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You're listening to Fox News Radio. I'm Ben Domenech. So if you had the misfortune to tune in to NBC's Saturday Night Live this weekend, you saw a cold open that referenced an event that had obviously attracted the attention of a lot of people in politics from the past week.
And more than that, a lot of people in higher ed and in the conversation about free speech on campus. It went something like this. Now I'll turn it over to mega superstar Elise Stefanik from New York, who's been pacing the hallways listening to Lose Yourself by Eminem. Miss Stefanik. Thank you, chairwoman. Now, I'm going to start screaming questions at these women like I'm Billy Eichner. Anti-Semitism, yes!
I'm sorry, what? Yes, the genocide of Jews against the conduct for Harvard. Well, it depends on the context. What? That can't be your answer, you pen lady. Same question, yes or no. Well, we are serious about stopping all forms of hatred, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia. And then that
the second one, and my tea lady, Chance the Steel. And keep in mind, if you don't say yes, you're going to make me look good, which is really, really hard to do. So I'll ask you straight up. Do you think genocide is bad? Could I submit an answer in writing at a later date? Am I winning this hearing? Somebody pinch me. Ms. Stefanik, your time is up. Oh, thank God.
The chair recognizes gentlemen from Michigan. Thank you. I yield my time back to Ms. Stefanik. Damn it! I am here today because hate speech has no place on college campuses. Hate speech belongs in Congress, on Elon Musk's Twitter.
private dinners with my donors and in public speeches by my work husband, Donald Trump. So, Dr. Gay, simple question. Is it acceptable for students to use anti-Semitic language? On this subject, I'd like to speak not from the heart, but from the thesaurus. That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
And could you rephrase that in an even more academic way? Sure. That variety of odious oration is vis-a-vis me repugnant. Now, what measures are you taking to protect Jewish students at Harvard? We're taking precautions to protect all students. Jewish students, Muslim students...
Again, just the first one. That's how SNL chose to depict the questioning from Elise Stefanik, the representative from New York and one of the highest ranking women within the Republican Party, someone who's been talked about not just as a future member of leadership, but also as someone who could potentially even be a running mate for Donald Trump.
No offense to other members of her party, but Elise Stefanik is not thought of as being a woman who is in the same category as some of the people who are considered bomb throwers or people who engage in conspiracizing or really even people who yell. In fact, you can hear her asking the questions sincerely in the hearing that went viral. Here's what she said.
Here's what really happened. Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT's code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no? You've 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 chants for intifada.
I've heard chants, which can be anti-Semitic depending on the context, when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people. 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? If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment, yes. Conduct 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. 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. This hearing obviously attracted the attention of a lot of people, not just those within the political world. I heard reactions from all over the media landscape, including a lot of people who engaged with it, of all things, from the sports media landscape, news
Dave Portnoy talked about it at length from Barstool. And when he had the opportunity to address it, Rich Eisen, the longtime NFL reporter and someone whose opinion I respect, someone who doesn't really get involved within the political scene all that much, he felt the need to address it on his radio show.
Seeing the answers I saw and heard from the school presidents of those three institutions of higher learning to the simple question of whether they consider the phrase or the statement of genocide against all Jews.
to be a violation of codes of conduct on the campuses or considered a violation of the code of conduct in relation to bullying or harassment and their answer is not being unequivocally, yeah, that violates it and just equivocating with a bunch of word salad and nonsense. Now you could sit here and say, well, it's legalese because they have to leave themselves some wiggle room. That's nonsense.
The question was from Elise Stefanik of New York, asking the school president at Penn about whether genocide against all Jews was a violation of code of conduct. Her answer was, if the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. Oh, so we have to wait for the genocide to happen before you kick someone off a campus? Is that right? She called it a context-dependent decision. How about the context of what's happening in the world right now?
where hate speech against Jews, and by the way, Islamophobia is through the roof too. How about the context of just being against all hate speech? And it starts with this subject matter. Harvard's president said that genocide, somebody advocating for genocide against all Jews being a violation of their code of conduct, quote unquote, can be depending on the context. What? What?
By just allowing that speech makes people comfortable to commit the genocide. You understand that? By not being unequivocal and saying, yes, this is a violation and anybody who violates it is off campus. They can't go to Harvard, Penn or MIT by saying, well, it depends on this, that, the other thing makes them comfortable to commit the genocide. It is...
The lesson you learn when you walk into museums of tolerance or Holocaust museums around the world, including ones that I've been to recently in Berlin, Germany and Tel Aviv, Israel. It's the first lesson you learn. And I can't believe you've got to tell people who lead these institutions of higher learning that. And certainly the presidents at MIT and Harvard just reach out to Bob Kraft. He's in the neighborhood. He's created the foundation to combat anti-Semitism.
And you see the commercials all around the football games that we're watching right now with the blue square and the hashtag as well. Stand up to Jewish hate. I cannot believe the answers I heard. It is frightening to see those answers from people in positions of leadership and higher education. Are you kidding me? The answer is yes. When you're advocating for genocide against anybody,
That's a violation of code of conduct and is a form of harassment or bullying. Forget the context.
As Eisen explained, the question really is very easy to answer. When you look at the honor requirements of all of these different schools, when you look at the requirements that they have under Title IX and all of the obligations that they have to prevent the harassment of students on campus, it seems very straightforward that calling for the genocide of Jews is not something that's going to pass muster.
At the very least, I think it's something that would raise the hackles of a lot of different people, regardless of whether their institutions were as prominent as Harvard and MIT and Penn. But considering the prominence of these institutions, how central they are to the worlds of business, of media, and of science, this is also something that attracted additional attention. In fact, by the time that the SNL sketch had aired,
You already had the resignation from Penn of their president who had been under fire from the get-go. The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy piece going through how the different alumni had reacted to the situation at Penn over President Liz McGill.
Something that played out over several weeks, including a number of different alumni, prominent alumni who had given millions and millions of dollars over the years to the school, really responding with complete shock and really animosity toward the leadership of the school, both McGill and Board Chairman Scott Bach, who also resigned.
This is a situation where you have a real contrast between higher ed's left-leaning leadership and the people who fund them effectively, which include a lot of people who are very pro-business and who have different priorities politically than a lot of the different people who are now in charge of these schools.
It's one thing when that's disputes about different ways that they approach the topic of higher education and the like, disputes that obviously play out in the pages of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and in academic media and the like. But it takes on a new character when you see the kind of situations that have been only increasing, it seems, in animosity and intention over the past several years.
The journal reports in part, in 2018, Penn Law professor Amy Wax spoke out against race-based affirmative action and immigration, leading to a formal complaint and investigation. In 2022, after transgender swimmer Leah Thomas switched from the men's varsity team to the women's team and won the NCAA 500-yard freestyle race, the school nominated them for an NCAA Female Athlete of the Year award.
The beginning of the end for McGill came this summer when advertisements went out for the Palestine Rights Literature Festival, billed as a celebration of Palestinian writers and artists set to take place on Penn's campus with the backing of some Penn programs. Cosmetics tycoon Ronald Lauder, who has a university degree program named after him and is president of the World Jewish Congress, visited Philadelphia to relay his concerns to McGill about speakers at the event espousing anti-Semitic views.
Two follow-up calls, he urged her to cancel the festival. This is the thing that I think you see playing out at universities across the country. But for some reason,
It really did take these presidents sitting down in front of Congress, having to answer questions that seemed to be very obvious to anyone who comes from the real world and treating it as if it's just an intellectual exercise or something that doesn't in fact result in increased anti-Semitism incidents that seem to be increasingly allowed on campuses across the country that make Jewish students feel particularly unsafe.
The refusal to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization, which was something that really came out right at the beginning of this in October, was kind of the trigger for a lot of people to ask the question of what are my dollars actually going to? And I think that's what you saw happening here, particularly with a group of people who coming out of
University of Pennsylvania were much more likely to be, you know, in the business world and were frankly, you know, particularly attuned to the fact that they were being ignored even after giving millions and millions of dollars to help the programs. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.
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From my perspective, the free speech issues around this are ones that really do deserve tackling. But I think that the dismissal of these concerns or the attempt to say that there's a contextual way to get around these various requirements in order to allow you to call for genocide is really just being too cute by far. You can't go down that road without
ending up in a place where you're trying to carve out some kind of special scenario for people who are being treated differently, frankly, than if they called for the genocide of any other people. It seemed to me that the simple question that Elise Stefanik put to these college presidents
as one that was so obvious, so easy to answer, that the actual joke to be made would have gone in a different direction. In fact, the Babylon Bees editor-in-chief, Kyle Mann, who's familiar obviously with jokes, tweeted out, "It's actually pretty incredible how this skit featured liberals being unwilling to call genocide bad and they weren't the punchline of the joke. Just shows how unfunny you can get if you're unwilling to make fun of people on your side."
I think that's particularly true, but it's also true in an era and in the context in which all of these places seem to be very much at odds with free speech in general. In the assessment of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression,
The free speech group that has obviously kind of tried to slide in there and replace what was lost when the ACLU became super woke and about trans issues, about free speech and the like, found that Harvard was ranked 248th out of 248 schools and Penn was 247th in their most recent annual college ranking. So that tells you the situation that you're dealing with.
Back to that SNL sketch, it was interesting to me to learn from the New York Post reporting that Cecily Strong, one of the more funny recent members of the SNL cast, was supposed to originally play Elise Stefanik in that sketch. But she, after going through the run through the dress rehearsal earlier in the day, decided, according to the Post sources, that she was uncomfortable with the sketch and
and backed out from it. She was replaced at the last minute by Chloe Trost, who is one of the newer members of the SNL cast. Remember when there was a stage where you knew almost all the members of the cast by name? Yeah, I don't really remember that anymore either. It's interesting to me that this is a situation where you had someone like Cecily Strong aware enough that this was not going to be something that went well, that she would have the sense to back out.
But look, it hasn't always been this way for SNL, and we should remember the good times. It's something that I think has been at various points central to our understanding of politics and society and things like that over the years. I remember fondly the experience of growing up with it at a stage.
when you had the likes of Will Ferrell and Daryl Hammond and you had some really excellent portrayals of President Bush, of President Clinton and others before really the Obama era seemed to turn everything around into fawning over celebrities and candidates and politicians who agreed with you as opposed to basically going after them and understanding that anyone can be made fun of. That's the approach. That's the joke.
But we can recall at least one moment when they did address the issue of anti-Semitism with a little bit more seriousness. The Eddie Murphy soul and kosher coalition that he proposed when playing Jesse Jackson on the show back in the day. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Jesse Jackson.
And I was recently quoted in the Washington Post as referring to a certain group of people as "hymies." They also said that I called New York "Hymie Town." I realize that kind of talk isn't kosher, but let me see if I can explain it to you all in song.
As I said, I'm Jesse Jackson. And I'm running for President of the United States. I'm a Libra. And this is a very special message to all you chosen people out there. Don't let me down. Don't let me down. Don't let me down.
Alright!
We're both happy noses and go change on our chest. I want to say please now. Don't let me down. I'm begging you please. Don't let me down. I'm down on my knees. Don't let me down. Don't let me down.
I want to form a new coalition of soul people and bagel people from the Chitlin District
To the Diamond District From Catfish to Gavilta Fish We all need to live as one I want to look out over the crowd and see both Leather Hats and Yamaka side by side So come on you brothers and sisters All you hymens and hymettes Let's get it together And bring it on down I want to talk about love I want to form a solid coalition
♪ I love those black suits you wear ♪ ♪ And them little tiny curls that hang down in your hair ♪ ♪ You know we all need one another ♪ ♪ So we'll stay right here in Hampton ♪ ♪ Where I run ♪ ♪ I love my Hampton brothers and sisters ♪ ♪ Sometimes I feel a little Hampton myself ♪ ♪ For Rook, Hossett, and Noah ♪ ♪ Hampton ♪
Whatever you think of the humor involved here, it's clear that the issue of anti-Semitism on campus isn't going away anytime soon. And the ability of these administrators to deal with it and to confront it as the problem that it is, is, I think, going to be a new test for a lot of them. If they would like to continue down this road, they can. They can afford to. The endowments that they've raised and the money that they have is absolutely enormous.
But one thing that's going to definitely happen in the wake of this type of performance from their leading administrators and spokespeople is that they will no longer be viewed through the lens of being an element of American society that unites us.
one that Americans respect, one that Americans seek to send their kids to. And that's something that I think is very difficult to replace once it's lost. I'm not sure that these educational institutions understand that yet, but it's where things are headed and it seems to be happening very fast. You're listening to Fox News Radio. I'm Ben Domenech.
Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. Hi, everybody. It's Brian Kilmeade. I want you to join me weekdays at 9 a.m. East as we break down the biggest stories of the day with some of the biggest newsmakers and, of course, what you think. Listen live or get the podcast now at BrianKilmeadeShow.com.