrimination on campus all the damn time, even though it's forbidden by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 64.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 64 is at least facially neutral with regard to which groups can be victimized by discrimination.
But in application, I have yet to see a case where anti-white discrimination, which happens all the time, harassing environments for white students on college campuses are quite real and they've been quite real for decades.
People on college campuses shouting anti-white racist slogans, that's been a thing since I was in college and long before.
And nobody's ever said that's a Title VI violation.
So, Title VI has always been applied only to the left's favorite intersectional groups.
So what the Congress was attempting to do today with this bill was to define anti-Semitism such that Jews would also be protected.
Now, theoretically, white people should already be protected because, again, discrimination based on race Is forbidden by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 64.
Discrimination of Jews is forbidden.
But discrimination against Jews is a bit of a weird category.
Because antisemitism is a category different from racism.
They're not... Antisemitism is not a subset of racism.
It's an entirely different theory of discrimination.
Not better, not worse.
Not more important, not less important.
Just different.
Antisemitism, in its essence, is a conspiracy theory about the shadowy power of the Jews behind the institutions.
About how the Jews are conspiratorially ganging up together in order to harm other people and that's why they must be stopped.
That's the common running thread of all anti-Semitism.
So, what Congress was trying to do was create a working definition of anti-Semitism such that they could then apply Title VI restrictions to go after the funding for the universities.
That's what this bill was about.
The problem is the bill fails in two particular ways.
It fails, number one, because it obviously is unconstitutionally vague, right?
It operates as yet another element of what should originally have been an unconstitutional hate speech law.
As I say, all of Title VI is an unconstitutional hate speech law, but this adds to that by incorporating within it the international Holocaust remembrance definition Working definition of antisemitism.
And that working definition of antisemitism has some cases that are included within it that obviously are vaguely worded, to say the least, and probably encroach, almost certainly encroach, on free speech concerns.
The IHRA definition.
So the IHRA definition of antisemitism, for example, which is what was codified in this House Bill 6090.
It says, quote, So that's quite vague.
antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.
Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals
and or their property toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
So that's quite vague.
So the IHRA then gives a bunch of examples.
And some of these examples are in fact, good examples of antisemitism.
And some of them are quite vague in how they're worded or in some cases, just plain overbroad.
Thank you.
So for example, here's an example of what's obviously anti-semitic.
Calling for aiding or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
Right, that obviously I think everyone agrees is anti-semitism.
Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews, as such, or the power of Jews as collective, such as especially, but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy, or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government, or other societal institutions.
Hey, again, that seems like pretty rote anti-Semitism.
But there are some of these that are overbroad.
So, for example, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Now, I can see why the IHRA is saying that that swings into anti-Semitism, because when you accuse the Jews of doing to other people what the Nazis did to the Jews, it's uncomfortably borderline anti-Semitic in the same way that it's uncomfortably borderline racist if you were to accuse black people of enslaving white people.
It's weird, but however, that definition may have worked better 30, 40 years ago.
It doesn't particularly work well now because everyone compares everything to the Nazis.
So comparing Israel to the Nazis is basically rote at this point.
It's what everyone does with everyone at all times.
Trump is Hitler.
Biden is Hitler.
Everyone is Hitler.
Everyone I don't like is a Nazi.
So that is now an overbroad definition.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Or for example, There's a claim here, it says, using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism, e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel, to characterize Israel or Israelis.
Now again, I know what they are going for.
What they're going for is the Disturber cartoon of, for example, an Israeli soldier who is drinking the blood of a Palestinian child, right?
Clearly anti-Semitic.
Or, an Israeli soldier who is killing Jesus.
And Jesus is a Palestinian, clearly anti-Semitic.
However, the way this is phrased suggests that it is anti-Semitic to say that Jews killed Jesus.
Well, according to the New Testament, Jews did involve themselves in the killing of Jesus.
The Sanhedrin, according to the New Testament, again, I'm a Jew, so this is not my book, but my best understanding from all my Christian friends and from reading the New Testament is that the Jews, under the New Testament, the Jews referred Jesus for prosecution to Pontius Pilate, Who then convicted, out of fear of riots, Jesus to death, and then gave the Jews the opportunity to free Jesus, and they chose not to do so.
And in the book of Matthew, there's a verse where it says, His blood be upon us and our children.
Right?
That's all from the New Testament.
Christians saying all that stuff doesn't make Christians antisemitic.
I think what the IHRA was actually going for here was a different claim, which has been rejected by the Catholic Church, which is that Jews today are collectively responsible for the death of Jesus.
Which is not what the Catholic Church says, it's not what Protestants say.
Again, my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, because again, I'm not a Christian, is that the basic idea is that all of humanity is collectively responsible for the death of Jesus.
That is, humanity's great sin, and Jesus wiped away original sin through his death.
And Jews are a stand-in as a sinful group in the death of Jesus for everyone.
Okay, put all of that aside.
The definition is vague and badly worded.
Okay, that is the problem with the IHRA definition here.
The problem with this bill is that in encapsulating this definition, it strays into free speech territory.
Now, as I say, I'm kind of bewildered as to why everyone is now getting upset about this, as opposed to, say, Title VI itself, which wildly veers into free speech territory, but I get it.
I get it.
So, and I agree.
I think it's overbroad, and I think the definition should not be applied in American law in this way.
The solution to that, by the way, is to get rid of Title VI, as I said at the very outset right here.
The most important thing that fails here is that it actually doesn't achieve what it's trying to achieve.
So the goal of the bill is to give the legislature an additional tool to hold Joe Biden and the White House accountable for not defunding all of these universities.
Well, they can already do that.
There are already letters on the books from the Department of Education.
They are called Dear Colleague Letters that say that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VI applies to Jews.
You don't even need a definition of anti-semitism to hold the executive branch to account.
What's more important, you shouldn't do any of that anyway.
You shouldn't leave it up to the executive branch.
You should just defund the universities through political act.
All you have to do is pass a law that says federal funds shall not be used on behalf of higher education.
You should go seek private loans.
That would be the actual solutions to the higher education problem.
But they're not going to do that.
Again, I see what they're attempting to do, which is to say to Democrats, listen, we see that you only want to protect certain groups.
We want to protect all the groups.
And so we're going to add new definitions here that protect all the groups.
But it's sort of like the argument people sometimes use with DEI, where they're like, should we abolish DEI or should we just broaden DEI to include other groups?
The answer is you should abolish DEI.
It's the same sort of argument.
Which is why I basically agree with Representative Chip Roy on all of this.
He voted against it.
He said anti-Semitism is evil.
It's been the driving ideology behind some of the worst atrocities in human history.
It has no place in a decent and civilized society.
It especially has no place whatsoever in any educational institution that receives taxpayer funding, an issue that has once again been pushed to the forefront by pro-Hamas protests coddled by leftist administrations at colleges across the country.
And again, what he's saying here is not that it's not free speech.
He's saying that universities should have no obligation to admit students who are morons, which I think is correct.
The bill put before us today did not have a full committee hearing or a markup.
He says the definition of antisemitism used by the bill was created by an international organization and includes certain examples that pose First Amendment concerns.
As I said, the House should never airdrop bills on the floor without adequate time for regular order, deliberation, and amendments.
The bill simply doesn't go far enough.
It's not good enough to merely ask the DOE to consider a definition of antisemitism in discrimination investigations.
Rather, we should cut off taxpayer funding to the supposedly elite institutions that are poisoning the minds of our children and propagating this despicable behavior.
Sounds right to me.
That sounds exactly right to me.
Okay.
Meanwhile, what's the actual solution to all this?
It actually turns out the solution to all this is quite easy.
If you're an administrator at a college campus, and students are violating the Student Code of Conduct, which is what they are doing if they are shouting things like, go back to Poland, just expel them.
There's a Student Code of Conduct.
You, as a person at a university, sign a contract with the university.
The university can then enforce its rules upon you, just as you can enforce your contract with the university.
Not only that, if they violate the law, as they have been doing at colleges across the country, don't negotiate with people who violate the law.
Simply expel them.
Arrest them and expel them.
And it all goes away.
And as for what individuals can do, at this point I need to pay homage to the gentleman at Pi Kappa Phi.
Pi Kappa Phi is a frat over at UNC Chapel Hill.
They went over to a pro-Hamas protest.
Where they proceeded to raise the American flag and prevent it from hitting the ground.
And so a GoFundMe was started to fund a rager for them.
It has currently raised well over $200,000.
Congratulations to those gentlemen.
The GoFundMe is the best thing all day.
Here's what it says, quote, Commie losers across the country have invaded college campuses to make dumb demands of weak university administrators.
But amidst the chaos, the screaming, the antisemitism, the hatred of faith and flag, stood a platoon of American heroes.
Armored in vineyard vines in Patagonia, fueled by zin and white claws, these triumphant brohemians protected old glory from the unwashed Marxist horde, laughing at their shrieks and wails, and shielding the stars and stripes from Soviet missiles.
These boys, no men, of the UNC Chapel Hill, Pi, Kappa Phi, gave the best to America and now they deserve the best.
Help us raise funds to throw this frat, the party they deserve, a party worth, worthy of the boat shoes, broletariat who did their country proud.
Absolutely awesome.
By the way, Bill Ackman gave $10,000 to the bros.
So, love that.
That is awesome.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the latest on House Republicans engaged in, once again, another circular firing squad.
I don't think it's going to be quite as successful as the usual circular firing squad first.
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Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene, she is back and weaker than ever.
She says she's going to force a vote on a motion to vacate next week.
She has to do that because she'd been threatening it for weeks at this point.
She does not have the votes to make this happen.
Here she was yesterday announcing it.
And so next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate.
Absolutely calling it.
I can't wait to see Democrats go out and support a Republican speaker and have to go home to their primaries and have to run for Congress again, having supported a Republican speaker, a Christian conservative.
I think that'll play well.
I'm excited about it.
Okay, so apparently she's doing a favor to the Republican Party by challenging the Speaker of the House for no reason that anyone can quite discern.
She says that Speaker Johnson has become unrecognizable.
Which, again, is very weird since he's cutting exactly the same sort of deals that Kevin McCarthy would have.
Maybe, again, the fact is that there are a bunch of people in Congress who grandstand for a living as opposed to the people in Congress who are actually trying to get things done from time to time.
I voted for Mike Johnson because his voting record before he became Speaker was conservative.
He voted against funding Ukraine.
He was solidly pro-life.
He voted to secure the border.
He voted to fight against Democrats.
Fight against the witch hunt against President Trump.
But once he became Speaker, he has become a man that none of us recognize.
He passed three continuing resolutions.
And then he finally passed a two-part omnibus that fully funded Joe Biden's agenda and the Democrat agenda.
Okay, or alternatively, you guys kept stymieing every attempt to change those bills, and then many of you ousted the Speaker of the House who was attempting to get through the bill, and then Johnson had to decide whether or not to have a government shutdown in the middle of a presidential election.
Lauren Boebert, another one of the luminaries in the Republican Congress, she says it makes no difference to her if Johnson or Jeffries is the Speaker, which is a really dumb thing to say because, and it probably doesn't, because again, if your entire goal is to get on cable news, then it doesn't make any difference.
If you actually would like to, you know, have the chairmanship of the House Oversight Committee, or if, for example, you would like to be on the House Rules Committee determining what makes it to the floor and what does not, it kind of makes a difference who runs the House.
We are passing the Democrat agenda each and every day that we're here.
Well, I mean, it should make a difference, because it actually does make a difference.
Now the motion to vacate is going absolutely nowhere.
Mike Johnson right now.
In fact, the reason that they are saving Johnson here, if they do save Johnson, is simply because they also don't want a rule whereby Ilhan Omar can challenge Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker of the House anytime she damn well pleases.
Mike Johnson, for his part, he continues to maintain that he has to do his job, which of course is correct.
House Democratic leadership just announced that they would vote to table a motion to vacate, effectively saving your job for you.
What's your reaction to that?
First, I've heard of it.
Look, I have to do my job.
We have to do what we believe to be the right thing.
What the country needs right now is a functioning Congress.
They need a Congress that works well, works together, and does not hamper its own ability to solve these problems.
And so we saw what happened with the motion to vacate the last time.
Congress was closed for three weeks.
No one can afford for that to happen.
So we need people who are serious about the job here to continue to do that job and get it done.
He is correct about that.
One of the rules here in politics is never interrupt your opponents when they're making a mistake.
Democrats are making a series of terrible mistakes right now.
On the Middle East, they're making a huge mistake.
It turns out, new poll, 71% of Palestinians support October 7th still.
And Joe Biden is still unable to simply allow Israel to finish the job in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, which is unbelievable to me.
It's political malpractice.
The longer things carry on with Israel in the Gaza Strip, the worse it is for Joe Biden.
He should be urging Israel to go in.
By the way, the hostage negotiations are apparently being held up by, you guessed it, Yahya Sinwar, who's the head of Hamas.
According to Israeli reports and reports from people who are speaking with Sinwar in the Arab world, apparently he's literally holding hostages around him personally.
Because he's afraid that he's going to get hit by an airstrike.
So one of the reasons he is hesitant to give up the hostages is because they are his leverage so that Israel doesn't just drone his ass.
And meanwhile, the Biden administration is trying to press Israel into making concessions.
Still.
And not going into Rafa.
Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden's economy is on the brink again.
According to Axios, the Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday for the sixth straight time, acknowledging a lack of further progress on cooling inflation.
The Federal Open Market Committee, the monetary policy setting body of the central bank, kept its target interest rate in a range between 5.25% and 5.5%.
It's been there since last July.
Jerome Powell confirmed the Fed is not going to cut interest rates as soon as it had previously signaled.
He said, so far this year, the data have not given us that greater confidence that inflation is headed back toward 2%.
It is likely that gaining that greater confidence will take longer than previously expected.
He said he thinks it's unlikely the next policy rate move will be a hike, but also if it just stays there, these are historically high interest rates for most people living in the United States.
And the inflation continues to be a major drag on Joe Biden's economy.
Which is why, again, Joe Biden's map for this election is not looking good.
Politico noted that yesterday.
They say Joe Biden's path to re-election has become increasingly clear.
It's the Rust Belt or bust.
So you remember, in 2020, Joe Biden was able to rely on the Sun Belt as well.
That'd be like Arizona and Georgia.
No longer.
Those are both solidly in Donald Trump's camp.
Apparently, according to Politico, polls broadly show Biden continuing to fall behind President Donald Trump in swing states across the country.
They consistently show older, whiter states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin as the most competitive for Biden.
Trump has larger leads in the Sun Belt states as well as in Nevada.
So, again, Joe Biden is running an incredibly weak race right now, which means that Republicans shouldn't get in his way.
Meanwhile, all Donald Trump has to do is stand there and point, and he's largely doing just that.
He's either in court falling asleep or he's pointing at Joe Biden, which is a fine campaign from where he's sitting.
Here he was yesterday saying, with Joe Biden, you're going to get World War III.
That is not off the table.
You know, we never got into a war with me.
I beat ISIS in record time.
We never got into a war.
With this guy, you'll end up in World War III.
You'll end up in World War III, I'll tell you what.
This next six months is going to be very scary.
You could end up in World War III with this person, and there's a grossly incompetent man.
Well, that is not wrong.
That's a pretty good way to run this campaign.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Well, meanwhile, things got real at UCLA last night, but I think that the important thing
is what the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment demanded.
Okay, so they demanded a bunch of needs and their list is pretty hilarious.
So I wanted to go through it for just a moment because this says everything
about these cosplay revolutionaries.
Urgent!
Headlamps, airsoft goggles, gas masks, and respirators, especially for our medics.
Skater helmets, shields, wood for barrier, knee and elbow pads, rain ponchos, canopies, utility gloves of various sizes, especially for small hands.
Yeah, I figured.
Super bright flashlights with strobe charged.
Umbrellas.
Medical, they need some EpiPens, non-steroid inhalers, headlamps, and organizational bins.
Here's what they need for food.
Hot food for lunch!
Triple exclamation point.
Important!
Double exclamation point.
They cannot subsist on cold food?
These brave, intrepid warriors for Palestine?
That food, by the way, needs to be vegan.
They need vegan food.
As you would suspect.
Honestly, you know, I've talked a little bit about the possibility that at some point, all of these Stands for Hamas.
At a certain point, maybe they start to actually imitate Hamas and do truly violent and terrible things.
That would require some testosterone.
So, maybe not.
Maybe it's just a bunch of blue-haired pansies who are going to sit in their encampments and basically do nothing until they're removed by the cops.
They need vegan food, gluten-free food, ice.
No packaged food.
No coffee.
No bagels.
Or as the encampments call them, Jew Donuts.
No bananas.
No nuts.
Some people have allergies.
Just like Gaza.
Okay, there are some other requests.
Sleeping pads.
AA, AAA, C and D batteries.
Rope zip ties.
Electric solar power generators.
Lotion.
Aquaphor.
No sunscreen.
I'm not sure why they hate sunscreen so much.
What did sunscreen ever do to them?
They then proceeded, by the way, to build a wall around their encampment at UCLA.
I thought walls don't work, by the way, and are racist.
But they built a wall around their encampment using plywood and wood pallets, and they used zip ties and drilled screws.
So, yeah, it turns out it's not going to stop the cops.
So, yeah, that did not go as well as they thought it would for them.
Well done, everybody.
These are the geniuses at America's leading universities.
Honestly, I went to UCLA.
I went to Harvard Law.
Like, they were bad in my day, and they've just gotten stupider over time.
Parents, it's time to stop sending your kids to these universities.
It really, really is.
Unless they're in the physics department, or the math department, or the hard sciences, you should not be sending your kids to these universities.
You should find them an internship somewhere.
Get them a job.
Get them an apprenticeship.
Give them the money to go into business.
Buy them a house.
There's so much better uses of money than training your kids to be good little LARP terrorists.
Seriously.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has now been held in contempt after violating his gag order in his hush money trial.
According to the Washington Post, former President Trump was held in contempt of court on Tuesday for repeatedly violating a gag order.
The judge overseeing his ongoing criminal trial warned him he could go to jail if he keeps breaking the court rules again.
All of this is designed to silence Trump.
It's not going to succeed.
And also, it is obviously stupid.
These gag orders are unconstitutional.
They are violative of the First Amendment.
He's the sitting Republican nominee and former president of the United States, and likely future president of the United States, and you're telling him that accountants sound off about the trial in material ways.
I cannot imagine this isn't setting up the predicate for reversal on appeal.
So, we'll see how it plays in the court of public opinion.
I think the answer is not particularly well.
All right, coming up, we are going to jump into the Volunteer Ben Shapiro Show Mailbag.
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