Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News and Analysis - A No Spin News Special: Protest Chaos

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Listen to Bill O'Reilly's recent commentary on college protests, where he's joined by Harvard grad and podcast host Julia Hartman to explore the connection between Harvard and liberal ideology. Bernie Goldberg adds insights into antisemitism within anti-Israel protests, while Cornell Law professor William Jacobson discusses how Anti-Semitism has metastasized from DEI initiatives on the Cornell campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Look, I'm a free speech guy. I believe in speech that I may not like, that you may not like, Bill, that the good people watching us may not like. I think people have a right to speak. But campus, college campuses are communities. and communities have a right to set their own rules. So intimidating speech is not protected. Threatening speech is not protected. And I have an easy, what I think anyway is an easy comparison.

If these demonstrators, instead of saying to Jews, go back to Poland, we're saying to black students, go back to Africa, how long would college presidents put up with that? If they were intimidating gay students, trans students, Asian students, Latino students, instead of Jewish students, if they were threatening them instead of threatening Jews, how long would that last? Why is it okay when Jews are in the crosshairs, but it's not okay when anybody else is? I can't answer that question. I want to know if you believe these school protesters, not the outside. agitators. But the kids are anti-Semitic. Do they, do you think they hate Jews? They hate you?

Most of them I would, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. But if you're in a group of students and some of them are threatening any students, in this case Jewish students, then you can't be part of that group anymore or you have to kick out the people who are doing those things. I'm not trying to make a statement that this is a widely, a big problem in the demonstrators, among the demonstrators. But if it's a problem at all, then it's a problem. Okay, so you say that even if you're not an anti-Semite, if you're in a group that's holding up a sign that says

Intifada, which is uprising to just destroy Israel, that you either get out of the group or you have to take the tag of anti-Semitism. Do I have that right? Yeah, pretty much. Look, here's what I'm saying. Let's go back a little bit to the 1960s to the great civil rights demonstrations, and I'll get to your point in a second. When Martin Luther King marched, he didn't wear a mask.

His followers didn't break into buildings and destroy anything. They didn't demand amnesty. They were grown-ups who said, we broke the law and we'll pay for a civil disobedient. They didn't whine about it. These people who are demonstrating now, a lot of them, not all of them, Bill, but a lot of them, are children who wear masks, who chant things like Intifada and from the river to the sea. They go on Amazon and buy Kifias, the Palestinian scarf so that they could look and sound like Hamas. As a matter of fact, I think Hamas ought to send them fruit baskets.

and thank you notes because they're saying and doing the things that Hamas likes. And if there are a minority, they're giving a bad name to everybody else. Now, Columbia and New York, Columbia University, Ivy League School, that's over. The NYPD went in, took all the tents out, arrested the people in the buildings. That's over. And I don't expect it will spring up again to that extent. But the protesters moved down to City College of New York, CCNY, where there are about 500, just milling around New York City, which is the center of anarchy right now in the country. So at Columbia, and this is what we told you yesterday, there were 280 arrests, according to the NYPD.

out of 109 on Tuesday, this is just Tuesday, okay, 109 arrests, 32 were outsiders, they call them non-affiliates, 32, non-students. At CCNY, out of 171 arrests, 108, look at that number, non-students, arrested. So you have 140 agitators on these campuses. Now, I use the word agitators, I guess it's possible that some very sincere people wander in there, but probably not, okay, because everybody knew the cops were going to come in. So this shows it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that outside anarchistic forces are driving much of these protests on the college campuses.

Then there is the bigger picture about these demonstrations, which I addressed with Chris Cuomo on News Nation last night. Go. As a student of history, this doesn't only smack of Germany in 1938. This smacks of what happened in Iran in the 70s, where fundamentalists came in and changed a culture by starting with the students. And are you concerned that this is the beginning of radicalization in America? I'm concerned about radicalization in America, certainly.

Okay, but I'm more concerned about poor leadership across the board from Biden down to the college presidents. Look, this isn't like 1938 Germany. Most college kids don't want any part of this. They're not anti-Semitic. They don't even understand what's going on. Most of the protesters don't understand the issue. That doesn't concern me. The lack of leadership does.

They're complicit. These poor leaders politically correct, woke people who have no spine and who allow people to be injured. And the final point I want to make is the progressive left, which drives this protest across the country, wants public disorder. We saw it after George Floyd. They want chaos and anarchy. So most college students don't buy into this at all. All right, it's not like Vietnam. And thousands and thousands.

No, no, this is very contained. All right, I've got people all over the place reporting to me now. Let's face it, the U.S. economy is under stress. National debt rising, trade war, shaking the markets. And meanwhile, China is dumping. the dollar and stockpiling gold. That's why I protected my savings with physical gold and silver through the only dealer I trust, American Hartford Gold.

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Power, politics and the people behind the headlines. I'm Miranda Devine, New York Post columnist and the host of the brand new podcast, Podforce One. Every week I'll sit down for candid conversations with Washington's most powerful disruptors, lawmakers, and even the president of the United States. These are the leaders shaping the future of America and the world. Listen to Podforce One with me, Miranda Devine, every week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. You don't want to miss an episode. And the University of Florida, we said this yesterday.

Big school, Gainesville. Day two, Ben Sass, the President, say, Craig. Look, if you violate any of University of Florida's tenants, you're expelled. Do you have any trouble down there? No. University of Texas, Austin, completely different, weak leadership. Now, when I say weak, there are two categories of weak. There's Joe Biden category, does it be futile, doesn't know what to do.

He did issue a statement at another one today, but we'll get to it. But that's why he doesn't know what to do. And then there are the sympathizers, the college presidents who, they don't like Israel. They kind of like this. But that's a weakness, too. You can't run an organization based upon what you like. So on the other side of the country, UCLA, they had a problem last night as well. Counter demonstrators showed up there.

And they got in a fight with the anti-Israel demonstrators. Violence, but no arrest. Cops, I understand, didn't do anything. They let the violence unfold. They let the people slug it out. I wasn't there, this is a secondhand report I'm giving you now, can't vouch for it, but that's what I was told, could be wrong. But no arrests.

But again, even if they were arrested, they're not going to get prosecuted in L.A. Or New York, or San Francisco, or Chicago, or Baltimore, or St. Louis, on and on and on. That's why this is happening. All right, here are the worst colleges for the demonstration. UCLA, Columbia, University of Texas, Tulane, Yale, USC, Southern California, Northeastern, George Washington, Loyola, New Orleans, MIT, Emerson, Boston, University of Mary Washington, Fredwood, Virginia, never even heard of that. Portland State, Arizona State, University of Indiana, Washington University in St. Louis.

hotbeds. All of those schools are run by leftists. There's one thing they have in common. So the Columbia president, Minu Shufik, put her a picture up. There's Mino. How you doing, New York? Yeah. All right, she is the reason why all of this chaos broke out of Columbia because at the University of Florida, the Gators, Gainesville, Ben Sasse, former senator, I believe from Nebraska, he's a president of the university. And he said, eh, if you do the shirk's belt. So all of a sudden, none of the kids did it. It's hard. It's not hard. Columbia University canceled their main commencement ceremony. Nice, right? Nice. First, these kids go through COVID, then they can't graduate because the loons are running around a campus,

demonstrating against Israel. Emory University in Georgia, in Atlanta, they're scaling about their graduation in Chicago Art Institute. Protesters broke into buildings and did all kinds of stuff over the weekend. Princeton, some students were on a hunger strike there. I went on a hunger strike when I was in college

because the food was so bad. There wasn't any cause. And Oxford and Cambridge, and I mentioned this because my son, was at Oxford in the fall semester. They have all kinds of pro-Palestinian encampments in Great Britain. Now there's a poll, morning consult,

almost 2,000 registered voters, good morning consult, you took my advice, registered voters, or likely voters, not adults. Question, ban pro-Palestin demonstrations on American campuses? Should they be banned? 47 percent say yes ban them opposed 30 percent see i'd be in that 30 percent i don't want to ban demonstrations you just got obey the rules all right don't know 23 percent so that means that tells

me if 23 percent of the people polled by morning consult don't even know what's going on at the college campus day hey it's sean spicer from the sean spicer show podcast reminding you to to tune into my show every day to get your daily dose inside the world of politics. President Trump and his team are shaking up Washington like never before, and we're here to cover it from all sides, especially on the topics the mainstream media won't. So if you're a political junkie on a late lunch or getting ready for the drive home, new episodes of the Sean Spicer Show podcast drop at 2 p.m. East Coast every day. Make sure you tune in.

You can find us at Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Caitlin Becker, the host of the New York Postcast, and I've got exactly what you need to start your weekdays. Every morning, I'll bring you the stories that matter, plus the news people actually talk about, the juicy details in the world's politics, business, pop culture, and everything in between. It's what you want from the New York Post wrapped up in one snappy show. Ask your smart speaker to play the NY Postcast podcast. Listen and subscribe on Amazon Music, Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. People don't know who Martha Pollock is. You know very well who she is and have been a critic of hers.

What's the essential problem with President Pollock? The problem was that after George Floyd, she reacted the way many colleges reacted with an aggressive, quote-unquote, anti-racism program, which of course was very racist, not anti-racist, and imposed it on the campus. in July of 2020, she laid out what she called an anti-racism initiative. She assigned Ebram Kennedy's book. He's a proponent of discrimination against people to cure past discrimination as reading for the summer for the entire university. And then she implemented her plans. And her plans were mandatory DEI training for staff,

which she implemented immediately, and then has been working for multiple years to impose that on the rest of the campus. So we're a campus where everything started to revolve around race in July 2020. And that's the problem. Now, it has metastasized from DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, into anti-Semitism in some cases. And there have been charges on the Cornell campus, and we know Colombia, we know Harvard, we know Yale, we know all of these, they call them pro-Palestimates, but a lot of it is anti-Semitic. Are you surprised that happened? Well, I've seen it coming, and I've multiple times over the years, warned about this,

that when you racialize everything on campus, when you install, quote-unquote, decolonization as your prevailing religion, when you impose land acknowledgments on the campus, every time there's an event, they have to read a statement saying that we're on basically stolen land. when you imbue the entire campus with that and you view everything through a people of color versus white colonizer ideology, we know from many places that the Jews and Israel get left on the side. And that's what happened. And that's what I warned about. I've been warning about this for years, but no one wanted to listen because they're so in love with the DEI. And so it burst up on October 7th. Everybody, I saw it coming. It was there. but October 7th really brought it out.

We're on our campus. You actually had student groups praising what Hamas had done. You had a professor saying he felt exhilarated when he heard about it. What's the faculty's responsibility? Did they just follow this Pollock into the DEI Wonderland? Or are they responsible, generally speaking? Yeah, the faculty is a major problem. People don't understand in the humanities and the social science,

how radicalized the faculties have become over the last 20 to 30 years. Not only have they not hired any conservatives in those areas in the last 20 or 30 years, they don't hire anybody who's pro-Israel. So you have a monoculture, an echo chamber among the faculty, which is anti-Israel, in many ways, anti-American. There's a strong tone of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Westernism, in all of these protests, including at Cornell. And the faculty is to blame a lot.

A lot of the faculty members have been participating in this. They're out there with the bullhorns also. So faculty is a major problem. It was 30 years in the making. And that might be the most persistent problem because the students come and go, but faculty are there for decades. So, and I was up there about six months ago

in Cambridge talking to some of the faculty at the Kennedy School where I graduated. And everybody's worried about the university. because, again, it goes right, poor leadership. When you were there, Julie, did you see poor leadership, or were you just oblivious to it? Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. When I was at Harvard, I absolutely saw it. I had a big political awakening when I was a sophomore in college.

I entered Harvard as a liberal, and I exited as a staunch conservative. And what happened was I was sent home in the middle of my sophomore year due to the COVID lockdowns. And I lost the entire rest of my sophomore year and the entirety of my junior year, zooming school from my childhood bedroom. And that paired with the Black Lives Matter riots of the summer of 2020 was enough to awaken me to the radicalism of the left. And so when you ask about was I aware of the university's poor leadership, It was hard not to be aware when you were sent home for a year and a half due to COVID lockdowns. That's when I started my show with Dennis Prager. I did it out of my dorm room, my senior year of college.

I wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal when I was a senior because even though we had been two years out of COVID, it was 2020 when I was a senior. We were still having to mask. We were limited to only 10 students in a room for fear of COVID spreading. We had to wear a mask as we were getting our food, but then we could take our mask off when we were eating our food because apparently COVID only lived where the food was and didn't live in the dining room where you ate the food. So I was calling out all of the hypocrisy and insanity.

And no wonder it is metastasized into this now, where these campuses basically are non-functionable because of all of the wokeism and all of the poor policies that over the years have been allowed to spread, and now they've blown up into this. When you were taking courses in history, did you see, with the professors, left-wingers,

were they pushing an alternative view of history? Did you see any of that? Oh, of course. I mean, I was very careful by the end of my experience to avoid the most lefty professors. But I remember in my 20th century American history course, the presidency of Ronald Reagan was reduced to a few bullet points. And it was tax cuts which harm the poor and war on drugs and mass incarceration.

So I raised my hand and I said, does he get credit for anything else, like maybe helping the end of the Cold War? But you know how it goes. it was, of course, many of my classes were crazy woke. Okay. Did you ever get into confrontations with other students because you're fairly outspoken and your senior year you were very outspoken? Did you get into confrontations with other kids there?

Absolutely. I do want to make clear, though, that when I came out, if you will, as a conservative and very publicly, I did have a lot of people stick by me. I have the most wonderful friends from Harvard. There are more common sense students on these campuses than you might think. But yes, when I first went on Dennis' show and when I started the podcast, I had people telling me that I was a racist, bigot, white supremacist. And by the way, a lot of those individuals who scorned me back then have, to their credit, actually come around and now said to me, you were right. You were calling out the kind of seeds that were being planted that led to this crazy explosion that we've been seeing over the past few weeks.

All right. Why do you think, when I was there at the Kennedy School, I was there for a year and a half, and then I got a master's in public administration, the faculty was left, but not crazy left. And there were, in the criminal justice area, the Kennedy School of Conservatives. They developed the broken window theories. But by and large, it was, you know, a touchy feeling. I remember the dean of the Kennedy School resigned because of Bill Clinton. He worked for Bill Clinton, signing the you have to work if you want welfare. Clinton, a Democrat, changed the welfare. It says, it means you had to look for work. And this guy quit the Clinton administration because of that. And then subsequently wound up at Harvard. But it wasn't like when I was in the classroom, it wasn't crazy insane, you shut up, we want to hurt you until some of the education students came over to take courses.

They were loons across the board. The Harvard School of Education, we sit there and look at them like, are you kidding me? I mean, this is absurd. But in your case, you know, recently, was the education that you received there so tainted by this leftist agenda that you were disappointed? I don't regret going to Harvard. As I said, I made a lot of great friends. I had a wonderful dorm. Ironically, I actually went on an all expenses paid for a trip to Israel for 10 days. when I was a senior through the Harvard Hillel. And so I actually think I had a lot of great academic

and outside of the classroom opportunities. But also, it is worth noting that, as I told you, I had a political awakening when I was a sophomore, and I spent a lot of my COVID time reading Paul Johnson, reading your history books, being affiliated with Dennis, learning through Prager You. So when I went back to class, I think the, the woke sludge didn't really resonate so much with me

because I had gotten sturdy in my worldview and my intellect. You were armed and dangerous with facts, which is always counter to the emotion of the progressive movement.