Is Claudine Gay’s Ouster Really a Victory for the Right? PLUS: Biden Illegally Arms Israel—And Pushes for a Cataclysmic Clash w/ Yemen & Iran
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We were planning on returning with a new show last night, but for logistical reasons that are too boring to go into, we were forced to just cancel at the last minute.
But we are very happy to be back, excited for what we are certain will be a very eventful 2024.
We hope you all had a restful holiday as well, and we are glad to see you back here.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, less than a month after the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its university president, Liz McGill, Harvard yesterday fired its president, Claudine Gay.
Exactly like McGill, Gay became the target of intense public pressure campaigns after both of them, along with MIT president Sally Kornbluth, were hauled before Congress to be interrogated about allegations of rising bigotry on their campuses.
Not just any bigotry, but anti-Semitism in particular.
And in the wake of that congressional testimony, which was condemned not only by pro-Israel conservatives, but also by Democratic Party elected officials and even the Biden White House, they all agreed, Apparently in Washington that these university presidents had done an extremely poor and even disgraceful job in answering questions about Israel and anti-Semitism.
A campaign was launched demanding the firing of all three of them.
Gay's resignation yesterday came after conservative journalists and activists proved persuasively that Gay had committed serial plagiarism.
But one has to be extremely naive to believe that that was the reason Gaye was forced to resign.
And even more naive to believe that this concern about integrity in academic writing was what motivated the campaign against her.
Indeed, McGill, the Penn president, was forced out by the very same faction, despite no plagiarism allegations of any kind.
And now the leader of this campaign, the real leader, the billionaire hedge fund manager and fanatical Israel supporter Bill Ackman, is already targeting MIT's Kornbluth, who, like McGill at Penn, also does not have a plagiarism scandal, but she does have an Israel on anti-Semitism scandal.
American elites occupying prestigious positions are known for many things.
Accountability is not one of them.
It is extremely rare that someone who occupies such a lofty height in American institutions of authority is brought down this way.
Let alone two in less than a month.
And it is rare, still, for that to happen due to some kind of ethical transgression.
Anyone paying even minimal attention to events in the United States over the past couple of decades would cackle with laughter at the suggestion that the people at the helm of the country's most powerful institutions get fired or ousted because they are guilty of ethical misconduct.
What elites do lose their job over, however, are two things.
Offending those with even greater power than they have, such as the billionaire Bill Ackman and his friends, or crossing or appearing to cross ideological red lines that are the real taboos in American society.
Many people on the right are celebrating because they seem to have convinced themselves that they scored some grand victory for their side by taking out the presidents of these two universities.
But is this really a victory for the American right or is this simply yet another victory for the sectors of American political and financial establishment power?
His views on Israel happen to fully align with the majority of American conservatives in this case and who have succeeded in imposing even more robust limits on the range of views that may and may not be expressed on college campuses in the United States.
We'll look at all the relevant events and the facts in order to answer that question.
Then from the start of Israel's war in Gaza, the weapons and bombs that Israel has been using have been not just paid for by the United States and therefore by American citizens, but have been furnished directly from the Pentagon's stockpiles.
A stockpile already heavily depleted due to the U.S.
spending 18 months financing and arming the war in Ukraine.
Remember that war?
Regardless of one's views on having the U.S.
fund Israel's wars or not, there are laws barring presidents from transferring lethal arms of this kind without congressional approval.
And there are also laws requiring congressional approval for a president to deploy military force in a region like the Middle East, as the Biden administration has been doing in the Red Sea, while it threatens Yemen as retaliation for attacks on commercial ships.
Now, I know from experience that when it comes to war, some people get very excited whenever it comes time for the U.S.
to bomb things and blow things up.
Questions of legality and constitutionality seem boring and besides the point, but there are reasons, important ones, why the Constitution vests these war powers in Congress.
And we should not tolerate a president simply ignoring constitutional limits and the law, especially when it comes to war, even if doing so in one case may be beneficial to Israel.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Taboos are a very odd thing in the United States, the way in which they work.
Oftentimes, people love to proclaim that they are the ones defying taboos, that they're expressing views that you're not freely allowed to express without all sorts of recrimination.
Doing so can be very satisfying.
It's a way that you can depict yourself as being very brave.
of showing your audience or your readership that you and you alone are willing to go to places that have been closed for people to go.
And yet, oftentimes the things that we're told are taboo really actually aren't.
Oftentimes the things that people claim that they're willing to say because they're so brave, in fact, are being said by a huge number of people without any recrimination of any kind, A lot of this happened in the culture war, for example, where there was a big chunk of independent media that claimed that it was defiant of taboos, even though the things they often were saying were really just things that many people in both political parties frequently say that is all over the media, that is a very common view to hear.
One of the ways that you really know what the real taboos are, are by the things that actually get people punished if they say them.
You can have a set of views that people proclaim to be taboos and yet they can say them over and over and over and nothing happens to them.
In fact, they can get wealthy and successful by saying them.
That's often what happens.
A lot of people who claim that they are brave and say things that are the off-limits views, nothing ever happens to them.
They just get more and more rewarded.
Their platform grows bigger and bigger.
The real taboo ideas are the ones that you can't say without actually being punished.
It's sort of like how you can tell a real journalist, somebody who really confronts centers of power as opposed to pretending to.
Those are the people who suffer recriminations, who are threatened with imprisonment or prosecution.
People like Julian Assange, you can tell that he's doing real work and confronting real power centers because he's in a prison in Great Britain and not in a CNN green room.
And now we have two presidents of universities, both of whom have been fired in the past month or forced out.
That is a very rare event for a university president, especially ones that major institutions like the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, two Ivy League schools, to be forced out.
And now there's an attempt to fire or get fired or forced to resign a third one, the head of MIT, the president of MIT.
Now, one of the things that happened in the firing of the Harvard president was that she was caught, and she was absolutely caught, by conservative journalists who did their jobs in proving that she actually engaged in plagiarism, serial plagiarism.
They looked at her academic record of writing and published peer-reviewed journals and either they or somebody who had hired people to do it found that she was guilty of copying other people's work without credit.
And I'm somebody who's written a lot of books.
I've written six books.
I've written many, many articles over the past 20 years.
And I know that what she did, when I look at what she did, is something that it doesn't come from just negligence or having something slip your mind.
It's from being incredibly reckless and irresponsible with how you're taking somebody else's ideas and pretending that they're your own.
It's not impossible that even the most careful people might forget a quotation mark here or there, or a certain way of attribution.
But to do it to that extent, that severely, in article after article after article over many years, that is more than just mild negligence.
That is genuine recklessness, if not outright theft.
And Harvard students are fired for much less when it comes to plagiarism.
So the question of whether Claudine Gay is guilty of plagiarism to me is not a difficult one.
It's an easy one.
The question of whether or not that was the real reason she was fired, however, is a much more interesting and complex question, in large part because the same people who celebrated and caused her firing just got the president of Penn fired less than a month ago, and she didn't have any plagiarism scandal.
She didn't have any scandal at all.
And now they want to get the MIT president, Sally Kornbluth, fired even though she has no plagiarism or other ethical scandals at all.
What they have in common instead Is the fact that they all three have been accused of permitting too much anti-Israel or anti-Semitic speech on their campus.
In other words, they were guilty of refusing to censor sufficiently in the eyes of the people who hold them for Congress.
That is what they have in common.
They have an Israel scandal.
They have an anti-Semitism scandal.
They do not have a plagiarism scandal.
Claudine Gay does, but the other two presidents do not.
And Claudine Gay's plagiarism has actually been known for a while.
There were definitely newer and more severe examples that emerged over the past several weeks, but not of the kind that would have ordinarily just gotten her fired.
People wouldn't have focused on it.
People wouldn't have cared, absent this broader political context.
And this is how you can see what the real taboo in American society is, the thing that you cannot survive, which is either, as I said, making genuinely powerful people angry, such as the billionaire donors who donate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to these colleges and obviously,
They have a huge say in what can and cannot happen at those colleges and they are pretty shy usually or timid or in private about using that power because it's not a very comfortable image to have American billionaires who have immense wealth and therefore immense power using it so flagrantly to dictate to our leading institutions of higher learning what types of ideas they should and should not permit to be expressed by students or faculty on campus.
And yet, ever since October 7th, which I'm starting to view more and more as the pro-Israel right's George Floyd, it has led to a tsunami of censorship and firings for expressing views and changes to language and all kinds of claims of racism against anybody who disagrees.
It has a very similar climate to the one that emerged in the wake of the George Floyd killing.
October 7th does.
In the wake of that, people have become much bolder.
Just like after 9-11, a lot of people became much bolder about ideas that they wanted and were able to exploit 9-11 to make happen, people have been able to exploit October 7, the attack in Israel, to become much more overt about the sort of things they want done.
And so you have a lot of billionaires now openly dictating to these colleges, not just that they should fire their presidents, but also that they should impose far greater restrictions on the kinds of speech that is tolerated.
Speech about a foreign country, about Israel, and about the US-funded war in Israel.
That's the real source of what happened here.
So you can lose your job as an American elite if you anger very powerful people or if you cross actual red lines.
Not contrived red lines, not the red lines people claim they're boldly crossing even though they do so and nothing happens to them.
The real red lines, the real taboos, the things that get you fired if you say or appear to be adjacent to.
So let's look at The facts here, in order to ask ourselves, number one, why did Claudine Gay really get forced out of Harvard?
In the context of everything that's been happening in the United States, in our country since October 7th, in the wake of the successful effort first to oust the president of Penn, the current effort already underway to oust the president of MIT.
Who and what really caused this firing?
And then for whom is this really a victory?
Is this really a victory for the American right that feels like they have been censored and targeted and persecuted legally and culturally and on academic campuses?
Or is this just another victory for establishment factions in the United States whose pro-Israel views in this particular case just so happen to align with the vast majority of American conservatives who also believe the United States Should be funding Israel's wars as they're doing.
So here is an article from the New York Times that is reporting on the forcing of Claudine Gay's resignation.
There you see it on the screen.
New plagiarism allegations force out Claudine Gay.
Backlash over Harvard's response to anti-semitism on campus led to increased scrutiny of her academic record.
So you see the New York Times carefully attributing her firing both to the plagiarism as well as to the controversy over her views on Israel and antisemitism.
And I think that is one thing that we can allow, that both things are true.
She actually was guilty of plagiarism and certainly a president of a major university probably should be removed if they're proven to have engaged in serial plagiarism given the fact that It's an academic institution.
Someone who leads the institution ought to have high ethical integrity.
And you cannot sustain an institution that punishes young students for a transgression but allows the president of the institution to skate free when found engaging in far worse transgressions.
At the same time, nobody would have cared about this.
Nobody would have been researching her.
Nobody would have been spending a lot of money, as it seems, to find out what she did 25 years ago in obscure academic journals, if not for the fact that she had become a political target, given her testimony alongside the president of Penn and MIT about the alleged increase or crisis of bigotry, namely anti-Semitism, on American college campuses.
So here's how the New York Times describes this, quote, Support for Dr. Gay's nascent presidency began eroding after what some saw as the university's initial failure to forcefully condemn the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and some pro-Palestinian student responses.
Outrage grew in early December after Dr. Gay gave what critics saw as lawyerly, evasive answers before Congress when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people were violations of school policies.
The December congressional hearing also led to the ouster of Elizabeth McGill of the University of Pennsylvania, whose support had already been shaken in recent months over her refusal to cancel a Palestinian Writers Conference.
She retired as president four days later.
Now there's several parts of this that I think are incredibly important here.
First of all, we have what brought Claudine Gay into public controversy, which is what the New York Times describes as the university's initial failure to forcefully condemn the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel.
Why should We want universities, as an institution, to weigh in on political controversies at all.
There are students at Harvard and at most American institutions of higher learning who believe that Israel is the victim in the Israel-Palestine conflict, that the United States has some kind of moral duty to fund the Israeli military and to fund Israel's wars, as the United States does and has been doing for the last several decades, even though millions of Israelis have a higher standard of living than millions of Americans.
There are a lot of people who simply believe that it doesn't matter that Americans should go to work, pay taxes, and those taxes should then be used to finance Israel's military and finance its wars.
Because Israel is such an important foreign country to the United States that we have the moral obligation to finance it and fund it and to provide it with all the bombs and weapons it needs or wants whenever it goes to war with its neighbors, which is quite often.
But then you have people at these American institutions of higher learning who believe That the Israelis are primarily to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
You know all the arguments because they're occupying the West Bank in a way that the world considers illegal, that the United States government has long opposed under both parties.
They're blockading Gaza and have been for 20 years.
They don't allow the people of Gaza to leave by air because they bombed its airport.
They don't allow them to leave by sea because they will kill them if they try and take boats and leave.
And along with the US funded dictator in Egypt, they don't allow anyone in Gaza to leave by land.
It's very rare for people of Gaza to be permitted to leave Gaza.
And as a result, other people say at Harvard and elsewhere, that it's not the Palestinians to blame, but that it's Israel to blame.
And that the two countries are basically in a constant state of warfare and Israel attacks the Palestinians, the Palestinians attack Israel, and there are people who believe that it's Israel's fault largely or overwhelmingly the conflict.
So you have students on both sides of this issue and a lot of people in between.
Why should we want institutions like Harvard or Penn to weigh in institutionally at all in our political debates?
Why was Harvard somehow obligated to comment on who's to blame for a conflict all the way on the other side of the world?
Why should American universities be doing this at all?
Now, it is true they have been doing this.
They've been doing it on issues of race.
They've been doing it on issues of LGBT equality.
They've been doing it on immigration.
They've been doing it on policing.
They've been doing it on affirmative action.
So there is an argument to make.
Why would they suddenly stop doing it when it came to Israel and Palestine and to the October 7th attack?
But just as is true for censorship.
censorship on college campuses and elsewhere, when an institution is doing something wrong, the solution is not to call for them to do more of it.
The solution is to call for them to stop it entirely.
So I thought it was extremely odd that somehow these institutions, in the eyes of many Americans, were duty-bound to weigh in on a political controversy, not even involving America, the country where they are situated, but involving this one foreign country in Israel.
There are conflicts all over the world, all the time.
In Russia and Ukraine.
In the Sudan.
In various places in Africa and in the Middle East.
And we don't expect institutions, universities to weigh in collectively, institutionally on every political conflict or any political conflict.
And so that was always a very bizarre grievance, but that absolutely was a major grievance that enraged people.
That these institutions, which all condemn the Hamas attack, didn't do so robustly enough, they didn't do so angrily enough, they didn't do so with enough conviction.
But then we have here as well that support for her presidency, and Claudine Gay ended up being president of Harvard for only six or seven months, the shortest tenure of any Harvard president in the history of the institution.
She also provoked anger, as the New York Times says here, because of some pro-Palestinian student responses.
And I think this is really the key to everything.
As you may recall, In the wake of the October 7th attack, some student groups at Harvard and other universities exercised their constitutional rights under the First Amendment, as people legally in the United States, citizens of the United States, are here legally to study, to express their political views.
And they signed statements saying that they thought Israel was to blame for the conflict, they oppose any attempt by the Israelis to hold people
collectively accountable or to collectively punish the people in Gaza and there were a lot of people offended by the statements that some pro-Palestinian groups issued including pro-Palestinian groups that are composed entirely of Jewish students or many different kinds of students including American Jews who are critical of Israel and there was a sense that somehow these institutions had engaged in misconduct by allowing
There are student groups at these campuses who blame Israel or who are opposed to Israel to issue statements expressing their political opinions in the United States.
That was the real anger.
That was, as you might recall, and we'll show you this in a minute, what prompted the real leader of this effort to purge American academia of Israel critics, Bill Ackman, who has been long using his Well, to try and pressure these institutions to reform in his vision.
That was really what angered him the most was that Harvard allowed a group of Harvard students, we interviewed two of them, to sign a statement that condemned Israel and blamed Israel for the broader Palestinian-Israeli context.
Now you of course might think That that statement was reprehensible, you disagree with it, but clearly college students have the absolute right, in America, at least in theory, at least under the Constitution, to express their views on a war that involves two foreign countries, or two foreign entities.
And yet, there seemed to be a lot of rage, a lot of anger, that these institutions allowed students to express their political opinions freely, that they didn't punish them, that they didn't expel them, And as you might recall, Bill Ackman demanded that these individual students, they signed this petition in the name of these student groups that wasn't enough for him.
He wanted their names divulged.
And then the names of these student groups were divulged.
And a lot of the people whose names were divulged Didn't agree with the statement.
Hadn't been part of these groups for a long time, but a lot of them obviously did.
And then he started saying, Bill Ackman did, that because they blamed Israel, that people shouldn't hire them.
He wasn't going to hire them.
A bunch of other CEOs who apparently have a strong affection or affinity for Israel started saying, yeah, we're not going to hire these people either.
It became a blacklist in the United States, a no hire blacklist.
Organized by some of the most powerful people in the country.
And that was when this crusade against these university presidents really gained strength.
And their real crime was they didn't defend Israel enough institutionally and they permitted their students the right to free speech.
That is really what their crime has been.
Both from the start and at the congressional hearing.
I want to show you the video of the congressional hearing that really is what ultimately caused him to get fired because I want to remind you of what that was.
Now let me just show you these other parts of the New York Times, this New York Times article just because there's a couple of other crucial facts here and we're going to get to this part in the video.
The New York Times recalls, I think fairly, that what critics got angry about were her lawyerly evasive answers before Congress when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people were violations of school policies.
I want to show you what she actually said and what the other two presidents actually said when asked about that to show you that what they're really being punished for Was their attempt to defend the rights of college students to express political views protected by the Constitution.
We should want university presidents giving answers that say, we believe in a broad and robust protection of free speech.
Even if they don't in other instances, even if they're being hypocritical, we should not be celebrating the firing of university professors because they spoke up in defense of free speech too aggressively.
Because in this particular case, they were defending the free speech rights of Israel critics.
Now here is the other extremely interesting and important component to all of this, which is the New York Times recalls that even before October 7th, Liz McGill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, had seen her support already shaken Because of her refusal to cancel a Palestinian Writers Conference.
And I've shown you this before, that the day before the October 7th attack, on October 6th, I saw a report about a pressure campaign from Israel supporters and major donors at the University of Pennsylvania who were angry that the campus was permitting a literary event filled with Palestinian writers.
Who of course they claim were anti-semitic, which is basically synonymous with criticizing Israel.
But even if they were anti-semitic, universities are supposed to allow free speech.
We want universities to allow free speech.
The policy of the University of Pennsylvania is we follow the Supreme Court's interpretation of the First Amendment.
So as long as it's not illegal speech, we permit it.
That was why they were angry at her before October 7th, Israel supporters, powerful Israel supporters and donors to the University of Pennsylvania, because she refused to cancel an event that featured Palestinian speakers whose views diverge from these billionaire donors.
This is before October 7th.
So this attempt to force universities to punish or suppress or restrict Free speech rights of faculty and of students to not permit criticism of Israel predated October 7th.
October 7th became the pretext to do that just like a lot of people in the United States before 9-11 wanted the United States government to go and invade Iraq and Iran in order to bring regime change to those countries and it took 9-11 for them to at least get the invasion of Iraq but that was something they wanted long before 9-11.
They just use 9-11 as the excuse.
It's exactly similar to how January 6th was exploited.
Namely that there were a lot of people in the incoming Biden administration who said that they regarded domestic extremism, right-wing domestic extremism, as the greatest threat to national security.
They wanted a new domestic terrorism law to be able to have the FBI unleashed against Right-wing extremists, as they called it, and then they used January 6, labeled it an insurrectionary movement, and were then able to exploit it.
Just by the way, I'm going to be having a debate, I think I mentioned this at the end of last week, the end of the week before we took off, sponsored by the site Zero Hedge.
I'm going to be debating alongside Alex Jones and Darren Beatty.
against the YouTuber Destiny.
A couple other people I think it's still to be determined on whether January 6th is really an insurrection, whether Trump was guilty of something as part of that and related issues.
So I believe that it's going to be streamed on our channel and on Zero Hedge Saturday night will give you, which is January 6th.
I was going to travel to Austin for that to do it live, but for logistical reasons I wasn't able.
So we're going to do it by, I'm going to appear by video.
So look for that.
We'll also post Notice of that as we come, but that's how 9-11 was exploited.
That's how January 6 was exploited.
This is how October 7th was exploited to impose all sorts of rollbacks of free speech rights on American college campuses that a lot of donors and activists on behalf of Israel have wanted long before October 7th and then were able to use October 7th to do it, including anger at the University of Pennsylvania president for her refusal to cancel a literary event Involving and featuring Palestinian writers.
Now here is that congressional hearing and I want to emphasize this is a case where social media distorts reality so much.
The vast majority of people have an understanding of what happened at this congressional hearing and what these three college presidents said based on an extremely viral clip.
of their answers to the Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York.
And there was a long hearing that were hours of testimony that came before this series of questions.
And that infused it with all sorts of important context and meaning.
Which was stripped out of this exchange deliberately to make it seem as though they were saying something they weren't.
So let's watch, first of all, what happened here.
Because this went mega viral.
It was the top story in every news media account.
The president, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, came out and condemned very strongly the University of Pennsylvania president for her answers here.
The Biden White House called them disgraceful, the answers of the three of them.
So let's just remind ourselves of what actually happened here.
At MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT's Code of Conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment, yes or no?
If targeted at individuals not making public statements.
Yes or no?
Calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment?
I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus.
But you've heard chance for intifada?
I've heard chants, which can be anti-Semitic depending on the context, when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people.
Okay, so that part right there already undermines and subverts what a lot of people believe happened here.
When the Congresswoman asked, are statements advocating the genocide of Jews a violation of university policy,
The context was, not just at this hearing, but more broadly, an attempt to take standard pro-Palestinian slogans like free Palestine, or Palestinians will be free from the river to the sea, and define them to secretly be calling for the murder of all Jews worldwide, a genocide against Jews like happened in the Holocaust.
And it's very similar to what left-liberal censorship advocates do when it comes to trying to justify the censorship of right-wing speech.
They take right-wing ideas on hot-button issues like immigration or affirmative action or trans issues and they redefine right-wing views so that they can claim that the reason right-wing views have to be censored It's not because it's dissent from left-wing orthodoxy, but instead because it's genocidal.
They want black people murdered.
They want to incite violence against immigrants.
They want to incite a genocide against trans people.
This is the left liberal tactic for censorship, is to redefine the speech, the ideas, as inherently racist, inherently bigoted, and inherently genocidal.
And therefore, on that basis, justify their censorship.
That is exactly, exactly, What pro-Israel activists, including many pro-Israel activists on the right, the American right, have been doing from the start.
There has been this amazing hoax to claim that there are hordes of people running around American college campuses chanting, gas the Jews or kill all Jews.
This did not happen.
This did not happen.
This is a hoax.
It's a fabrication.
Go and, if you disagree with me, I fully understand why.
So many people have repeated this enough times that a lot of people assume it must be true.
Go and find a video of any students on American college campuses who have chanted, kill all Jews, or gas the Jews.
You will not find it.
I have asked hundreds of people who believe it happened over the last month to show me an example of a video of students chanting this or a news report stating they did.
The idea that there are genocidal statements on American college campuses against Jews depends on taking pro-Palestinian slogans like free Palestine or Palestinians will be free from the river to the sea and claiming that they're genocidal and only then saying to these university presidents Do you consider genocidal statements against Jews to be a violation of campus policy?
And that's why the president of MIT immediately said, I have not heard any calls for genocide against Jews on MIT.
And then Elise Stefanik said, well, what about intifada, which is the Arabic word for uprising?
Now, is it possible that people when they say free Palestine or Palestinians will be free from the river to the sea or Intifada mean violence against Israel?
Yes, that's possible.
Is violence against Israel the same as genocide against Jews?
Of course not.
People advocate bombing Iran or flattening Gaza.
That doesn't mean that someone's engaging in genocidal speech against Iranians or Arabs.
I mean, you could make an argument that flatten Gaza is a much more genocidal statement than all these other examples, but certainly it would be free speech to advocate flattening Gaza or turn Gaza into a parking lot.
That has been something that has been said by a lot of American supporters of Israel and a lot of Israeli officials.
We've shown you the videos many times of people saying that.
But that was the fraud of this hearing, was these university presidents said, it depends on the context, it depends what you mean.
If a student writes an op-ed in the New York Times or in our campus newspaper saying free Palestine or Palestinians will be freed from the river to the sea, of course that's not a violation of university policy that of course that's not a violation of university policy that should justify the punishment of a student.
That's called free speech and we do not have an Israel exception, at least we shouldn't, for free speech in the United States.
This phrase, from the river to the sea, is included in the party platform of Likud, the governing political party in Israel, the political party of Benjamin Netanyahu, and it says there, That all the territory from the river to the sea, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, belongs to Israel.
That is as genocidal of a statement against Palestinians as Palestinians saying Palestinians will be free from the river to the sea is against Israelis, which by the way is not the same thing as Jews.
And so there are all sorts of things that could be racist.
It might be racist.
To oppose permissive immigration laws.
There are probably some people who oppose immigration because they're white nationalists, but it doesn't mean that all people who oppose immigration are racist.
There probably are some people who are racist to oppose affirmative action.
That's the reason for opposing affirmative action.
It doesn't mean all people who oppose affirmative action are racist.
There may be people who actually want to do violence against trans people who say things like, I believe in the eradication of transgenderism from American society.
It doesn't mean that everybody who questions trans dogma or the full agenda of trans rights believes in violence against trans people, which is why all those views are permissible on college campuses and elsewhere.
People can't be punished for those views.
They can't be prosecuted for them.
If they are, that's wrong.
The idea is to oppose such speech oppressions.
And exactly the same way, Even if some people who say Free Palestine or Intifada or From the River to the Sea are advocating violence against Israelis or even Jews, it doesn't mean all people who are engaging in those phrases are.
And even if they were, You're permitted under the First Amendment to advocate violence.
You're permitted to advocate violence against Iran.
You're permitted to advocate violence against Iraq.
You're permitted to advocate violence against Yemen.
You're permitted to advocate violence against Gaza.
And you're permitted to advocate violence against Israel.
There is no Israel exception to free speech doctrine in the United States, nor should there be.
I really should say there shouldn't be.
There seems actually to be.
So when these university presidents were being asked this, and I'm going to play the rest of it, and they kept saying, it depends on the context, they were defending a concept, a conception of free speech that we want to uphold, not that we want to punish.
But by trying to get them all fired for this, not for plagiarism, for this, is part of what has been the longstanding effort in the United States Especially on college campuses to restrict the free speech rights of critics of Israel.
That's what this is about.
That's what these three university presidents have in common.
And nothing else.
Let's listen to the rest.
So those would not be according to the MIT's code of conduct or rules?
That would be investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.
Ms.
McGill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct?
Yes or no?
If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.
Yes.
I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?
If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.
So the answer is yes.
It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.
It's a context-dependent decision.
That's your testimony today.
Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context.
That is not bullying or harassment.
This is the easiest question to answer yes, Ms.
McGill.
So is your testimony that you will not answer yes?
uh is if the yes or no if the speech becomes conduct it can be harassment yes conduct now one of the problems here is that they have spent their lives in academia and so they're incapable of expressing themselves like normal human beings who communicate in a normal way They're so overly layered and bureaucratic.
And so they just had these phrases that were written down for them on paper.
They had no ability.
These are very educated people.
Liz McGill is a constitutional lawyer.
And yet she has made the most muddled and timid case for free speech rights as you could possibly make, and that was one of the reasons that this looked so bad.
Stripped of the context, getting kind of bullied by a member of Congress who was much more certain in her crusade, which was to shield college students from having to hear criticisms of Israel.
But the whole premise was a fraud.
And these university presidents, despite expressing themselves so poorly, were saying the things we should want rewarded, not punished.
Meaning committing the act of genocide?
The speech is not harassment.
This is unacceptable.
Ms.
McGill, I'm going to give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer.
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's Code of Conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment?
Yes or no?
It can be harassment.
The answer is yes.
And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?
It can be, depending on the context.
What's the context?
Targeted as an individual?
Targeted at an individual?
It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals.
Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them?
Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism?
I will ask you one more time.
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment?
Yes or no?
Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct and we do take action.
So, the answer is yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard Code of Conduct, correct?
Again, it depends on the context.
It does not depend on the context.
The answer is yes and this is why you should resign.
These are unacceptable answers across the board.
Alright, so if you're comfortable having members of Congress and then hedge fund billionaires pressuring universities successfully and saying you should resign, I want that person gone because we don't like their answers, then congratulations.
Congratulations, you've won.
What has been won here?
What has been won?
A lot of times if you defend free speech, you're going to be put in the uncomfortable position to people who don't believe in free speech of seeming like you're defending horrible things.
Do you think that Nazis, actual Nazis wearing swastikas, should be able to march through a town of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois?
Yeah, I actually do think in the United States they should be permitted to march and protest even if they're Nazis.
So it seems like, you know, if you have a member of Congress who wants to make a big deal about the dangers of free speech, and especially if you're timid about Expressing the defense of free speech, or you're feeling uncomfortable about it, or you've been told how to say it in a way that doesn't sound human, it's going to seem very lopsided.
It's going to seem like you're a monster because you're defending the rights of Nazis, people with swastikas on their arms.
But yes, that's actually what we do want in the United States.
And on college campuses, we want the right of people to go and march, Even if it's against Israel.
Even if it's against Israel.
Even if some students feel uncomfortable from hearing those statements.
Even if.
It's still free speech and we should want it to be.
And yet, their crime was that they were unwilling to say that people should be punished for that.
What the distinction that we're trying to draw is that if you go up to a specific Jewish student every day and in their face scream, Jews to the gas chambers, or you go to their dorm room and you post a Nazi symbol or a Nazi slogan on their door, then you're specifically targeting with conduct a Jewish student.
Just like if you went to a newspaper and argued that affirmative action destroys meritocracy, you would be permitted within your rights to do it.
But if you go every day to a black student and scream in their face that they're an affirmative action entry, That would then turn into bullying.
That's the difference between conduct and speech that they were drawing.
So what has actually been won here is a bolstering and a strengthening of the censorship regime that conservatives have spent years pretending to oppose.
A lot of them actually do oppose it and are being consistent here, but many of them aren't.
And, as I've said before, this is not some victory of saying, oh, we're finally forcing the left to have to live under the censorship regime that they created because punishment of Israel critics has been going on for many years at American college campuses.
Those are the professors who get fired, the ones who cross the line and criticize Israel too harshly.
Those are the real taboos in the United States.
That's why these people are losing their jobs, not because of plagiarism.
That nobody cares about, it's because of this.
Now again, in an ideal world, Claudine Gay, who did actually commit plagiarism, would be fired.
But that's not the world we live in.
That's not why she was fired.
And it's not because Chris Ruffo or the Washington Beacon put pressure on Harvard either.
Harvard does not care about Chris Ruffo or the Washington Beacon.
They deserve credit.
They did a great job in doing the job of journalist the New York Times, CNN wouldn't do for ideological reasons.
Major kudos to them.
Nothing but good things to say about them.
But they're not the reasons Harvard fired Claudine Gay.
The reason Harvard fired Claudine Gay is because the Biden White House condemned them.
Because the people who write $80 million checks to the endowment of Harvard and Penn had the public support necessary to finally get them removed.
They were trying before October 7th on free speech grounds, and now they were able to do it.
That's who won.
And I know that Bill Ackman, who has a team of PR advisors, has been very clever in pretending that his crusade is the elimination of DEI, diversity and equity inclusion, on college campuses or woke.
That's not his agenda.
His agenda is Israel.
Bill Ackman's agenda is Israel.
But he knows he can't go out and say, what I'm really trying to do here is purge American educational institutions of criticism of Israel because he wouldn't have a lot of public support.
He's pretending that what he's really interested in is getting rid of woke repression of ideas.
Bill Ackman doesn't want to eliminate the censorship regime.
He wants to strengthen it in protection of this foreign country.
That's the real motive of what's going on here, which is why today Bill Ackman said, what about you, MIT?
And Sally Kornbluth?
She didn't commit any plagiarism.
She did this.
Here's the New York Times on December 6th, which is a day or two after this testimony was given, and it says college presidents under fire after dodging questions about anti-Semitism.
The leaders of Harvard, MIT, and Penn appeared to evade.
The leaders of MIT, Harvard, and Penn Appear to evade questions about whether students should be disciplined if they call for the genocide of Jews.
And here's what happened.
Quote, support for the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT eroded quickly on Wednesday after they seemed to evade what seemed like a rather simple question during a contentious congressional hearing.
Would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews?
Quote, it's unbelievable that this needs to be said.
Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country, said a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates.
Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said he found the responses by Elizabeth McGill, Penn's president, quote, unacceptable.
That's why This, this succeeded, not because of Chris Rufo and the American right, because the Biden White House and Josh Shapiro, the president, the governor of Pennsylvania who sits on the board of Penn.
Quote, even the liberal academic Laurence Tribe found himself agreeing with Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, who sharply questioned Harvard's President Claudine Gay.
Quote, I'm no fan of Congresswoman Stefanik, but I'm with her here, the Harvard Law professor wrote on the social media site Axe.
Quote, Claudine Gay's hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends.
It is amazing to me that A lot of conservatives don't understand what they're strengthening here.
After the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas, the EU, one of the chief bodies trying to censor the Internet and censor right-wing speech on the Internet,
Threatened to initiate, and they have initiated, we covered this several weeks ago, a formal investigation of Egon Musk and X, and they're exploiting October 7th to justify that, saying Egon Musk and X permitted too much anti-Israel and pro-Hamas propaganda on Twitter, and they want more of that censored.
That's what this is all about.
These are the people who are actually the beneficiaries.
If it were just the American right demanding censorship of Israel critics, Then none of this would be happening.
It's happening because it's Bill Ackman who wants it.
And because the entire Washington establishment is entirely pro-Israel.
Without them, this would have been ignored.
Here is Bill Ackman on December 5th, quote, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn were all asked the following question under oath at today's hearing on anti-Semitism, and then he gave his view of what happened, and then he said, This could be the most extraordinary testimony ever elicited in the Congress, certainly on the topic of genocide, which to remind us all is, quote, they must resign in disgrace.
This is who won.
And, you know, the irony of this as well, this idea that, oh, nothing can be said that's genocidal, aside from the fact that a lot of right wing speech is classified as genocide by the left.
Is that a lot of people think the actual genocide, like the real genocide...
is what's taking place in Gaza.
Now, I personally avoid the question of whether that term is applicable to bullets being done in Gaza, because I don't think it's a particularly well-defined term, and I don't, I dislike political terms that lack clear definition, like terrorism, or hate speech, or disinformation.
I tend to avoid those terms, because they're not well-defined, and if you look at the definition of genocide, it's not very concrete.
But in the last several days, the Primary ministers, the most powerful ministers in Netanyahu's government have come out and said that the goal of this war is to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, to get them out of Gaza.
It's certainly ethnic cleansing, but
If you want to create a standard that says, oh actually there is a free speech exception to, an exception to the free speech rights of Americans, which is speech that can be interpreted as genocidal, advocacy of genocide, you could very easily make the case, in fact a lot of people would make the case, you better hope they never get into power, that the real advocacy of genocide is cheering on the Israeli military and what they're doing in Gaza.
That's the standard that has been now created, that there's some kind of an exception to the free speech clause in America, that if your speech can be interpreted as genocidal, as inciting violence against a minority group, then it shouldn't be permitted.
That's the victory from the people who have been claiming to be crusading under the banner of free speech?
Sounds like the opposite to me.
Now, again, Bill Ackman is the same person, this person we're told was the champion of free expression on college campuses, of getting rid of racism.
He is the person who went on to Twitter and said the following on October 10th, quote, I have been asked by a number of CEOs if Harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas's heinous attacks to Israel so as to ensure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.
In fact, if in fact their members support the letter they have released, The names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known.
One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists who, we now learn, have beheaded babies, among other inconceivably despicable acts.
Of course, the claim about beheading babies has been debunked.
That never happened.
But it is true that Hamas's attack on October 7th, as I've said a thousand times, was indefensible and repugnant.
But the idea that you lost the right to engage in anonymous speech, that your name has to be divulged if you sign a statement, you lose the right to be a member of a student group without having your name dragged all through the public.
Anonymous speech is crucial.
The Supreme Court has often held that the right to be a member of a group Without having that list be made public is crucial to political activism precisely because if you want to actually engage in advocacy of a cause that most people dislike, the ability to do so anonymously is crucial.
That was why when Nikki Haley said everybody who speaks online should have to give government ID first.
It was so menacing because the right of anonymous speech is crucial, and Bill Ackman wanted to drag these people out, 20 and 21-year-old Harvard students, into the light to be put onto blacklists, and he succeeded in that.
This is not a person who wants to free and liberate American colleges.
He wants to further constrain them.
And given what a central player he is in all of this, I do think it's important to just share with you a little bit about who Bill Ackman is and what he's actually been doing.
He is a major donor to the Democratic Party, except in 2012 he supported Mitt Romney, but before that Barack Obama.
He gives most of his money to Democratic members of the Senate.
But he's also the kind of ultra-capitalist that most people ordinarily would despise and loathe.
Here is a profile of him from Business Insider on April 9th, 2020.
This is the person that a lot of people now want to put in charge of remaking American academia.
He wrote an article today in Barry Weiss' Free Press called, Here's How to Remake Harvard or Save Harvard.
He is absolutely a key player in everything that has been happening.
Quote, Meet Bill Ackman, the controversial hedge fund manager who made $2.6 billion off the coronavirus market crash in March.
Bill Ackman, the chief executive of Pershing Square Capital, made $2.6 billion for the hedge fund off a $27 million bet after the pandemic tanked the stock market.
Ackman has a history of controversial bets that earned him a $1.6 billion fortune and an investigation by the New York District Attorney's Office, although no charges were ever filed.
Ackman's hedge fund made most of its money by purchasing stakes in large corporations Large American corporations lobbying management to make changes to drive up its stock and later offloading their shares at a profit, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in 2008.
For example, Pershing Square bought a large steak and fast food burger chain, the Wendy's Company, in 2004, pressed it to sell off its successful Canadian subsidiary, Tim Hortons, and went on to cash out its investment at a profit.
Quote, his game is to drive up the stock and get out fast.
Howard David David David, which then chairman of a New York investment banking and consulting firm, told the paper about Ackman in 2008.
Ackman made an appearance on CNBC on March 18th, 2020, right at the start of the covid pandemic, proclaiming that, quote, hell is coming because of the covid outbreak.
After tweeting similar sentiments earlier in the day, Ackman's comments sent the already volatile market down, prompting accusations from various news outlets and social media that Ackman went on television with the intent of making his bet against the market more profitable, Forbes reported.
Markets plunged so sharply that the market hit a so-called circuit breaker, halting trading for 15 minutes.
In other words, at the start of the pandemic, Bill Ackman bet against the American economy.
He made bets that if the American economy collapsed, he would profit.
He then started publicly calling for a complete economic shutdown for a month, at least, at the start of the COVID pandemic, saying, shut down the economy for a month in order to protect people from the COVID pandemic.
He then went all over the media saying the economy is going to collapse because of COVID.
And the whole time he had bets that turned out to be very successful.
That earned him in excess of a billion dollars when the economy actually started cratering.
Something that, according to these articles, he helped to bring about.
He hollows out American companies as a way of making his money.
He donates massive amounts of money to the Democratic Party, except in 2012 when he wanted Mitt Romney to win.
This is who he is.
This is his politics.
And it's amazing to me how many people seem to be Deceived into believing that he is some sort of hero in defense of free expression and fighting wokeism in American universities when that is not his cause.
The New York Times, May 5, 2015, the top 10 hedge fund managers and how they spend their money on politics.
Mr. Ackman, a person in Square Capital Management, has given to Republicans, including Mr. Romney in 2012, but he backed Barack Obama in 2008 and most of the $571,000 he has given to federal campaigns has gone to Democrats, like Cory Booker of New Jersey and Jim Himes of Connecticut.
Now, he has He's been celebrating the firing of Claudine Gay, and as I said, on January 2nd, he went and wrote, Et tu, Sally?
Meaning, now we have two of these presidents I wanted gone, and now it's time for Sally to go.
Here from Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, With this headline today, a day after Harvard's president quits, Jewish alum launch campaign to force MIT's hand.
Campaign organizers are urging Jewish graduates and their allies to reduce their annual gift to MIT to a token $1 in response to what they describe as continued inaction following numerous anti-Semitic incidents on campus.
This is who is behind this campaign, according to Haritz, and this is what it's about.
It's not about eliminating diversity and inclusion.
It's not about that.
It's certainly not about eliminating censorship laws or practices on American college campuses.
It's about the opposite.
It's about taking what has been in place for many years.
Which are severe restrictions on critics of the state of Israel and fortifying and strengthening them even further by having everybody watch these very powerful presidents of universities be destroyed for the crime of not having told Congress that they would act more aggressively to silence what Elise Stefanik and other supporters of Israel call advocacy of genocide.
It's a left-wing tactic.
Here is Lee Fang, who has long opposed left-wing censorship, recalling on January 2nd, quote, Professor Joshua Katz angered Black Lives Matter activists for critiquing their demands in 2020, so they cooked up a sex scandal to fire him from Princeton.
Similar dynamic here.
Claudine Gay was targeted over her failure to censor pro-Palestinian students, so they found another angle.
It's so obvious that's what happened.
Now the media has been pathetic, I have to say, in not only doing things like Defending Claudine Gay, claiming that, oh, what she did wasn't really plagiarism because she didn't steal other people's ideas.
She just stole their words and didn't, things like that.
They've been saying that Christopher Ruffo is somehow a racist because he said, oh, look, we got a scalp.
And then AP had to stout that at their article to acknowledge that it's not just white Americans who have used the term scalp as they originally claimed.
That doesn't mean you should be blind to what's going on here.
Now, I started off by talking about taboos, what real taboos are.
it.
So they're just embarrassing themselves as always.
But that doesn't mean you should be blind to what's going on here.
Now, I started off by talking about taboos, what real taboos are.
And over the years, certain people who are well-regarded have made jokes about what the real taboos are in the United States and what they're not.
And And I know this isn't supposed to be something that we're talking about.
That's the whole point of why it's a taboo.
But you can't look at what happened in the United States on September 7th without acknowledging what lines you can cross and what lines you can't cross.
In November of 2022, Dave Chappelle went on Saturday Night Live right around the time that Kanye West had first made some controversial comments that were anti-Semitic.
And he was in a lot of hot water because of that.
And this is what Dave Chappelle did when he first came out on his Saturday Night Live monologue to address the situation.
Thank you very much for being here.
But before I start tonight, I just wanted to read A brief statement that I prepared.
I denounce anti-semitism in all its forms.
And I stand with my friends in the Jewish community.
And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time.
I gotta tell you guys, I've probably been doing this 35 years now.
And early in my career, I learned that there are two words in the English language that you should never say together in sequence.
And those words are the and juice.
I've never heard someone do good after they said that.
Think about why that was funny.
Now, the EDL came out and denounced him for anti-Semitism, for having made that joke.
But I do think it's worth thinking about why that joke was funny to the audience and to a lot of people, and obviously to Dave Chappelle.
A similar sentiment was expressed by the comedian Daniel Tosh.
I actually found this by accident.
YouTube showed it to me for some reason.
I think sometimes YouTube does read your mind in very alarmingly effective ways, but here is Daniel Tosh back in 2014 addressing the similar topic.
If I can take a quick moment to be sincere, and then I'll go back to being an asshole.
Know that I appreciate this.
That this isn't lost on me.
I didn't have dreams of grandeur getting into comedy.
It's overwhelming.
Thank you for coming out.
I know that eventually this will come to a crashing halt.
I'm not gonna stop saying awful things.
Eventually I'll say the one thing where it's like, whoop, there goes his career.
Wow, he thought you could say that, huh?
I actually wrote a career suicide note.
Would you like to hear it?
Now, I've been covering censorship in the United States for a long time.
People are like, "Oh fuck, he's doing it.
Here we go, got it." This started out strong. - Now, I've been covering censorship in the United States for a long time.
I didn't start in 2020 when the primary target became American conservatives or American conservative students.
I've been doing it for a lot longer than that.
I've been covering Big Tech censorship for many years.
I didn't only start when Big Tech was censoring Trump supporters.
I've been covering censorship and so therefore I know that for a long, long time in the United States, one of the primary targets of censorship, both on campuses and in general, are critics of Israel.
That has been one of the strongest and most repressive means of limiting free speech in the United States.
And I've seen professors fired one after the next for going over some line and how you can criticize Israel.
Alan Dershowitz went on a very successful crusade.
To have Norman Finkelstein denied credit at Drexel University based on allegations that he was too critical of Israel.
I watched Stephen Salatia get an offer from the University of Illinois.
For a tenure position that he accepted and before he started his tweets criticizing the Israeli bombing of Gaza in 2014 were discovered and they were full of anger and rage and Jewish students at the school claimed they didn't feel safe to have somebody like that on campus and Jewish donors and other donors at the University of Illinois successfully pressured the administration to withdraw that offer because of his criticisms of Israel.
He then sued they had to pay him close to a million dollars for breaching the contract but They would have lost a lot more had they not rescinded the offer from donors who were intolerant about having somebody who was such a critic of Israel on campus.
I've seen people in media who have been fired for criticizing Israel.
This is the one of the main taboos in the United States.
And it has really been strengthened in the last 10 weeks, more than I've ever seen a censorship regime be strengthened in such a short period of time.
And that is the real victor of what is happening here.
And if and when the MIT president is fired, that will be even more true.
The message is very clear.
The message is not, oh, from now on, you better be a lot more careful with your citations and your academic writing.
The message is, if you want to keep your position as an administrator at an American university, or anywhere else, you better be a lot more stringent and a lot more aggressive in punishing and repressing ideas and views that defenders of Israel find offensive.
And I understand why a lot of people are celebrating that as a victory.
People who are supportive of Israel and don't want Israel criticized in the United States naturally would consider that a victory.
Those are the people who actually led this campaign and made it work.
But everybody else, especially the people I've been hearing from for many years now who tell me they believe in free speech, this is something that they ought to be lamenting.
Notwithstanding the successful and very deliberate attempt to pretend that it's about a different agenda.
The very first reporting I did on big tech censorship was in 2016.
You can go look it up.
It's in The Intercept.
And it wasn't about big tech censoring conservative speech or Trump supporters.
It was about the fact that the Israeli government regularly gives to Facebook a list of Palestinians, journalists and activists in media outlets.
That they demand be censored on the grounds that these people are inciting terrorism.
The same theory used by American leftists on campuses to censor conservative speech.
They're inciting violence.
That's the theory used against Trump to try and keep them off the ballots.
He incited violence.
He incited an insurrection.
And in something like 95 or 96% of the cases as of 2016, when we did that reporting, Facebook accepted from Israel, from the Israeli government, the people that should be banned and they banned them.
Censorship is a tool of the powerful.
And you can always tell who the powerful people are by the people who are succeeding in censoring.
And you can tell what the powerless people are by the people who are being censored.
So while the United States, under President Biden, continues to very steadfastly support the Israeli government in essentially everything it's doing in Gaza, and I don't mean just support them rhetorically.
I mean, the United States is paying for this war.
Every year, the United States transfers $4 billion to Israel under a deal that President Obama and Vice President Biden negotiated with Prime Minister Netanyahu in 2016, a record-breaking deal for the United States to give Israel $3.8 billion every year for 10 years.
$1.8 billion every year for 10 years.
It was a $38 billion package.
But then every time Israel has a new war, like it does now, the United States separately pays for that as well, which is why the Biden administration requested $14 billion additional in aid to give to Israel.
And in addition to that money, the Biden administration has been feeding Israel the weapons.
So if some bomb detonates in Gaza or some ordinance is dropped, Then people can see it says Made in America.
It's an American weapon.
Everyone in the region knows that even though it's nominally an Israeli war, it's the United States that is funding and paying for it and providing the weapons used to destroy civilian infrastructure and kill huge numbers of people in Gaza.
And aside from the morality of that policy and the geostrategic wisdom of it, It's also illegal because the Biden administration is doing this with no approval from Congress.
Here is CBS News on December 29th.
The Biden administration approves emergency weapons sales to Israel bypassing Congress.
Quote, for the second time this month, the Biden administration is bypassing Congress to approve an emergency weapons sale to Israel as Israel continues to execute its war against Hamas in Gaza under increasing international criticism.
The State Department said Friday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed Congress that he had made a second emergency determination covering a $147.5 million sale for equipment, including fuses, charges, and primers that is needed to make the 155mm shells that Israel has already purchased, function.
Blinken made a similar decision on October 9th to approve the sale to Israel of nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth more than $106 million.
Even some Democratic Senators are a little bit upset with this.
Here is the Vermont Senator Peter Welch on January 1st.
The Secretary of State has approved the sale of tens of thousands of rounds of artillery ammunition to Israel by circumventing Congress's right of prior review.
This type of heavy ammunition has been used to devastating effect in Gaza, contributing to the death and injury of countless civilians and the displacement of an estimated 2 million people.
There are actually major consequences for the United States in supporting and arming and funding Israel.
shelter, or medical care, Congress must discuss the merits of supporting the transfer of lethal aid, which has grave implications not only for the millions of civilians trapped in Gaza who had no part in the horrific slaughter of innocent Israelis on October 7th by Hamas, but also for the United States.
There are actually major consequences for the United States in supporting and arming and funding Israel.
Major costs.
And that's the reason the Constitution requires congressional approval before the United States can get involved.
And that's the reason why there are legal schemes requiring congressional approval before the United States can sell lethal weapons to a foreign country as part of a war.
And the Biden administration is completely ignoring that law.
Now again, I know it's very hard when people get excited about a war, the way a lot of people have been excited about this war in Israel, to get people to care about legalities.
It seems very besides the point.
It seems very boring.
But even if you're in favor of this war, you should be very concerned that the Biden administration is simply ignoring the law.
In sending arms to Israel without any involvement by your representatives in Congress, the people you theoretically elected to be your voice in making decisions about peace, war and peace.
Just the Biden White House is saying, we don't care.
We're going to do this anyway.
It's not just that that they're doing, but they have also involved the United States in combat in the Red Sea because the Yemenis, the country that the United States worked with the Saudis to bomb for many years under President Obama, Has been the Houthis in particular, the militia group in Yemen that was formed to fight against the U.S.
puppet regime installed in Yemen that had no popular support and is a very well trained militia.
They have been targeting Israeli ships and other ships passing through the Red Sea that they perceive to have some connection to the destruction of Gaza.
And even though the United States is not claiming they're acting in response to attacks on the United States, at least on a couple of occasions, the Biden administration has deployed military force again without congressional approval.
Now, again, maybe you think it's the right thing to do to get involved in another war with Yemen.
Even while the risk of escalation is very great, the Israelis bombed Syria several times in the last several weeks.
They seem to have carried out an assassination in Lebanon in a way that Hezbollah has said is a redline violation because it's in Beirut.
There was a huge terrorist attack today in Iran that killed over 100 people.
The Israelis deny involvement.
No one knows who for sure did it yet, but obviously that contributes to the tension in this region.
If we're going to have an escalation of this war beyond what the United States is already fueling and funding, you should at least demand That the Biden White House has to go to Congress to do it, and yet they're also refusing to do that.
Here from the New York Times, December 31st, US helicopters sink three Houthi boats in the Red Sea, the Pentagon says.
Quote, Iranian-backed Houthi gunmen from Yemen had fired on American helicopters responding to an attack on a commercial ship, American officials said.
The Houthis had launched an attack on the freighter.
A Singaporean flag container ship, and we're attempting to board it.
As the ship's security forces tried to hold the attackers at bay, helicopters from the USS Eisenhower Carrier Group arrived to chase them away, and the Houthis opened fire on them.
Quote, the American enemy bears the consequences of this crime, they said in a statement, and its military movement to the Red Sea to protect Israeli ships won't prevent the Houthis from, quote, performing their religious, moral, and humanitarian duty in support and aid of those who have been wronged in Palestine and Gaza.
The incident now poses a difficult choice for Mr. Biden and his administration.
Senior officials said they must decide whether to strike Houthi missile and drone strikes in sites in Yemen or wait to see whether the Houthis back off after a sinking of three of their fast boats and the death of their fighters.
Now note there they weren't acting in defense of a US ship.
So there's no justification that, well, we used military force immediately in order to protect an American ship or to avenge an attack on an American ship.
It was a Singapore-flagged ship.
And again, the legalities matter.
The Constitution assigns to Congress the right to declare war, not the President to just go in, involve the U.S.
in a bunch of wars without any debate or approval from Congress.
Here is Just Foreign Policy, the foreign policy group that actually does among the best work in insisting on some congressional accountability for every time the executive branch decides to just use the military like it's a toy, like they're playing risk.
Quote, the Singapore flagged ship is not a U.S.
quote, territory or possession.
If there's a strong case that the U.S.
should participate in hostilities to protect foreign ships, the administration should simply get authorization from Congress, which could help define the mission and avoid mission creep.
That is one of the major reasons why you want Congress involved, so that the administration can't just go off with no plan and involve the United States in some new endless war.
How many wars are we supposed to be involved in?
That war in Ukraine, I know no one talks about anymore, it's still ongoing.
The Congress has not yet authorized the new $60 billion that the Biden administration has asked for.
But that war is still ongoing.
The United States is still supplying weapons.
So is Europe.
You have the war in Israel that I really believe once there's more emotional distance between us and the October 7th attack and the definitive evidence of how much of civilian life and civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, how many people end up dying, not just from bombs and shells, but from disease and starvation.
People are going to be very ashamed, not everybody, but a lot of people are going to be very ashamed to have supported this and they will pretend that they opposed it from the start.
But to now involve the United States in still another conflict involving Yemen and the Houthis and the Red Sea that could easily lead to escalation with Iran.
Is at least a complex decision that we ought to be having a public debate over through our elected representatives in Congress and yet the Biden administration just doesn't care about the legalities of this war.
Now there is a bizarre component to all of this which is that As steadfast in support of Israel as the Biden administration has been, the Israelis finally seem to be crossing a red line with these ministers who are saying that their real goal is to expel Gazans from that part of Palestine and ethnically cleanse Gaza.
That's a bridge too far, at least rhetorically, for the Biden administration.
The Biden administration came out and said, we oppose That policy preference from the Israeli government and in response, one of the most radical Israeli ministers, Ben Gavir, who is somebody who is gathering a militia that he commands in the West Bank, who believes that the West Bank and Gaza belong to Israel.
And was one of the people who came out and said, the purpose of this war is to force the Gazans to leave.
We think other countries should accept them.
They shouldn't stay in Gaza.
And the United States came out and said, look, we're funding your war.
We're paying for your war.
And we're opposed to this.
And this is not something we will tolerate.
Here is what the Israeli security minister said in response to the United States who's funding their war, who pays for their military.
This is what they said to the United States today, quote, really appreciate the United States of America.
Like, why wouldn't they?
The United States, they get the United States to pay for their military and fund their national life.
So yeah, really appreciate the United States of America.
But with all due respect, we are not another star on the American flag.
The United States is our best friend.
But first, we will do what is best for the state of Israel.
The migration of hundreds of thousands from Gaza will allow the residents of the enclave to return home and live in security and protect the IDF soldiers.
That is exactly right, what Ben-Gavir said.
I want to emphasize what he said here because I'm not usually in agreement with this Israeli minister, but in this case I am.
He says, We are not another star on the American flag.
Talking about Israel.
We are not another star on the American flag.
And that's true.
They are not the 51st American state.
And that's why I question so much why American citizens are paying for their military and paying for their wars.
Why is that?
Since they're not the 51st American state.
I had on my show over the last year or 18 months Members of Congress, conservative thought leaders, opposed to the U.S.
funding of the war in Ukraine.
And oftentimes what they would say to me as their argument for why they oppose it is, Ukraine is not the 51st American state.
We have too much debt at home.
We have too much debt.
We have too many problems at home.
We can't go around funding Ukraine's war.
They should fund their own war.
They're not the 51st American state.
And so many times I would say to them as a follow-up, well, Is that also true of Israel?
Because we fund Israel's military, we pay for their wars, and everybody would stammer and say, well, no, no, that's maybe a different case.
But it's also true of Israel.
They are not the 51st American state.
We should not be tolerating restrictions on our free speech rights in the United States.
We should not be constraining the range of expression permitted on our college campuses in the name of Israel.
We should not be funding their wars.
We should not be involving ourselves in highly dangerous potential escalations, especially when The United States government says to them what you're doing is harmful to our security, and they say, we're going to do what's best for us.
We love you, you're our best friends, but you don't tell us what to do.
That is something that a country has the absolute right to say if they are not a dependency on another country, if they're not using political pressure to get another country to pay for their wars.
But this is what's been going on in Washington for decades.
In the 1980s, President Reagan told the Israelis to stop several times with wars they were engaged in.
And the Israelis did.
And then finally, when our involvement in that region led to a suicide bombing attack that killed 241 American troops in Lebanon, Reagan withdrew those troops, even though a lot of people were trying to pressure him to go to war with Iran.
And when President Bush, the first President Bush, told the Israelis you either stop settlement expansion in the West Bank because that harms our security or we're going to cut off the loan settlements of $10 billion, the loan guarantees of $10 billion that you need from us, it was a major political controversy.
The Secretary of State under George Bush I, James Baker, who also was the Secretary of Treasury under Ronald Reagan and the Chief of Staff to Reagan and Bush, Was vilified as an anti-Semite for telling Israel, look, you want $10 billion more from us.
If you get that as a condition, you need to stop doing things we think is harmful to our national security.
And the Israeli said, we're not going to listen to you.
We're going to do whatever we want, including expanding settlements in the West Bank, even if that harms your national security, because the Israeli government knew.
that they had enough power in the United States to destroy the reputation of anybody who criticizes them or who insists on imposing limits on what Israel can do.
Benjamin Netanyahu was on tape mocking the United States and how easy it is to manipulate Americans into supporting what Israel does and to unleashing their anger against the United States government if the United States government dares to try and impose limits on what Israel can do.
That is the dynamic in the United States.
And it has been bizarre to me not only to watch people who have marched for years under the banner of free speech now turn around and cheer the strengthening of a censorship regime to protect Israel, as I just reviewed,
But also the people who have said that their worldview is defined by an America First foreign policy opposition to financing the wars of foreign countries at the expense of American citizens who so clearly venerate Israel to such an extent that they actually cheer Israeli officials when they tell the United States Go F yourself.
We don't care what you're trying to tell us to do.
We're going to take your money, you're going to finance our wars, and you're going to shut up and we're going to do what we want.
That is a borderline sadomasochistic dynamic.
But that is the US-Israeli relationship.
And the Biden administration, because it's led by Joe Biden, one of the most pro-Israel politicians in decades, Has not only involved the United States in this horrific war by financing it and arming it, but he's doing so illegally.
He's doing so in a way that risks serious escalation with no congressional approval.
Something we've seen many times in our history is an extremely dangerous thing to do.
And is presiding over the strengthening of the censorship regime in the United States in the name of protecting this foreign country.
It is, when you look at it all, remarkable the stranglehold that this foreign country has on American politics.
the actual taboos in the United States, not the one that a lot of anti-woke pundits like to pretend they're defying the actual taboos in the United States, could not be clear from all of this.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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