Harvard, MIT & UPenn Presidents Disgrace Themselves

0:00 - The presidents of three elite universities facing questions about the rise in hate on campus. - As the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania are testifying before House lawmakers- - It looks like there is a glaring hole in the policy. It doesn't appear to extend to Jews. - Dr. Kornbluth, Ms. Magill, and Dr. Gay at MIT, at Penn, at Harvard is calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT's, Pen's? Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?

0:30 - If targeted individuals not making public statements. - Yes or no. Calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment. - I have not heard only for the genocide of Jews on our campus. I've heard chance, which can be anti-Semitic depending on the context. - If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman. - It's a context-dependent decision. That's your testimony today? - It can be depending on the context.

0:57 - 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. (intense music) - The barbarians are at the gates, folks.

1:29 How has this happened? Harvard's MBA program is renowned for using case studies. So I think it's only fitting that we use Harvard itself as a case study in barbarism. Let's recount a few recent facts so they don't get lost. in the fog of war. On October 7th, over 1,400 innocent Israeli civilians were massacred in an orchestrated, planned, and purposeful paramilitary assault by Hamas. They came by land, sea, and air. They went door to door killing and kidnapping innocent men, women, and children.

2:03 This was an intentional act of terrorism. It was barbaric aggression and the murder of Jews on a scale not seen since the Holocaust. And that night, while the civilized were in shock, while I and others around the world were rushing to WhatsApp to check on friends and relatives in Israel and offer prayers, condolences, and help. Over 30 student groups on Harvard's campus released a joint statement by Harvard Palestine solidarity groups on the situation in Palestine.

2:33 Among these was the school's affiliate of Amnesty International. The letter which we'll link to in the notes below asserted the following. And I quote, "We, the undersigned Student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. The apartheid regime is the only one to blame." So Israel was entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence, the only one to blame, what?

3:05 Now look, these Harvard students were not alone, of course, as we've seen this kind of celebration and defense of barbaric brutality swept the so-called Elite Western World. A Columbia professor called the Hamas Attacks "Awesome, a stunning victory." A Cornell professor called the Attack exhilarating. Pro-Palestinian protestors took to the streets producing the rightfully infamous and again, irony-free queers for Palestine image that's gone viral for obvious reasons.

3:37 I'll come back to this one because in a way, it's a Rosetta Stone into the nature of the barbarism we now face. There are plenty of condemnations of these students and professors and their stances out there already. One can absolutely make the case, which I personally completely agree with, that they are barbarians themselves and supporters of barbarism. But here's the thing. In civilized societies, we allow crazy, stupid, and even downright evil things to be said. That is in fact a hallmark of civilization and civil discourse.

4:10 America leads the world in this with our explicit First Amendment Protection of free speech and dissociation. Hateful speech is protected speech still, and it still should be because the only way to discover truth is in an open, full-throated battle of ideas. Hateful speech, as so many have said, is defeated with more speech, not censorship. Places like Harvard claim to be the absolute vanguard in this pursuit of truth of Veritas. So how did the institution respond?

4:41 On October 9th, two days after the 30-plus student groups blamed the victims, Harvard President Claudine Gay signed her name as well as many others to a letter that was, I would say conspicuously constrained. It makes no mention of the group's reactionary screed. One long sentence I think best captures the posture and tone of this letter. And I quote, "We have no illusion that Harvard alone can readily bridge the widely different views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we are hopeful that, as a community devoted to learning, we can take steps to draw on our common humanity and shared values in order to modulate rather than amplify the deep-seated divisions and animosities so distressingly evident in the wider world."

5:25 But, John, you may be wondering, doesn't this sound right in tone for an institution seeking to avoid taking a stand so that all points of view can duke it out in the battle of ideas? And frankly, my answer to that would be yes it does. This is proper if it were applied consistently, but it's not. See, this same Claudine Gay wrote a very different letter in May 2020 in the aftermath of the tragic murder of one man, George Floyd.

5:51 Though not yet the president of Harvard, she was a dean at the time. And the tone and language of that letter speaks volumes for the bias at work, not just with Claudine but at Harvard and every institution like it. Since I don't trust my own biases in reading this frankly, and you shouldn't either, I decided to ask ChatGPT to analyze both letters. My prompt was simple and as neutral as I could make it and here it goes.

6:16 I wrote, "I am going to feed you two different letters written in the immediate aftermath of an event signed by the same person. I would like you to analyze the tone of both of them individually and then compare the tone. I may ask some follow-up questions for clarity. Are you ready?" You know you've gotta be polite with ChatGPT for some reason. Then I fed it Claudine's 2020 post-George Floyd letter. Here's a section of ChatGPT's response. Quote, "The letter's language is strong and purposeful.

6:46 Phrases like 'Callous and depraved actions,' 'Heartbreak and outrage,' and 'Acute sense of vulnerability,' drive home the urgency and weight of the moment. Overall, the tone encapsulates a mix of sadness, frustration, and a clarion call for change." All right, fair enough. Then I fed it the October 9th letter, and ChatGPT responded with this. Quote, "The tone of the second letter is somber but more restrained compared to the first.

7:16 Unlike the first letter, which had a stronger call to action and a direct acknowledgment of systemic issues such as racism, this letter is more focused on the emotional aspects and community support. The language used is somewhat more neutral and less emotionally charged than the first. Overall, while both letters are written in response to tragic events and aim to address the concerns and feelings of the respective communities, the tone of the second letter is less impassioned and more focused on communal support and education."

7:46 Now, (scoffs) first of all, it's completely crazy that the computer can do this and have it be coherent. And I frankly judge it as being less biased than me or any other human reading these two things 'cause they are very charged. But you need to remember something. Ms. Gay was in a position of institutional authority in both instances and both letters were posted on official university websites. So the difference in tone reflects a difference in the institution's culture, not just Claudine's behavior as a private citizen versus as a university representative.

8:16 It wasn't like the bombastic 2020 was posted on her substack and then the very reserved and restrained one was put on Harvard's website. These are relatively equivalent documents. One more bit of context you should know about the current president of our oldest and most prestigious university. She is a verified cancel culture warrior. Ms. Gay went on a successful warpath to destroy the work of multi-award-winning economist Roland Fryer, an attempt in an unprecedented attack to try to strip him of his tenure.

8:50 Roland is a Black professor from a broken home who rose to the heights of academic achievement, but dared to actually review the statistics on the lethal use of force by police in America against Black people. His findings not only undermine Ms. Gay's impassioned 2020 letter, but call into question crucial elements of the America as oppressor narrative Ms. Gay and others like her across academia push on our kids and frankly, profit from immensely as an accepted fact.

9:18 So she canceled him in what one of Roland's colleagues called "The most cold-blooded murder I've ever seen." It wasn't literally a murder, but figuratively. You can get a fuller picture of this story in the beautifully produced documentary by Rob Montz titled "Harvard Canceled Its Best Black Professor," and we'll link to that down below. This is the person that Harvard promoted to president of the university, an enemy of discourse, a cancel culture warrior. And though I am hesitant to say it, a barbarian, I recently interviewed Greg Lukianoff, the President of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

9:54 His new book, "The Canceling of the American Mind," lays out just how barbaric our universities have become. The current environment makes the McCarthy era look like an Oxford debate. Academia has become a place where debate is only entertained at best between the farthest reaches of the utopian revolutionary left and that's kind of it. So free speech and civil discourse between radically different points of view is explicitly rejected. Free speech is now considered right-wing under the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse.

10:25 And being right-wing, as Greg notes, is grounds enough for total cancellation and you can simply ignore people. So it should come really as no surprise that Harvard ranks dead last and FIRE's Free Speech Rankings of universities. It's joined at the bottom by a civilization, murderer's row of poison ivy leaguers. If the school ranks highly in US news and world reports, it's a good bet. It's an incubator for barbarism. Super majorities of students nationwide say both that they feel the need to self-censor at school and that they approve of censoring others.

10:58 Our kids are an irony-deficient lot. (logo whooshes) (logo whooshes)