Rob Shimshock of Campus Unmasked exposes three 2018 campus scandals: Eric Clanton (Diablo Valley College), who assaulted a Trump supporter with a bike lock in 2017 but avoided prison, John Cheney Lippold (Michigan), whose academic boycott lie led to reversed sanctions, and James Livingston (Rutgers), whose racist Facebook rants were quietly ignored after initial condemnation. These cases reveal how ideological bias in academia—from Israel-Palestine misrepresentations to Title IX weaponization—undermines free speech, even with legal protections like the First Amendment, while universities often backtrack under pressure. The trend suggests systemic moral corruption where political conformity trumps academic integrity, leaving students and dissenters vulnerable. [Automatically generated summary]
A feature interview with Rob Shimshock of Campus Unmask.
It's January 1st and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Well, 2018 was an incredible year, and I think one of the things that characterized it was that the insanity from university campuses started to spill out into the general world.
In Canada, that happened most remarkably through the Prime Minister's office.
He can't touch anything, whether it's the budget or our military deployment to Mali, without looking at it through a gender equity lens.
The guy's gone mad, but it's a madness that is commonplace on universities.
And I don't know if you know this, but we have a specialty website on The Rebel.
It has its own URL, its own domain, campusunmasked.com, and it does just what the name promises.
Every day, our reporter Rob Shimshock unmasks some campus craziness in Canada or the United States.
And we've asked him to do a special show today.
We're going to take the whole episode to talk about some of the craziest stories from campuses in 2018.
And then maybe afterwards to think about what we might expect in the year ahead.
And joining us now via Skype from Washington, D.C. is our friend Rob Shimshock.
Rob, great to see you.
Ezra, thanks for having me.
Well, it's a pleasure.
And you are sort of your own remote outpost there.
And you're probably about 70 years younger than me, so you're still in touch with the kids.
But seriously, though, you are in a heavy campus beat.
You work for us, you work for campus reform, and all you do every day is study political correctness on campuses, right?
Yes, that's true.
Left-wing bias and abuse, yep.
Well, it's so important, and I'm pleased to say that your videos on our specialty page, campusonmask.com, have been seen.
Last I checked over 2 million times cumulatively.
I don't have the exact number at my fingertips, but they're very popular.
And you're really building up a track record.
You've covered so many different campuses in both Canada and the United States.
It would be in the dozens now, the number of different campuses, am I right?
Yeah, if not more so.
I think I was giving you the numbers a couple months ago, and we had like over 200 stories, and half of them were from different campuses.
Wow.
That's probably at least 100 from different campuses.
Yeah, I mean, we here in Canada think that we're really socialist and we're really far gone.
But some of the craziest campuses are actually in the United States.
Even though you've got the First Amendment there, even though I think as a country you're more conservative than we are, your campuses are more leading edge.
I mean, Berkeley has always been insane.
Is it true that your campuses, you've got the best campuses in the world by some measures, but in terms of grievance industry and political correctness, would you say America also has the worst in the world?
I would say so.
And I think no other campus captures this dichotomy more than Harvard University, which has been in the news for perhaps discriminating against Asian American applicants.
You have them trying to ban single gender groups.
So they've definitely taken a stand against such value principles as free speech, freedom of association.
And they're, you know, they're considered the premier institution worldwide.
Yeah.
That's a great point.
I mean, it's the best and the worst.
We sometimes talk to Jordan Peterson.
We haven't had him on in a few months.
He's been so busy with his tour.
But he, considering he's a PhD professor at U of T and he's a fairly prestigious guy, he often recommends against people going into the humanities, even though that is where he himself teaches.
Before we get into you, you've selected three crazy stories that I want to get into.
We'll play the video clips and I'll ask for your commentary.
But before we do, would you agree with Jordan Peterson when he encourages young people not to go to university?
He doesn't say that as a blanket statement.
I think he still believes in engineering and other practical educations, even career education.
But just to get $100,000 in debt, to go through four years of grievance studies, would you agree with Jordan Peterson that there's a better way to be a young person?
Well, I think it all depends on your priorities, Ezra, because of course, most people, whenever they're going to college and they're making that huge capital and time investment, they're looking for a huge payoff.
So if you're looking to go into a really lucrative industry, you know, one of the STEM fields, perhaps it's still not infiltrated by social justice.
However, we do need people like myself, like other great reporters at Campus Reform and other places for which I've worked who cover these, who perform like a watchdog mission.
And so I think that that could serve some value if you want to major in the humanities.
If you find that, you know, writing or some other such skills still suits your purpose, we can definitely use some more watchdogs out there who perform my kind of work and who also keep tabs on other institutions.
You're so right that we need more watchdogs, but just for someone who's not an activist, not a public personality, not someone who wants to have a political mission in life, but just someone turns 18, they graduate from high school, just a normal person who wants to leave a normal life, would you recommend that they go to even an Ivy League school to take a humanities degree?
Would you still say that's worth them doing?
You know, I would.
And I think it's because I still see some value.
You know, like my favorite thing to read in my pastime would probably be Shakespeare or something like that.
And so I do see some value in getting that kind of, just like more of an aesthetic pursuit out of it.
But I think if you do want to contribute value to the world, increasingly so, you can get that same experience through your internships, through actual job experience, being out in the field, and in some cases, the technical colleges, which are less expensive and will often take less time to get a degree.
So definitely there are alternatives depending on, you know, if you want to make a lot of money or if you're particularly passionate about shaping change in a certain part of the world.
Yeah, you definitely could save yourself a bundle as well.
Yeah.
You know, I remember when I took an English class in my first year university, and like you, I loved Shakespeare, couldn't get enough of it.
I only studied a little bit of it in high school.
I thought this is going to be wonderful.
So I signed up for an English class at University of Calgary, and I was stunned.
And this is, and I'm much older than you.
This was more than 20 years ago, almost 30 years ago.
We didn't study Shakespeare.
Eric Clanton's Controversy00:08:24
He was considered a dead white man.
We didn't even really study true literature.
It was all critical theory and a feminist analysis.
And I was so heartbroken.
You know, frankly, I think if you want to learn Shakespeare, you're probably going to do it better online or just with chums than in some Marxist-directed study.
But listen, I called you on today, and I'm so grateful for your time, not just to opine on things, although it's good to catch up, but to review, we asked you for three of the craziest stories from 2018, and you selected them.
I want to start off with the first one.
Maybe you can set it up.
A professor.
I mean, a professor who got violent.
And I'll let you tell the story.
Boy, I want to tell it, but you know the story inside and out.
Tell us about Eric Clanton, and then we're going to play a clip from your video.
So Eric Clanton used to be a professor at Diablo Valley College.
And during one of the incidents at Berkeley, in which there was a bit of an altercation, he was present, and he was masked.
He had black sunglasses on, a hoodie, and he actually took a bike lock and, you know, just spiked a Trump supporter's head with it.
Now, of course, we can get into later what actually happened to him.
But probably the most ironic part of this story, just off the bat, is that he used to be an ethics professor.
All right, well, let's play a little excerpt from your video on the subject.
Take a look.
Oh, shit!
Oh!
Oh, shit, he's bleeding.
Yo, yo, yo!
Hey, man, he's bleeding!
Clanton, who used to teach ethics at Diablo Valley College in California, was facing 11 years in prison for that April 2017 assault and others.
And guess how much time he'll actually have to serve?
Zero.
So was that some antifa riot or something?
There's been a lot of that kind of street fisticuffs.
Normally you don't have a professor.
Normally it's the radical students, not the radical professor.
And a bike lock, that's a weapon.
You don't bring a bike lock to a meeting unless you, like, it's not something you keep in your hand.
You leave it on your bike.
It would be like bringing a hammer to a protest.
You're not there to do carpentry.
It's clearly brought as a weapon.
How did that even happen?
What was that all about, that kerfuffle?
Right.
So earlier in 2017, there were, of course, a few, quite a few showdowns at Berkeley.
One was in the midst of a planned Milo Yiannopoulos speech back in February 2017.
During that event, of course, Antifa caused, I believe, $100,000 in damage to the city by bashing ATM, setting things afire.
And this was another one of those occasions, and it was in April 2017.
Now, Eric Clanton was charged with three felony assaults with a deadly weapon.
He was charged with another felony for causing great bodily injury, I believe, and then two misdemeanors for simple battery and wearing a mask to avoid getting ID'd upon committing a crime.
Now, he was able to enter a plea bargain with California in which they dropped all of his felony charges in exchange for Eric pleading no contest to one of the misdemeanors.
Yeah.
You know what?
Just a few weeks ago, I saw news that a far-right-wing person who was punched in Charlottesville sued the person who punched him and got $1.
And it's so clear to me that there is a political color to prosecutions like that.
Like our politics is so pervasive now.
And the fact that Eric Clanton, this professor, who hit a bunch of people with a bike lock, gets off with no jail time because he cut a deal with, obviously, a Democrat prosecutor for talking about California.
And I have no sympathy for this far-right guy in Virginia who got punched, but I don't believe we should punch people.
Well, apparently the jury or whoever it was thought, well, $1 is enough.
That's us pretending we care about the law.
I find it really troubling that the left these days no longer believes in the rule of law.
Is this common on campuses or is this so rare?
That's why it's newsworthy.
How common is this?
Well, I think this was a particularly egregious instance, of course, but you have to remember that it begins not with the actual act of swinging a byclock, but with the actual ideology that's espoused in the class.
You definitely do see ideology that leads to this kind of stuff.
You see misrepresentation of the Israel versus Palestine conflict.
You see things like this that engender these kinds of false equivalencies, wherein like hate speech, hate speech is suddenly actual violence.
And so I think it definitely begins in the classroom.
One thing back to Eric Clanton that was particularly astounding was I think we can all agree that it was a miscarriage of justice, but it was really egregious in this sense because this wasn't a case that was investigated by the police initially at least.
This was a case that average citizens on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, 4chan were looking into this professor.
Concerned citizens did the hard work of identifying this guy, and it was all for naught.
Yeah, isn't that, I remember that people sort of used their own online sleuthing to find out who it was.
You know, you're so right to say that the actual final act of violence, it's the most tangible, obviously, and that's where the crime is committed.
But the seeds are planted with the normalization of violence against our political opponents.
And I remember on Donald Trump's inauguration when some liberal walked up to a racist named Richard Spencer and punched him right in the face on the street, broke his eardrum.
And I have no sympathy for Richard Spencer's views, but I don't believe that any American citizen or any Canadian citizen should simply be punched in the face because of their political views.
But this punch a Nazi thing became so ubiquitous.
And the trouble with that, Rob, is that there aren't a lot of real Nazis around.
So what this was is punch someone you don't like and then after the fact say, oh, well, he's a Nazi, so it's okay.
And this spread so much that it became cool.
Here's an awards show in Hollywood where some actor, cool, to the rapturous applause of the Hollywood lovies in the room, shouted, it's time to punch some people in the face.
Do you remember this clip?
Here, take a look.
We will hunt monsters.
And when we are at a loss amidst the hypocrisy and the casual violence of certain individuals and institutions, we will, as per Chief Jim Hopper, punch some people in the face when they seek to destroy the League of the Disney Franchise and the Marginalized.
Punch some people in the face.
And this guy's talking about decorum, and he's calling for punching people in the face.
I think that we have a generation now that says, if you don't like someone, you can punch them in the face.
Because if you're a Trumpist, well, you must be a Nazi because Trump is like Nazis, and wouldn't you punch a Nazi?
I think we've unleashed a dangerous force by saying it's okay to do violence to people you don't like.
What do you think, Rob?
Yeah, I think so, definitely.
And, you know, one thing that's particularly revealing about this is, as you were asking before, were there other cases in which professors were actually the agents of violence?
And one thing, of course, I'm covering so many stories a day, I don't remember them right off the bat.
But one that I do remember was this was something, it was the feminist professor, and he attacked someone at a video game convention.
And I believe he just, you know, kind of walked away.
I don't think things were actually, I remember I was trying to get the actual report, the police report filed by the victim, and there were witnesses to this assault.
But yeah, I don't remember any repercussions on that one either.
Well, you know, and we've seen this spilling out in the streets, very progressive city, Portland, Oregon.
Professors and Power Imbalance00:15:26
Andy Goh, who's a Vietnamese American, so he's a racial minority.
He covers antifa thugs who are invariably white, by the way.
I got nothing against white people.
I'm just saying he's the minority.
They're the white folks with masked faces.
They threaten him.
They assault other people.
And the Portland cops are clearly told to stand down.
I find it dangerous.
But let's move on to the next clip.
And this is about a University of Michigan professor.
And I find this crazy.
Now, Michigan has a very high Muslim population, but this is not a Muslim professor.
His name is John Cheney Lippold.
And well, let me invite you to tell the story and then we'll play the clip.
Yes, so there was this professor, John Cheney Lepold, who had agreed to write a recommendation for one of his students to study abroad.
Now, a couple of weeks later, whenever the student reminded him that he needed his recommendation, the professor suddenly reneged on that agreement upon finding out that the student wanted to study abroad in Israel.
Yeah, well, okay, let's take a look at that clip right now.
Let me introduce you to Dr. John Cheney Lepold, a professor of American studies at the University of Michigan.
His fields of study all end with studies, which has become quite the telltale sign for cultural Marxism in universities.
And his research areas include gender, race, and identity.
Cheney Lepold recently agreed to write a recommendation letter for one of his students, Abigail Ingber, but then changed his mind after learning that Abigail was going to be studying in Israel.
He said, as you may know, many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine.
What's a Palestine?
You say that as though it's a country or something.
This boycott includes writing letters of recommendation for students planning to study there.
What happens in that case?
Because clearly that's not a professor doing what they academically, like either that student is to be, is commendable or not, and to withhold or grant an accurate observation of the student's talents based on an irrelevant criteria.
Like either the student is worth recommending or not.
It's got nothing to do with an external political situation.
I can't imagine someone who wanted to go to communist China or even totalitarian Iran would be treated this way.
How did that go down?
How did that end when it finally worked its way out?
Right now, what's really remarkable about this story, Ezra, is that the professor flat out lied to his students.
He said that different departments at University of Michigan are boycotting Israel when it's actually against you, Mitch, policy to do this.
And to, you know, refuse academic boons for students based on your political persuasion.
And so the school did, fair enough, did sanction him by saying he won't get a merit raise for this school year and won't be able to take a sabbatical for the next two years.
Yeah, it's just, I believe that a professor should be able to be political.
In fact, you know, professors might have a lot to offer in terms of politics.
And I think there are some courses of study where a professor's own politics are relevant to the class, but to essentially bring in political standards over academic standards and to reward or punish students based on the professor's own political proclivities, I think it's odious.
Frankly, I think it's so commonplace, though, the only unusual thing here, Rob, this is my opinion, I'd like yours, is that he was so open about it.
I think professors reward or punish students based on their ideology all the time.
I think they're normally just not stupid enough to put it in writing like this.
Right.
And what's really peculiar here, Ezra, is you would think if you either support Israel or you oppose Israel, the best way for your students to get information to support either side of the argument is to actually experience Israel.
And of course, this is what the professor was preventing his student to do.
So this is kind of like a Streisand Effect type situation, wherein if you ban something, you A, make it all the more appealing, and B, inadvertently lend some credence to the side of the argument that you oppose.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
I want to talk about one last story, and I find this so odd because I remember my very first day of law school, if I can tell you an old war story here, Rob.
Getting into law school is hard.
You have to take the law school admission test, the LSAT as it's called, and you have to have good grades and letters of recommendation.
And some of the schools are pretty competitive.
I applied to the University of Alberta Law School, which is sort of competitive.
It's not like the top school in the country or something.
But more kids applied than got in.
So everyone who got in was sort of relieved and grateful, at least if it was their first pick or something.
But I remember the very first day of school, the associate dean went through and said, well, you're 49% male and 51% female, and this percent of you had a business degree and this percent had a nursing degree.
And I thought, okay, that's interesting.
And then the professor or the dean broke us down by race.
And I thought, well, I know how she knew all the other factors.
How did she know our race?
I never said her race.
And it was then, on the first day of law school, that I realized they had a race-based affirmative action.
And I guess every person who was in there had made the cut.
But I immediately thought, well, imagine those people who were the best, but they lost out because there's this affirmative action.
I found very little sympathy for my point of view from my fellow students because obviously everyone in that room hearing that had made the cut.
The kids who lost out for reasons of being wrong race weren't there to complain.
And that's a long preamble, Rob, to what has only grown in the 20 years since I've been in law school, and that is that being a white student is demonized in political and academic circles, but most vigorously by white people who hold positions of privilege.
You see my point, Rob?
It's like, and the reason I told you that anecdote is all these other white liberals who are saying, oh, yeah, that's totally fine that we have anti-white discrimination.
Well, they say that because they made the cut.
If they hadn't made the cut, they wouldn't be saying that.
Tell me about James Livingston, this crackbot professor at Rutgers, which is a good school.
He's a history professor who's as white as the Klan.
He's like white as a snowstorm, but he puts it on a big show of being anti-white.
Tell me about him.
Sure.
So this was a Rutgers University professor, which is in New Jersey, James Livingston.
He went to a fast food restaurant in his spare time.
So this wasn't in the classroom, but he did go to this restaurant and he saw some white kids playing on the ground around him.
And so after this, what I guess was a very horrible experience, he proceeded to take to Facebook where he launched some racially charged profanity-laden attacks against these white kids.
He said he hates white people, and he apparently resigned from his race in that post, too.
I didn't know you could resign from your race, but I guess if Rachel Dolazah can do it, surely a professor from Rutgers can't.
Let's take a look at the video.
Rutgers history professor James Livingston took to Facebook and said, Okay, officially, I now hate white people.
I am a white people and apparently not an English professor.
For God's sake, but can we keep them, us, us, out of my neighborhood?
Now, up until this point, you might be like, hey, maybe he's just satirizing apartheid.
Maybe it's even in commentary on South Africa.
But that's until you reach the next few sentences when he seems to blame the rambunctiousness of children not on their immaturity, but instead on their whiteness.
I just went to Harlem Shake on 124 in Lenox for a classic burger to go.
That would be my dinner.
And the place is overrun with little Caucasian holes who know their parents will approve of anything they do.
Slide around the floor, you little head.
Sing loudly, you unlikely moron.
Do what you want.
Nobody here is going to restrict your right to be white.
Right.
So attributing rowdiness to the amount of melanin you have in your skin.
Is this the new progressive, Mr. Professor?
It's so weird.
I mean, I think it's cool or something, but again, if he really wants to leave his whiteness, it's not the whiteness, the shade or hue of his skin that's the problem, apparently.
It's the conduct or the power or the privilege.
Why don't ever any of these folks looking for affirmative action lead by example?
Reminds me of what Abraham Lincoln said.
He said, when I hear people promoting slavery, I have a hankering to see it tried out on them.
I'm paraphrasing.
And my message to this Rutgers professor would be: if you really hate the power and privilege of your whiteness, you can actually do something about it by giving up your position to someone who's morally better than you.
They never do that last part, though.
They just virtue signals.
It's so weird.
And as you point out, it's just so bloody racist.
Exactly.
It's just like the celebrities who were claiming they'd leave the country when Trump got elected, or now, of course, with the migrant crisis, they know, well, why don't we let these people into the country?
Why don't we let illegal aliens in, just not into our houses?
You never see that volunteered.
And so back to James Livingston, though, after I broke this story, the restaurant did denounce the professor, and the school actually said that he violated the school's discrimination and harassment policy.
But then, so their reasoning there was that a student in his class could reasonably feel stigmatized by their race by taking a class with him.
But three months later or so, after the story died down a bit, Rutgers quietly reversed its decision and the professor did not get sanctioned.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I mean, if you were a white student in his class, you could properly feel that he hated you just based on your race.
It's so weird.
You know what?
I miss the days of racial equality when Martin Luther King Jr. told us to judge each other by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
That is the opposite of what's going on on campuses these days.
And what's so irritating is it's the obsession is to think of yourself as a color, as a gender, as a sexual orientation, instead of just as students or citizens.
I hate the fact that we're being atomized and then reformed along those identity politics lines.
I just don't think it's healthy.
Is that everywhere?
Are all campuses like this to a degree, Rob?
Yes, you definitely have these little hypocrisies springing up along a lot of different lines.
So of course you have the racial one, in which case, if this were James Livingston saying these comments about black kids at a restaurant, I'm pretty sure he would have been sanctioned for those.
And, you know, I think the sanctions would have been pretty rough for him.
And you see the same thing in Title IX cases in these campuses, wherein it's a kangaroo court for the accused, often male students.
And that's a male-female equality rule, isn't it?
Just for our Canadian viewers.
Okay, sorry, I interrupted you.
I just wanted to explain that because we don't use the phrase Title IX up here, but we have the same thing.
It's basically feminism in law.
Sorry, keep going.
Yes, and this would apply to the kind of sexual discrimination cases or sexual assault in many cases.
And so what often happens is the accused student won't get a fair trial.
Sometimes they'll be actually very disrespected by administrators.
I remember there was one story in which the administrator, the Title IX administrator, thought that they had hung up on the student and then called him a vulgar word on the phone.
So you just see this kind of arrogance and really just intolerance for people based on their identities.
And it's like, these are the same people who are preaching that they want equality.
But where's the real equality, I'd ask you, Ezra?
Yeah, well, I think it's a whole industry that depends on inequality.
The whole point of these grievance industries is not to solve the grievance because then they'd have to get a real job.
It's to perpetuate the grievance and monetize the grievance.
Well, I tell you, I find your videos depressing.
You deliver them in an entertaining way and in a way that makes, I think, a viewer laugh.
But I haven't watched all 200 of your videos.
I watch as many as I can.
And I have to say, I have come to the conclusion that if there is another way for a young person to find a path in life that does not go through a humanities education in one of these politically correct campuses, that would be a way I would try and choose.
I just think that it's so difficult for someone to hold their breath for four years to get through it.
And you can't come out of the other end without being in some way tainted by it.
Do you think 2019 is going to be a year of backlash or the pendulum swinging back?
Do you think people are sick of this or do you think, no, it's just getting going?
You know, I'm not so sure, Ezra, because if you had asked me this question a couple years ago and Donald Trump had just won the presidency, I would say, yeah, I think we are going to have some kind of backlash.
But, you know, now we're two years into this.
We're still reporting some of the most insane stories.
I don't know if that's likely to happen.
I will leave you with this one anecdote.
And this was actually in my own experience through humanities at University of Virginia.
I took a class.
It was Latino Media Studies.
And I was getting a media studies degree on top of my English one.
And I remember my whole semester essay was pretty much an essay bashing Trump.
And in this class, what I really had to do was compartmentalize.
I was just coming off of an internship at Breitbart.
And I think my professor may have known that I didn't particularly agree with his point of view on Trump.
But I, for that class, just bowed my head and I told him what he wanted to hear.
So I think oftentimes what the case has to be is if you are a student, you either have to do that and parrot the same talking points, the same progressive talking points, or risk getting a bad grade and have your future livelihood messed up.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a shame.
And I've talked to Peterson about this, about should a student lie?
Not lie in an express, like tell a falsehood, but lie as in shape what they say in an essay, shape their views to please the professor.
I'm not calling you a liar.
I'm saying you complied, you submitted, you bent the knee to get through it without, because is it really worth a moment of independent political thought to get an F?
Or if not an F, to get to get to be damaged academically in your grades, especially if something turns on it.
Why Students Compromise00:01:19
And I'm not criticizing you.
I remember when, again, I was at law school and I would fight all these folks and no one would support me in class.
And afterwards, they'd say, oh, we're behind you all the way.
I said, why don't you help me out when the professor's here?
And they say, Ezra, this is our only ticket.
This is our only chance out.
I remember one guy said, if I don't get through law school, I'm done.
This is my only chance, economic chance.
So I think professors have a power imbalance.
And if they abuse it by treating students as political pawns, I think that's abusive in its own way.
And I think it's morally corrupting to force young people to lie.
I think it's a terrible thing.
Anyhow, listen, Rob, I really appreciate your work.
The website is called campusonmasked.com.
I'd have to check the viewer stats.
It's millions of views, so I know you're making a difference.
Thanks so much for your great work in 2018, and good luck to us all in 2019.
Thanks for having me, Azra.
All right.
It's our pleasure.
Well, that's our friend Rob Shimshock.
As you heard, he's been doing the Campus Unmasked beat for us.
He also works for Campus Reform, a U.S. NGO with a similar mission.
And I encourage you to check out his videos, whether you're a student or know someone who is.