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Dec. 13, 2023 - Sean Hannity Show
38:07
Harvard Under Scrutiny - December 12th, Hour 2
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What I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why?
Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies.
From Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi.
What difference at this point does it make?
Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hour two Sean Hannity show toll-free.
Our number is 800-941-Sean.
If you want to be a part of the program, we've got an update on what's been happening.
We know that the UPenn president resigned over the weekend.
A lot of pressure being brought to bear on other presidents of other universities, especially the big three that went before Lee Stephonic last week, that being MIT, UPenn, and Havid.
What's so interesting about this, it's now taken on a whole new meaning because despite the crumbling reputation of Harvard's president or Havid's president, Claudine Gay, they're going to keep her.
Now, Harvard University threw their support behind President Claudine Gay in the face of these growing calls for her to resign over her handling of campus anti-Semitism.
And yet in the interim, she's also had to address a very serious charge of plagiarism that compounded concerns about her leadership.
But in spite of that, the Harvard Corporation and the university's highest governing body said, quote, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay in this statement sent out earlier this morning.
As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay's continued leadership of Harvard.
And the board said our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues that we are facing.
The university said it learned of plagiarism allegations in October regarding three of Ms. Gay's articles.
So it wasn't one incident.
And an independent review that the concerns did not rise to the level of, quote, research misconduct.
Even so, she has issued corrections and she's apparently rewriting parts of her thesis, a 1997 doctoral thesis, which became the focus of plagiarism allegations following a report in the Manhattan Institute City Journal.
And anyway, and she paraphrased passages, quote, nearly verbatim.
That's supposed to be a big no-no in college.
No statement signed by the fellows of Harvard College means that Ms. Gay has escaped, for now, the fate of the former University of Pennsylvania president Liz McGill, who had to resign on Saturday.
Now, let's go back to the beginning of all of this.
And as these three presidents of universities, UPenn, Harvard, and also MIT, went before Elise Defonic.
And here's how it went down with Claudine Gay.
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 anti-Semitism?
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.
And is it anti-Semitic rhetoric?
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.
Wow.
Very powerful.
Joining us now, a good friend of this program for many, many years, Carol Swain is back with us.
And apparently, Carol, who, by the way, is an incredible, if you look at her background, incredible academic credentials.
My understanding is one of the people that she plagiarized was you.
Is that true?
It is true.
She lifted passages, only a couple of passages, out of my prize-winning book, Black Faces, Black Interests, the Representation of African Americans in Congress that was published in 1993 and updated in 95 and 2006.
And so that was the first thing that I was made aware of.
And I immediately wanted to wait before I spoke.
I wanted to read her research to see what she had been doing over the years.
And I noticed that her research followed the themes of my book, but without really engaging my book, like she will have one citation in her bibliography, but there's no way anyone reading her articles would know that all of her research, you know, follows the theme of my award-winning book that won three national prizes, cited numerous lower court cases, cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
She should have engaged the work, even to refute it and disagree with it, because we did disagree.
She didn't do that.
And so it's like I was canceled in my research from the very beginning.
She didn't acknowledge that her work on minority representation was work that really followed my work that was considered seminal.
Well, I mean, then what is your reaction before we get to the comments that she made?
You know, if it crosses into conduct, which I think is obscene, I want to speak directly.
I mean, she's the president of what is supposed to be one of the most prestigious universities in the country, and they have multiple instances of plagiarism.
How does any college president survive that on its just on its own?
Sean, they can't normally.
But let me tell you this.
She never met the standards for tenure at an Ivy League institution.
When I received tenure at Princeton, the standard was you had to have a path-breaking publication, a path-breaking book.
As far as I can see, she does not have any books, and all her research is derivative of my research.
And it's not plagiarism in the sense that she copied passages from my book, but I would argue that her whole research agenda really grew out of work that I had done back in the 1990s.
And this is how it hurts people like me.
In academia, your statue, everything about how you are accorded respect comes from the number of citations you have.
If someone like her, if they have a body of work and they're not citing someone, someone that is a leader in the field, people who read their work, you know, may never know that they're drawn on someone else's work.
And I don't just blame her.
I blame her committee and her colleagues because people in political science knew about my work.
It won the highest prize in the profession, so there's no way they didn't know.
I would argue that in the mid-1990s, after Derek Bach and William Bowen wrote a book, The Shape of the River, where they argued in favor of preferential treatment for affirmative action, at that time, I had started writing and commenting in favor of race-neutral, means-tested affirmative action.
And so the elites all around me, at that time I was at Princeton, they were going in one direction, and ideologically, I was going in another direction.
I supported class-based, race-neutral affirmative action, and that was not popular.
And as I became more and more conservative, eventually leaving the Democrats, becoming an independent, and finally a Republican, I would say that I was kind of canceled.
And so she got away with having a whole research career without really acknowledging my work the way scholars would traditionally do if you're building on someone else's work.
So today, yesterday I was sad.
I was sad for academia.
I was sad for myself.
Today I'm angry because there's no way that she should have been tenured in the Ivy League.
Once it was exposed that she had plagiarized, she should have immediately been fired or forced to step down.
And Harvard University thinks that it gets to decide what plagiarism is because some of her supporters have argued that's not plagiarism.
So they're saying that Harvard University decides what constitutes plagiarism?
I don't think so.
Well, they're certainly changing the definition and lowering the bar dramatically to thread the needle to keep her in their position.
What was your reaction to the questioning of Elise Stefanik to Claudine Gay?
It was a simple question about the issue of bigotry and whether or not if you call for genocide of Jews, is that bullying and harassment according to Harvard policy?
And her answer is, well, only if it crosses the line into action.
So in other words, you can say anything you want.
Now, I would ask you, can you say anything you want about any other identity group at Harvard University in the halls of Harvard?
I tend to think that if you were a racist, if you were a sexist misogynist, that if you went against the LGBTQ community, that if you were Islamophobic, if you used the wrong pronoun and were, quote, labeled as transphobic, I would imagine the reaction would be very different.
Here we're talking about calls for genocide and that that's okay.
That's acceptable as long as it doesn't cross into action, which I find unconscionable, especially in light of you know, what this was referencing, and that was the murder and the raping and the beheadings and the torture and the kidnapping and the terrorist activity of October 7th.
Well, Sean, we both know, as well as the listeners out there, if the Jewish students were black and the pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian students were white, it would have been shut down immediately.
It would not be taking place on our campuses.
And what we have here is the DEI industry in action.
And my book, The Adversity of Diversity, I think Dr. Gay is a poster child for the conundrum that the DEI industry poses for civil rights laws, for the Constitution.
It turns everything upside down.
It hurts racial and ethnic minorities, but it hurts everyone.
Every student at Harvard will be hurt by Dr. Gay's leadership.
And so the Harvard board, because she's their first DEI black president, they think that they have to protect her at the expense of their brand because there's no way in the real world that someone, and she went to the best schools, she went to Exeter.
She supposedly won a prize for her senior thesis.
I want people to go back and examine that senior thesis.
And so she has had the best of the best of the best.
I come from poverty.
You know, I came from the school of hard knocks.
I had to work for everything.
And most Americans have had to work for everything.
But I mean, this woman who's had everything just breathes in.
So progressives, they created her.
They're protecting her.
And they're doing it at the expense of academic standards.
And they are harming every student in America.
All right, quick break more with Carol Swain on the other side.
800-941-Shauna's on number one.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hammond.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started Normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson.
And I'm Ted Cruz.
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Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
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So down at Verdict with Ted Cruz Now, wherever you get your podcasts.
What I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why?
Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies.
It's almost a dirty word, one that connotes conspiracy theory.
Will we ever get the truth about the Benghazi massacre?
Bad faith, political warfare, and frankly, bullshit.
We kill the ambassador just to cover something up.
You put two and two together.
Was it an overblown distraction or a sinister conspiracy?
Benghazi is a Rosetta Stone for everything that's been going on for the last 20 years.
I'm Leon Napok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries.
This is Fiasco, Benghazi.
What difference at this point does it make?
Yes, that's right.
Lock her up.
Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Ham.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started Normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass, you're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson.
And I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So download Verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
What I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why?
Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies.
It's almost a dirty word, one that connotes conspiracy theory.
Will we ever get the truth about the Benghazi massacre?
Bad faith, political warfare, and frankly, bullshit.
We kill the ambassador just to cover something up.
You put two and two together.
Was it an overblown distraction or a sinister conspiracy?
Benghazi is a Rosetta Stone for everything that's been going on for the last 20 years.
I'm Leon Napok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries.
This is Fiasco, Benghazi.
What difference at this point does it make?
Yes, that's right.
Lock her up.
Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We continue now with Carol Swain.
She is a senior fellow for the Institute of Faith and Culture and the author of Adversity of Diversity.
It really is sad.
You know, these universities have become woke, and yet this double standard is being applied on a number of levels for her.
Now, I just happen to believe most HR departments can be summed up in a very simple way, and that is the golden rule.
And I guess if you're an agnostic or an atheist, you can reject the first part, which is to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul.
Okay, that's optional.
But treat your neighbor as you treat yourself.
You know, treat others the way you want to be treated.
And if you, like, for example, if somebody wants to be called he or her or she or whatever, I'd respect their request.
I don't have a problem with it.
But I don't think kids in schools should be indoctrinated and values of parents should be contradicted, especially in the lower grades, even in high school for that matter.
Well, I mean, I agree, and I can tell you that if we want to try to rescue American education, we have to turn our colleges and universities into institutions where you do have competing ideas.
We used to think of universities and colleges as marketplace of ideas, and I guarantee you that no critical thinking skills would take place in indoctrination chambers.
People grow.
They learn when they are exposed to divergent views or they are forced to think.
That is not happening on today's college and university campuses.
It's really a shame.
And, you know, all the academic work that you have put together in your life, you need and deserve to get credit for it.
I mean, I'm proud to know you and call you a friend.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on what's going on.
And I'm sorry this happened to you.
I really am.
Well, I'm not going to give up until she resigns.
And then we're going after the rest of them and try to reclaim and restore American universities.
I think that is a noble goal.
Carol Swain, thank you so much.
We appreciate you being with us.
Thank you.
Your calls are coming up next, 800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
You know, I want to tell you something about what's going on.
The state of Texas now has joined groups like the Federalists, the Daily Wire, and they are suing on the issue of federal censorship or what they call the federal censorship industrial complex and basically the latest in a series of major investigations and court cases in the last year.
And what they're uncovering is federal censorship laundered through private cutouts.
Now, the U.S. Department, U.S. State Department is violating their claim, the U.S. Constitution by funding technology that would silence Americans that question government claims, saying that a lawsuit filed by the Federalist, the Daily Wire, and the state of Texas.
Now, the three are suing to stop, quote, one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, gravest abuses of power and infringements on the First Amendment and First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.
That's written right into the lawsuit.
And it exposes federal censorship activities even beyond the very dramatic discoveries in the pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Murthy versus Missouri, or basically also known as Missouri versus Biden.
That lawsuit alleges the State Department is illegally using counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign disinformation, instead to stop American citizens from speaking and listening to information government officials dislike.
I mean, look at the lead up to the 2020 election.
You want to talk about disinformation or the federal censorship industrial complex?
Well, we know what happened in the lead up to 2020.
We know that the FBI, they had verified the authenticity of the very real laptop of Hunter Biden, which they had in their possession since December of 2019.
They confirmed its authenticity in March of 2020.
Why did the FBI have their special agents meeting weekly with big tech companies, warning them they may be victims of a disinformation campaign, and that disinformation campaign may be about Joe Biden.
It may be about Hunter Biden.
And then, by the way, when we get close to the election and the New York Post breaks their blockbuster story, even though the FBI knew it was an authentic laptop, when they were asked by the likes of Facebook, asked by the likes of Twitter, by the way, is this the misinformation you've been warning us about?
Or is this true?
Even though they knew it was true, they would not confirm that it was true.
You know, that seems like they're putting cinderblocks on the scales of a presidential election.
And this is the type of thing that is happening again and again and again.
Let me play for you Michael Schellenberger saying that the censorship industrial complex, which includes the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, big tech media platforms, is even worse than they realize.
Let me play this for you.
Nine months ago, I testified and provided evidence to the subcommittee about the existence of a censorship industrial complex, a network of government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, and big tech media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials alike for holding disfavored views.
I regret to inform the subcommittee today that the scope, power, and lawbreaking of the censorship industrial complex are even worse than we had realized back in March.
Two days ago, my colleagues and I published the first batch of internal files from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, which show U.S. and U.K. military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed abroad against the American people.
All right, joining us now, Sean Davis, our friend with the Federalist.
He is the CEO and the co-founder.
Sir, welcome back.
How are you?
Happy holidays.
Merry Christmas.
Happy Hanukkah.
Glad you're with us.
Merry Christmas.
Thank you for having me, Sean.
Let's talk about this lawsuit and how applicable is this whole issue of what the FBI did in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election.
I think it's all connected.
Basically, what we have is the federal government acting effectively as a death star, to use a Star Wars example, for censorship across the country.
Because the government has shown us what they actually fear most.
It's not foreign propaganda.
It's not foreign terrorists.
They're terrified of their own citizens exercising their rights in ways that the government doesn't approve of.
And in our case, our own government, using our money that it takes from us in taxes, basically built up a censorship regime to tackle us, to tackle organizations like the Daily Wire and the Federalist, to make it harder for us to report facts, especially facts that the government doesn't like.
And we're thrilled to have the new Civil Liberties Alliance representing us in this case so that we can finally fight back against this massive regime trying to shut us down because of our politics and because what we say is inconvenient to them.
Can you explain exactly what it is they've been doing to the likes of the State Department?
There was a unit that they set up there called the Global Engagement Center.
And the Global Engagement Center acted as a hub for a bunch of other agencies within the federal government to partner with private and third-party groups in order to crack down on what they call misinformation or disinformation, which is merely just facts that they don't like.
And what the State Department unit did was develop technology and build partnerships that it then farmed out to private entities and third-party groups all around the country and all around the world.
It farmed out its censorship activities to them and then pretended, oh, they're doing it.
It's not us.
So it's okay.
By the way, I've been a victim of this also.
My name was on a couple of lists.
I'm not going to sit here and whine and complain, but efforts to censor by social media presence have been well chronicled on top of I've lost all privacy.
Every time I turn around, my private text messages are being released publicly, but I digress.
Yes, well, and what's so insidious about it is that a couple of these private entities that we've identified, and we know there's hundreds of them.
We have evidence on at least two of them, openly brag that what they want to do is starve companies like mine of revenues so they can shut us down so we can't report facts they don't like.
And this was all being done in concert with the federal government using technologies that the federal government developed.
And it's illegal on a number of fronts.
Obviously, it violates the First Amendment that says the federal government can't abridge our freedom of speech or our freedom to publish news.
But it also violates the law.
Federal law says that the State Department is allowed to tackle misinformation and propaganda only as it pertains to foreign actors, to state actors, which makes sense.
You don't want China dropping propaganda in here and being able to get away with it.
But what the State Department did was it illegally used that program and that funding to target domestic critics, to target domestic dissidents like you, like me, like the Daily Wire, like conservatives all over the country, like the New York Post.
And that simply cannot be allowed to stand if we want to continue to have a free republic.
I totally completely agree.
All right.
So what do you think the future of this lawsuit is?
Well, we're very confident.
We think we have the federal government dead to rights.
And I think what makes our case a little unique, we're not going in there shaking down the federal government for money.
We're not saying, hey, you need to give us millions or billions of dollars for what you've done to us.
All we're asking for is for the censorship and the illegal behavior to stop.
But wait a minute.
It sounds to me like you would have damages.
Why wouldn't you seek damages?
Because we want I'm in this business.
I'm doing what I do.
And I know you do it for the same reason because I want to make a difference because I know that what we believe is right and what we say is true.
And all I want is the opportunity to do that.
I want the opportunity to go out unencumbered by my own federal government to say things I believe and to say facts that are true.
So all we want is for them to stop doing that.
I couldn't agree with you more.
Anyway, Sean Davis, keep us in the loop on this, okay?
Thank you, sir.
I appreciate it.
All right, we appreciate it.
800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
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Tell me, friend, Sean Hannity sent you.
The final hour of the Sean Hannity Show is up next.
All right, back to our busy phones.
Let's say hi to Corbin.
He is in Missouri.
Hey, Corbin, how are you?
Glad you checked in.
Hey, I'm doing good.
As always, a good show, Sean.
Thank you, ma'am.
What's going on?
Watching the debates and everything else like that, you got Haley and Vivek and Christie and DeSantis, and I'm just listening to him, and he is going to be the candidate.
Number two, whenever Trump talks, I mean, he could be talking to 50, 60, 70,000 people.
And Donald Trump is making that connection with each and every person out there.
Whenever you were interviewing him, and I guarantee you, I'm sure you looked out there at the crowd.
You know, they just weren't listening to Trump.
They had that connection with him.
And the other thing that I see these candidates talking about, it's always I and me and I and me and I and me.
The one thing that Trump always says, us and we.
And, you know, we dealt America back.
It was what we did.
And, you know, the one thing that he always says, you know, they're not after me.
They're after us.
Trump is just in the way.
But, I mean, the man makes a connection.
And that is.
Listen, it is a phenomenon that in many ways I can't even explain to you.
I mean, think about this.
It defies all conventional political gravity that you have a presidential candidate that gets arrested and arraigned.
And every time it happens, his poll numbers go up.
They don't go down.
You see what's going on.
On paper, you could not explain that.
But in reality, you can.
And I think what the American people have figured out is that the DOJ, the FBI, they have been politicized.
They have been weaponized.
That we have a dual justice system, that there's a fundamental corruption at the core of all of this.
And I think it has caused people to rally to him.
And then he's got one other thing, I think, really working in his favor.
His policies worked.
And his policies are simple common sense.
And they're very conservative.
Now, I'm not saying anything bad.
Look, do I think Chris Christie belongs on that stage with his I hate Donald Trump agenda?
No, I think he's a blowhard and it's a waste of time.
Vivek, in my view, started out interesting to me.
He's become a little full of himself.
And he's never really been a solid conservative with conservative credentials.
Now, in the case of Governor DeSantis, I think he's done a great job as the governor of Florida, a really good job.
And he's 45 years old.
I think I could see him one day being a president.
I can see that.
Nikki Haley, you know, ran a conservative, ran a conservative state.
She has a track record.
She's a serious candidate.
They certainly deserve more attention, in my view.
But, you know, I don't think I could take another shouting match with Christie and Vivek.
You know, it makes my ears hurt after a while.
The one thing that, you know, that watching the debate that you had with DeSantis and Newsom, you did a great job, too.
I thought you were very right in the middle.
You had the facts and everything else like that.
I'm watching DeSantis on that debate.
And I'm going, wow, I could get behind this guy.
I like DeSantis.
But I'm watching him in the debates, and I'm going, okay, where was the guy that was on Hannity that was actually fighting Newsom?
Look, I'm not going to make an excuse for him, but I can only tell you in an environment like that when you got so many people in a very limited time.
30 seconds.
Okay, you're finishing your answer.
Time is up.
If you remember what I said at the beginning of that debate, I said, I'm going to try and give you guys room to breathe here.
Now, let me explain the system we had.
We had a green light meaning it's your time.
We had a yellow light meaning, okay, wrap it up.
And then we had a red light meaning your time is up.
When the red light went off, I did not stop either candidate unless I really had to.
And I let them finish their thought.
I let the debate, I even said, I used the word during the debate, I want to let this thing breathe and let you guys have a conversation if you're willing to have it without speaking over each other.
And it got, you know, every once in a while, I'd have to say, please don't make me a hall monitor.
I don't want to be Chris Wallace.
And mostly they were cooperative.
It got out of hand occasionally, but that's bound to happen.
And I thought it was a very good, substantive debate.
And my questions were all fact-based on the issues that I think impact people the most.
That's how I approached that debate.
I hope I succeeded in my mission.
Certainly a lot of people watched it, and I'm glad that they did.
And a lot more than watched the last Republican primary debate.
But I just think it lends itself for people to stay more dialed in and focused rather than, you know, too many people on the stage.
I think I just don't see a lot of these people making it far.
Anyway, I hope that answers your question, my friend.
Glad you're out there.
Thank you for your kind words.
It means more than you know.
Hope you have a great holiday.
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And I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
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What I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why?
Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies.
From Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi.
What difference at this point does it make?
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