Morning Joe - Morning Joe 4/29/24

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

The Morning Joe panel discusses the latest in U.S. and world news, politics, sports and culture

My weekend update co-anchor Michael Che was going to join me here tonight, but in solidarity with President Biden, I decided to lose all my black support. Nothing makes sense anymore. The candidate who is a famous New York City playboy took abortion rights away, and the guy who's trying to give you your abortion rights back is an 80-year-old Catholic. How does that make sense? I'm not saying both candidates are old, but you know Jimmy Carter is out there thinking, I could maybe win this thing. It's been a year since I delivered this speech, and my wife chills with me tonight, was worried how I do. I told her, don't worry. Just like riding a bike. She said, that's what I'm worried about.

The 2024 election is in full swing. And yes, age is an issue. I'm a grown man running against a six-year-old. Age is the only thing we have in common. My vice president actually endorses me. Being here is a reminder that folks think what's going on in Congress is political theater. That's not true. The Congress were theater.

They'd have thrown out Lauren Boebert a long time ago. Some of the jokes from both President Biden and host Colin Jost at Saturday's White House Correspondents Dinner. I thought Colin Jost did well. Oh, it was he was really good. He was funny. It was subtle. It's a weird moment to, you know, be laughing, actually.

Well, you know, the thing is, that is such a difficult room. Yeah, oh. I remember Stephen Colbert being there. And no laughter, because very little laughter, because he was so dry. And it is such a difficult room for a variety of reasons, which I won't go into here as far as the crowd that's out there. But you've got to do exactly what he did the other night, which is I've got my jokes. I'm going to tell them I'm going to have fun.

He sort of dryly looked up at the audience. Yeah. And, you know, it was one of that Carson look. There was a lot there. I thought it was. Yeah, he did very well. And the president was hilarious. We'll have more from that event, including the president's more serious message about the importance of a free press, which is what the event's all about. Also, I had the latest on the protests over Gaza that are spreading to more and more college campuses. And we're going to have an exclusive first look at Forbes's list of the new Ivies, universities who are poised to replace the elite institutions, in part because of their handling of the protest. It's a much bigger story.

Even before these protests, and I've got to say just the absolute weakness of the administration, the cowardice of the administration, and unfortunately on these elite colleges, having people that are now running these elite colleges on faculty boards that burned down college campuses in the 1960s, that were responsible for the election and part of Richard Nixon in 1968 because of the chaos on college campuses, because of the chaos in Chicago. And they gave America Richard Nixon and five more years of war. Good job. Let's see if these administrators, the ones that like tried to levitate the Pentagon in the 1960s with Abby Hoffman, the ones who took over president's offices in the 1960s, that trashed college campuses. Let's see if they're now going to elect Donald Trump for, I don't know, maybe the last election in American history. If so, good job. Way to go. Way to go by not being able to

discipline students that violate your rules. You either have rules or you don't have rules. You either have standards or you don't have standards. And if you can't live by them, leave. And let's get some adults in these universities that actually teach students that there are consequences when they break the rules, when they break the laws, and when they spout genocidal chants over and over again. All right. We'll have more on that. And we're also going to be showing you or at least telling you about I I'm having a hard time with this one. Wow. How South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is responding to criticism after admitting to shooting and killing her young, happy, jubilant, joyful puppy.

And then deciding to kill a goat after that with her gun. And they're bragging about it. It's one of the more staggering stories I've ever seen a politician put in a book, thinking this would actually make them look strong. Yeah. It's sick. But we'll read from the book and let you decide. The dog, who's still a puppy.

14 months old, hunting dog. She actually said his grave offense was being joyful and happy. Yeah. And I've got to say, and you know, this has long been my attitude towards dogs. Yeah. If a dog is misbehaving, I never look at the dog. Right. I look at the owners. I go, what? You don't know how to train a dog? You don't know how to make sure the dog is in line. And by the way, if there's still puppies, you have a ways to go. So I come from growing up on a somewhat of a family farm run by Eastern European immigrants. And we definitely we had we were deer hunters, turkey hunters, geese. There was absolutely a sense of life and death with animals in our life. But there was never a joy in killing.

And there was a respect to it and a process if you were hunting and if you brought home a game too. But this story was more about how she felt killing an animal. And that's what's scary about it. The impatience, the kind of like a switch flipped in her brain and she decided she needed to kill it. Like, this is not someone you want in charge. Not someone thinking through the process of life and death. I'm going to kill the goat. To Jonathan Lemire, I mean, there are times we're watching Red Sox games and these thoughts go through our minds with the relief pitchers.

There are times, not last night, certainly not this year, homicide, lowest ERA, not only in the major leagues, but also lowest ERA in 100 years for the Red Sox. And I've got to say, Lemire, you and I, we saw this coming. Sure did. Sure did. Nobody saw this coming because half of these guys were pinching for Pensacola Catholic High School this time last year. But anyway, this Kristi Noem thing, the most remarkable part of it is, and we can we can get serious here for a half second.

The most remarkable part of it is that the conservative movement has got has been so corrupted by Donald Trump and has reached such new lows that she actually put that in about the killing of a happy puppy because she thought it would help her with the base. Well, Donald Trump famously doesn't like dogs, so perhaps that was part of her calculation as as well. But it is it is stunning what a self-owned this was here to put this in her book and to now stand by it. She put out a statement last night, you know, saying she acknowledged that some people were upset at her telling of the execution of her puppy named Cricket in a gravel pit. And that's what it was, was an execution of Cricket in a gravel pit. But she did. She framed it as it is like, well, you have to make tough choices. That's what leaders do. And that was part of her pitch to be vice president. And let's be clear, she's on the short list, or at least she was in the last couple of days. She was. She was. And some Republicans, insiders thought she might even be atop the short list. Trump was so enamored

with her that that all may have gone out the window with with this revelation, which horrified those. I would say some of the right as well. Also horrified. But we don't know. We haven't heard from Trump yet. We haven't heard from Trump yet. Yeah. I mean, I mean, tough choices is not tough choices. It's like the tough part is. You actually take time to train the puppy. Yep. Yeah. You train the puppy. You don't shoot the puppy.

If the puppy was nice to neighbors and if the puppy was, quote, too happy. So there's that way. I make tough choices. I kill things that are inconvenient to me. Not exactly. It's not sort of. Yeah. We could have a deeper conversation about this. And we will. Yeah. Also with us, the president of the National Action Network and host of MSNBC's Politics Nation, Reverend Al Sharpton. He loves dogs. Yes. U.S. national editor at Financial Times. Ed Luce is with us this morning, an author

and NBC News presidential historian. Michael Beschloss joins us as well. Do you think Ed Luce grew up in the English countryside with a lot of hunting dogs? He went out and did whatever, went fox hunting and everything. He's a corgi guy, but Alex says. Alex says you're a corgi guy, Ed Luce. I don't know. Did you have 12 corgis walking around your property? We did not, but that's an inspired guess. We certainly didn't have any puppies called cricket,

but as an Englishman, I would consider it to be a very grave offense to execute anything called cricket. I mean, this is right. This is a proof that, you know, it's not guns that kill puppies. It's governors that kill puppies. And I don't know the silence of the puppies, the silence of the goat, the silence of the horses. There's so many jokes here. I share your tragic sort of reaction to this. But the humor, the humor can't be suppressed either. And watching her rivals like Carrie Lake, people auditioning to be Trump's running mate, post pictures of themselves with puppies. It's just very entertaining. No, it's not. I have to say I read that with such I have a story just like that

Hobson, you know, my huge dog did that that to a chicken. Literally. My daughters watched it. And the last thing I would do is be mad at the dog. I was mad at myself for creating this scenario in which the dog had access to the chickens. Right. Right. And I was, I just can't, you got to read it. It takes you to a different place mentally. Like, what does it take to do that to a dog?

Donald Trump's hush money criminal trial will pick back up tomorrow with court in recess today in this historic trial. On Friday, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker wrapped up his testimony. Wow. The defense tried to poke holes at his credibility as a witness, seeking to establish how his tabloid stood to profit off the stories it bought. Earlier in the week, Pecker testified about catch and kill agreements linked to Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. But before his testimony ended, Pecker revealed details about a conference call Trump set up between the tabloid publisher and two of Trump's White House aides, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Hope Hicks. The call took place soon after former

Playboy model Karen McDougal gave an interview to CNN in March of 2018. On the call, Pecker told the two aides he planned to extend an agreement with McDougal that would keep her from speaking more widely about her alleged affair with the former president. Pecker said Sanders and Hicks, quote, thought it was a good idea. Joining us now, former litigator and MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin. You know, Lisa, it's interesting. The argument that the defense was making really fell flat when when they suggested that Pecker was doing this for profit, all of this for profit, when in fact, if he had run the McDougal Trump story, it probably would have broken records. But he decided to sit on it because, as he said throughout his testimony, he wanted to help Donald Trump, his friend, get elected president.

That's true. And Joe, it was really underscored by the fact that in much of his testimony, David Pecker's bottom line was clear as the primary motivating factor for him. But as Joshua Steinglass, who is a representative of the DA's office, established with him on his redirect, yes, it was to his benefit to run positive stories about Donald Trump, who had long been a reader favorite among National Enquirer readers. But as Steinglass asked him, your intention was never to run this story about McDougal. And Pecker affirmed, I had zero intention. He said, in fact, if you had run it, that would have been equivalent to National Enquirer gold, right? And Pecker had to say, absolutely, it would have been Enquirer gold. This is a story about a playboy, playmate of the year, who was alleging, and a story I believed, by the way, a years-long affair with the Republican candidate for president of the

United States, who was also a known celebrity and commodity in my universe, that would have been Inquirer Gold. And at that point, we broke for lunch. And it was the perfect point for the D.A. to have reestablished. This was far from what the Trump world was calling standard operating procedure for the Inquirer. So, Lisa, there was a lot from the Pecker testimony about affairs, hush money, catch and kill, the whole concept of that type of journalism, none of which is against the law or the crime that he's accused of, the former president. Did Pecker's testimony help prove or begin to help prove the crime that he's accused of? Absolutely, because, Mika, the crime that the former president has been charged with

is falsification of business records as a felony. And in order to establish that he's committed a felony as opposed to a misdemeanor, you have to show that he falsified business records with the intent to conceal another crime. And that's where David Pecker comes in. David Pecker is critical to the establishment of the conspiracy to promote Trump's election through unlawful means, where at least one act was taken in the direction of those unlawful means. David Pecker was there for the formation of the conspiracy. David Pecker helped execute the conspiracy.

David Pecker's payment to Karen McDougal, which he understood would pose campaign finance law problems, was that unlawful means. So through David Pecker, prosecutors have gotten a lot of what they needed to establish that this was felonious and not just your everyday garden variety misdemeanor. Trying to pull back. Does that testimony seem to add value to what the DA is

trying to prove? Did we expect Pecker to be as strong as he was, or were we looking for that in other witnesses that are yet to come? Well, Pecker had a lot of information that we didn't quite know that he would have. Namely, he put himself at multiple conversations, either with Donald Trump and Michael Cohen or with Donald Trump alone, that helped establish that Trump was a participant at the conspiracy and that he knew and intended the results of that conspiracy,

which were to promote his own election by subverting the Karen McDougal story. And so nobody was expecting that David Pecker would come in and say, for example, I met with Trump alone in his Trump Tower office in January of 2017. He asked me how Karen McDougal was doing, which was less about care about her welfare and more about was she going to be quiet and compliant. And once I assured him that she was fine, he said, I want to thank you for handling the McDougal situation. I want to thank you for handling the doorman situation. Donald Trump was so grateful that he let David Pecker essentially throw himself a White House dinner that summer, after which, as they're walking in the Rose Garden, Donald Trump resumes that same conversation. How's Karen? How's she doing?

All Donald Trump cared about was that David Pecker had an arrangement with Karen McDougal that allowed her to feel satisfied that she was getting something out of the deal. It became clear through David Pecker's testimony that Donald Trump had the knowledge and intent that prosecutors not only want to establish, but have to establish as part of their case. Kept asking, how's our girl? How's our girl?

David Beschloss, we have been watching for about... Michael Beschloss, I'm sorry. It's really early. It's Monday. David Pecker. I was thinking David Pecker, Michael Beschloss. I'm sorry. It's really Monday. David Packer. I was thinking David Packer, Michael Beschloss. Witnesses to history. Exactly. Right. Yes, exactly. So I was thinking back, starting in 2016, 2017, Donald Trump started calling the media enemy of the people. He constantly throughout the campaign talked about fake news, derided mainstream press. And it is so interesting that, yeah, sometimes the New York Times gets it wrong. Sometimes NBC gets it wrong.

Sometimes The Post, Washington Post, sometimes Wall Street Journal. And they'll get the facts wrong, despite all the editors they have and their best efforts. And then they'll retract. Usually they'll retract it and they'll correct it. It happens when you get a thousand stories right, you may get one or two wrong. And yet Trump has seized on what they've got wrong or sometimes what they've got right and completely undermined a majority of America's confidence in the media. And we get to see how Donald Trump masterminded lies about Ted Cruz, that his father had helped kill JFK. Ben Carson destroyed somebody's life by leaving a sponge in their brain. Hillary Clinton saying back in 2016 she has six months to live, which, of course, Hillary's doing well. We can report seven years later. But one lie after another lie after another lie after another lie that was put out to voters throughout that campaign.

And you just talk about cynically undermining the news. It is it is a move out of the old Soviet playbook, which is try to undermine those telling the truth. And while you are spreading propaganda through a fire hose of falsehoods. Yeah, that's perfectly put. And I guess if he were running against Kristi Noem, it wouldn't have been a good enough story that she she kills puppies when it actually happened in real life. So they would have had to invent something worse, amazingly enough. But that's what authoritarian dictators do. You know, Soviet Union is exactly where they did it. When you saw people who were vilified in Pravda, let's say at the orders of Stalin, which they oftentimes were. For instance, there was a chief of police called Beria and Beria was fired. And this is a little bit later on the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which is obviously

published by the government. People were told to tear out the page that mentioned barrier and insert a page of the bearing straight. That is what our lives could be like under that kind of dictator. If that ever happens, you know, you were talking about 1968, which I think is a perfect comparison because Donald Trump knowingly or otherwise is operating to some extent from Richard Nixon's blueprint. You remember? Well, you don't remember. But I remember that Nixon used to give speeches saying when respect for the president of the United States and tumult in this country has become so enormous, tumult has drowned out the president's voice that he can no longer speak almost anywhere except for military bases. It's time for new leadership, he said. And Johnson at the time was not able to speak on college campuses. Same year, George Wallace's, George Wallace was campaigning, you know, in arenas saying, everyone look at those reporters back on the platform.

Those are bad people. You should go after them. Who does that sound like? So Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is coming to Donald Trump's defense following David Pecker's testimony last week about a catch and kill scheme to help the former president. Take a look. I think all these trials are political. I think it's selective prosecution. I think what's going on in New York is an outrage. The case is eight years ago. They created a crime just for Trump. I think it's selective prosecution for political purposes. David Pecker, who ran the National Enquirer's parent company, testified that he paid to

catch and kill stories about Trump specifically to help his presidential campaign. You don't have any concerns about that? You know, apparently a lot of people do this. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods. No, I think the whole thing is a crock. Obviously, Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods is not running for president and the allegation is about, at least not yet. Yeah, no, I got it. I think the whole thing's BS. Yeah, I think it's all BS. Yeah, political BS. So, Rav, it's no surprise that Lindsey Graham would, of course, defend Donald Trump and bring in some false equivalencies while he's at it. And we should also fact check, of course, this is not a charge. It was invented just for

Donald Trump. But I want to get you a big picture of the politics of this. Far too early to know whether there'll be any impact in November from this criminal trial. But what Graham is saying there is what we are hearing from some Republicans, the idea that this case, it's not that serious. It's prosecutor overreach. Biden ordered it up, whatever it might be. Do you think that's going to have that talking point going to resonate some with independents, with swing voters who maybe aren't paying attention day to day like we all are, but just hear that Trump's in trouble for X, Y, Z. And they hear about this case. They're kind of like, well, this is you know, that was a long time ago and maybe it's not as big of a deal.

Do you think there's going to be some merit to his argument? Could it work? I think they are trying to make it work. I think in the long run, whether or not they get away with it is how the Democrats and other independent that believe in the law and believe in not trying to tilt public opinion one way or another to therefore have all the information they need to know about a candidate to vote, how vocal they are and effective they are. We're talking about normalizing a man running for president of the United States that actively engage in trying to, in effect, bribe people and to not saying what it is his true character was so he could become the president of the United States. I mean, to normalize this kind of behavior at a presidential level is a danger to this country. How are we raising our kids? And I think if they begin to amplify that, like we were talking earlier about Governor Noem.

Can you imagine if somebody came out and said Kamala Harris had shot an animal, how the reaction would be? So we need to talk about this in the sense of what are the standards we're talking about? It is now acceptable to bribe people, including porno stars that you allegedly set with in order for you to achieve office. That's acceptable behavior. Then what happens to all of the moral standards that the evangelicals and other supporters of Trump preach to the rest of us? So, Ed Lewis, let's be clear. These are serious charges. And of the four cases, maybe it's the least serious, but this is a criminal offense. And it's a serious case, and we're going to see how it plays out over the next six weeks or so. So let's posit that. But let's get you on this topic as well.

I saw you this weekend at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Half of the political world was focused on D.C. And there was a lot of chatter about this case. You know, Democrats wishing, I wish this wasn't the case that went first. I wish some of the others had come in. And now there's a real chance that none of the other cases will happen between now and the election. So what do you think? With the understanding that we're still a long way from November, what sort of political implications, if any, might come from this trial? That's a really good question. I mean, it's the case that you'd least like.

Well, I want to see this case go forward. This is clearly a crime. You know, you're bribing people to conceal information about your character and then falsely putting that down as an election expense. That's clearly a crime. So Lindsey Graham is wrong about that. But let's just consider why the other cases aren't going forward. is actively intervening on the grounds which are the exact opposite of the originalism that they claim is their motivating philosophy, the conservative justices, on the grounds that president essentially is king and a king can do what he likes. They are trying to prevent and I think will prevent any trial before November of the Trump January 6th attempted coup. And then there's Judge Cannon in Florida, who's a Trump loyalist, who has a comically

bad legal brain, who has really, really bad sort of pretexts for delaying the classified documents trial. So we've got a legal system with Trump appointees preventing really serious cases, criminal cases being from going to trial. We have one trial that is going ahead. That trial on its own merits is absolutely serious. I think it will damage Trump. It's early to, you know, I don't trust polls, but I think anybody paying attention to the kind of tawdry, just just really low character of this man that's being revealed cannot.

If you're an independent or you're somebody who's still undecided, you cannot but fail to be put off Trump. So I expect that will be the result. And the final impact of this trial is just the psychological effect on Trump sitting there without his cell phone, being told to sit down, you know, practically having to ask for a bathroom break and awaiting Stormy Daniels, the scenario of his nightmare, testifying in front of him. So that psychological impact on Trump, I think we shouldn't we shouldn't overlook. It's it's it's already apparent. And, you know, Mika, how how surprised, you know, I've always been a big defender of the Supreme Court, federal judges. I believe they've been a great balancing act throughout the Trump presidency and beyond and have usually ruled on these issues in a way that

holds the country together. I'm not talking about abortion. I'm not talking about IEA. I'm talking about these Trump challenges. And yet I must say, even I, I was stunned that even while I want them to clearly define the outer perimeters of official acts, I think this is an important exercise by the Supreme Court. But the fact that some of the conservative justices sat there and allowed Donald Trump's lawyer to say that a military coup could be an official act? Craven things, yeah. A military coup could be an official act. He went down the list. He was asked, went down the list. In any past Supreme Court hearings,

somebody doing that would have been derided and mocked and ridiculed here. Other than, I must say, other than Amy Coney Barrett, who was like, wait a second, hold on. Hold the phone. I've got to say the other Trump appointees and Alito and Thomas, yeah, OK, well, maybe it is. It was it was jarring. And I've never I've rarely jarred by the Supreme Court. I under I understand their role and what they do and that there are very conservative and very liberal people on the court. But in this case, it was it was staggering. Shocking. Lisa, the trial continues, the hush money criminal trial in New York City this week.

What can we expect? Witnesses, testimony that you're going to be watching for? Well, Mika, tomorrow we'll see the resumption of testimony of a gentleman named Gary Farrow, who was Michael Cohen's banker at the now defunct First Republic Bank. That's the bank through which Michael Cohen directed the money to Keith Davidson, Stormy Daniels' lawyer. And that is an act for which Michael Cohen

has now been held criminally responsible. Why? Because he lied on the forms to open that account. But even maybe more importantly, somebody at First Republic Bank flagged the transaction as risky and notified the Treasury Department. We never found out who that person was. That could turn out to be the gentleman on the stand, Gary Farrow. So watch for that. The other thing that I'm watching for is to see, obviously, who comes next. The Manhattan DA's office has been less than forthcoming with us, not because they want to hide things from the

press, but because they know they're dealing with a person who's already been accused of not one, not two, but at this point, 14 separate violations of the gag order. We're still waiting for an order from Judge Marchand about what the consequences of those violations will be, but also waiting sort of with bated breath about who those next witnesses are going to be because they don't want to give defendant Trump advance notice so that he can denigrate those people and perhaps even worse through his social media posts than otherwise, Mika. MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin, thank you very much for your coverage. We'll see you again tomorrow and still ahead in just 60 seconds, the latest on the growing unrest

on college campuses across the country amid protests over the war in Gaza. One of our next guests says what universities haven't done is train their students to talk with one another. That important conversation is next. Morning Joe is back in one minute. I'd like to think that what the students feel about the university is important enough that maybe we could bring this university to a halt and really reorder its priorities but at the moment it doesn't seem that this is possible at all. We may halt classes for a few days. We may even halt it for a spring.

But ultimately, we don't change the foundation of this university, which is essentially an enormous business corporation. That was a Columbia University student speaking to NBC News in 1968 about ongoing protests at the school in opposition to the Vietnam War. I've got to say, it makes as much sense in 2024 having 18 or 19 year old people running college campuses as it did in 1968, which is to say doesn't make any sense at all. And you do wonder where the adults are, the adults that are supposed to be running the university, the amount of money that they are paid to educate students and they can't allow students to go to class because a small subset of those students and outside agitators want to shut down the camp. Where are the adults?

It's staggering, not just to me. I know I'm a conservative, not just to me, but to 90 percent of Americans. They want to know where the adults are at Columbia. They want to know where the adults are at Penn. They want to know where the adults are at Columbia. They want to know where the adults are at Penn. They want to know where the adults are at Harvard. They want to know where the adults are at all of these college campuses where they're letting their students and outside agitators run across the campus, shut down debate, scream whenever anybody tries to talk reason to them, shout genocidal chants, hold up signs pointing to Jews saying Hamas is next victims, holding up signs talking about the

final solution, chatting constantly from the river to the sea. You know what from the river to the sea is? If you don't, that's all right. Most of the students chanting it don't understand that they are chanting genocidal comments. All right, joining us now. They want to wipe out all Jews and they want to destroy the state of Israel and they want to kill Jews and push them. See, they are Hamas on college campuses when they chant that. Some of them may not even know what they're doing. Yeah, exactly. That's the point. But the adults there do. Yes, they do. And yet this, by the way, this is a long time coming. This has been coming since the 1960s. And now the people that were burning down college campuses, the people that were taking over president's offices, those people are now on the faculty Senate in the faculty Senate trying to encourage these students to do the same.

They helped elected and they helped elect Nixon. They they they I guess they want to elect Donald Trump in 24. Good on you guys. Joining us now, staff writer at The Atlantic, George Packer. His latest piece is entitled The Campus Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education. Also with us, chief content officer and editor in chief at Forbes, Randall Lane. Forbes is out with a new piece this morning entitled Employers Are Souring on Ivy League Grads While These 20 New Ivies Ascend, which we are unveiling exclusively here on Morning Joe. And it really has a lot of synergy with what

we're covering in terms of these protests. But it's bad news for Ivies and good news for some universities that usually don't get a crack at being at the front of the line. So many parents that I've talked to from, you know, Connecticut, when I lived in Connecticut, they're sending their kids south. I talked to administrators at Southern Universities, SMU, Vanderbilt, of course, Alabama, Georgia, Southern Universities, a lot of parents sending them south. It's really sad. George, I want to make sure people watching don't associate any of my conservative born in the USA comments on onto you,

because you actually wrote a very thoughtful piece. And I let's read it right now. So in the piece right with you, right. In part, this George, 56 years ago this week at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university. Stop funding military research and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby black neighborhood. The current crisis brings a strong sense of deja vu. Ideas born in the 60s have become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or

ambiguity. There's nothing to debate, which I think education's about. Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They've trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not marginalized, while Israel is a settler, colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They've trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven't done is train their students to talk with one another. And George, we've seen this not only in elite universities. I think we've talked to you about this before,

about even schools in Manhattan, where parents send their kids to schools and some of the thinking that is permeated, the thinking that undermines liberal education. Talk about what you're seeing right now on college campuses and how this has been a long time coming. And most importantly, when we get beyond this, what it actually says about the death of liberal education in some of these elite universities. universities? Yeah, well, first, students have every right to protest. Free speech has to be at the heart of a liberal education. When speech crosses the line into coercion, when it interferes with the rights of other students to get an education, when it seems to be a form of harassment and

discrimination based on the identity of the other students, then it's no longer free speech and it has to be sanctioned. And, you know, it's not an obvious line. Administrators have a very hard time figuring out where free speech ends and coercion or discrimination begins. So I sympathize with them when they're called before Congress and are demanded whether such and such a phrase is a call for genocide and whether that contradicts their code of conduct. But what I don't sympathize with them on is that they have failed, as Mika read from my piece, to teach their students to think in complex ways, to entertain conflicting views, to argue with each other, to debate each other, to listen to each other. Instead, there is among the demonstrators, and I think more widely in elite universities, a kind of orthodoxy that's set in that makes some students feel absolutely certain of their views, and other

students feel a bit afraid to even challenge them. And this comes from the adults. It doesn't come from the students. So that's what I blame the adults for. They're in a pickle. They don't know how to get out of it. But they have kind of made this bed for themselves by forgetting or abandoning the core values of liberal education. And that's been a long time coming. It began, I think, in 68, where certain ideas among the student radicals that there's only power, that there really is no disinterested pursuit of truth. That is now a given. And that is the instinct that today's demonstrators are protesting with. Well, and you're absolutely right. No, no. Randall, unfortunately, in some of these schools, and we've talked about this because we've got kids that go to college. I've had kids that have been going to college for some time. And it is distressing.

It has been distressing to me as a parent. It's been distressing to them as students. We have really close friends in the family who even go to schools that are not Ivy schools who've said basically kids just keep their hands down now because if they say the wrong thing, they're canceled. I must say, too. And if you don't know how bad things are on college campuses right now, you don't have kids going to colleges because I will tell you now that that we have heard from friends whose children get canceled for having Jewish friends, for dating Jewish people. That I swear to God, it's happening today in elite college campuses across America. And Randall, guess what? in elite college campuses across America.

And Randall, guess what? Employers are saying enough. Parents are saying enough. And even alumni are saying enough. This is crazy. So what's the impact? I think when, Joe, you were mentioning the adults in the room, I think a lot of the employers are stepping up and saying, we're going to be adults.

We're out today, as Mika mentioned, with a survey. And the numbers are really shocking where we surveyed 300 people from our Future of Work newsletter. Two thirds, three quarters of them actually are direct employers. They're in charge of hiring for their company. And what they said is we don't want, you know, 33% said they're hiring fewer Ivy League students than they did five years ago because they're seeing all these trend lines. They're seeing a lack of critical thinking. They're seeing all these things that George talked about. The ability to be a good employee means being able to talk to other people, work through problems, as opposed to just sit there and say no. And so we saw 33 percent decline in the want of hiring.

But yet we see public universities, the same the same survey field, 42 percent, 40 percent says they're more likely to hire. Thirty four percent said more likely to hire non-Ivy private. So this is not necessarily a problem of all education. It's certainly a perception problem with Ivy League, but it's also a problem at the highest levels of higher education in terms of prestige. But it's not an overall problem. There are employers who said, we like having young, hungry students. The problem, as you said, Joe, is not the students. The problem is the adults who are not at certain campuses, not setting up a system that are producing students that are going to be productive in society. So this exclusive reporting and data

from Forbes is fascinating and coming up after a break. Everyone stay with us. We're going to talk about which schools are emerging as the success stories here and which are not. Also, Bill Maher has his take on the overall situation. So much more, Morning Joe, and we continue this conversation. And we're going to dig deeper into Georgia's Atlantic case. Absolutely. So important. Right after a break. We'll be right back with more Morning Joe. Maybe the question that today's protester needs to ask themselves more than any other is, why do I care so much about this particular cause? North Korea stars its people. China puts them in concentration camps. Myanmar brutalizes the Rohingya. Boko Haram kidnaps whole villages of women. The president of Burundi says gays should be stoned to death because they,

quote, deserve it. Nothing? Ukraine? Maybe if these Google employees had the slightest idea what kind of fundamentalist oppressive a**hole they're supporting, Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, they might take it a little easier on the world's greatest monster, Genocide Joe. Genocide, by the way, is when you want to wipe out an entire people. That's the stated goal of Hamas. That's what from the river to the sea means. Hamas would do that to Israel, but can't. Israel could do that to them, but doesn't.

That's Bill Maher on the show Friday, pointing out the selective outrage and the lack of understanding of the issues. We're seeing from many of those protesting Israel over the Hamas war, the Hamas war that Hamas started, the Hamas war that continues because Hamas continues to hold civilians in tunnels underneath Gaza. We could go on and on. But I've got to say, Bill Maher picked up on a point that we were talking about this past week, Mika, where you have 500,000 people killed by Assad in Syria.

No protests. Colombia went on fire. 500,000 Arabs killed. Nothing. Nothing. Saddam Hussein, response for the death of about a million Muslims. Schools didn't shut down in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Kept going.

Nothing. And then you add to what Bill Maher said. You could talk about two million people killed in Sudan over the past 20 years. That civil war continues. Nothing on college campuses at all. I wonder what's different this time. Oh, wait. It's actually Israel. Yeah. That's what's different this time. Oh, wait, it's actually Israel.

Yeah. That's what's different this time. You could add Ukraine to this. Well, yeah. Talk about Ukraine. If you read the recent reporting on what's happening to Ukrainian soldiers fighting, so we don't have to. So those kids in college can go to college. OK, we're not putting any skin in the game. We are sending funding. Oh, wait, no. It was really hard to send funding. I didn't see college kids saying you've got to send funding to Ukraine because they're

fighting for us. When you read about what is happening to Ukrainian soldiers captured by Russians and then putting if they're if they're brought home in a prisoner swap, they're put back out there three months later because that's all they got. Just devastating. Are you kidding me? I don't hear anything about that. It doesn't involve the safety of the world.

Doesn't involve Jews. It doesn't involve Israel, because if this were about Arabs dying, this is about Palestinians dying. They would have shut down campuses when Assad was killing five hundred thousand Arabs. But not a word. Colleges are places for education, for deeper understanding, for understanding these different problems around the world and for debate, for empathy, for learning, for hearing each other. And by the way, Jonathan O'Meara, we'll let you take it from here. But, you know, you take an issue. I can't think of an issue that requires more discussion, that requires more patience, that requires a greater understanding that two truths can be held at the same time if these students actually had been taught over their lifetimes to actually engage in

critical thinking. Because as we've done on this show, we have talked about Benjamin Netanyahu. We have talked about what he's done over the past decade, you know, in the West Bank, the illegal settlements, purposely trying to kill a two state solution. We've talked about all the errors he made leading up to it, his cynical alliance with Hamas. We've talked about that. We've talked about the suffering of the people in Gaza, the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, the fact in the West Bank, the fact that Arab nations hate the Palestinians, Arab nations will not allow the Palestinians to go into their countries because they hate them. We've talked about that. We've talked about how is the United States. We have got to keep pushing both sides toward a two state solution toward peace. Is it easy? No. But you know what? We're never going to have this discussion if college administrators at Columbia and across these elite Ivies allow their students to keep running around making genocidal chants sort of the hallmark of their protests.

Yeah. And the administrators are sitting there. But who who's allowing this to happen in Colombia day in and day out? Who's allowing this to continue at Penn? Penn just keeps getting worse. Yeah. And we are approaching a fraught moment in this war. President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday, again urged them to be careful going into Rafah, where there's about a million civilians. The Israeli military seems to be still planning for an invasion in the days and weeks ahead. So those protests likely only to increase in response to that. And you're certainly right, Joe, there is space for peaceful protests on college campuses and elsewhere about the plight of the civilians there in Gaza who have

suffered. There's a place to criticize the Netanyahu administration for their conduct in this war. We've been doing that here on the show. But there's not, of course, a place for anti-Semitism that has gone along with it in so many of these college campuses, including Columbia University, where I am an alum. Randall, let's talk about, this is, I mean, it's the scenes of these campuses. I mean, they're canceling commencements. You know, these are, in some ways, I'll note, some of these college kids, seniors who are losing their college commencements are the same ones who lost their high school commencements because of COVID, because it was four years ago in 2020. So that is really tough for these kids. Our heart goes certainly to them. You know, tell us more, though, with this scenes of tumult as the backdrop. Tell us more about the findings

of your study here of the list and just what people are looking for now as an alternative. Well, it's funny because the Ivy League has served a great purpose to the U.S. for over 300 years. Harvard's pushing 400 years old. The L's over 300. UPenn's almost 300 years old. Harvard's pushing 400 years old. Yale's over 300. UPenn's almost 300 years old. It's been a sorter, you know, and a beacon of meritocracy, really for white men, but now increasingly over the past few decades, for everybody where they say, hey, we're going to do the job of selecting the best and the brightest, the highest achievers. We're going to do a great job educating them.

And then the employers can say, OK, great, check. Columbia, where are you? Penn, where the employers can say, OK, great. Check Columbia where you went, Penn where I went. Check, check, check. And the employers are saying that's not true anymore. They forfeited that in part because the admissions officers have admittedly said we don't really want well-rounded students anymore. They say that. They say we want a well-rounded class of specialists.

Everybody who's like, you know, if you're an Olympic swimmer or you're an oboe player, they want exceptionalness in one area. But when you have a class of special, as opposed to a class where people are hardworking, super achieving, I mean, you see the same thing when they abolished, you know, test scores. Test scores were actually a great way for underrepresented kids to get to these schools because they can show that they can achieve at the highest level. Now it's a crapshoot. And I think a lot of what we're seeing right now is a manifestation of that, which is you've got these campuses with again, it's not the students fault. It's the administrators fault, but they've amalgamated classes at the Ivies where it's not necessarily about the highest achieving. It's about special. And special sometimes means, you know, you can get entitled or people who aren't necessarily using critical thinking.

They're just feeling, I feel this way and I'm special. And I think that's what the employers are reacting to. They're really seeing it. Michael Beschlot, you can take the next question for George. Well, you know, I keep on thinking, George, you remember how William F. Buckley once said that he would rather have America governed by the first thousand names in the Cambridge, Massachusetts phone book than the members of the Harvard faculty. Is that just looking at this through the political lens, you know, election presidential elections a year from next week? It's going to seem like a presidential elections a year from next week. It's going to seem like a year, six months from next week. Are we in a situation where this is teeing it up for

Donald Trump to say, you Americans have been led by an out of touch elite that has been educated in places like Harvard and Columbia and Penn that are doing things that sound strange and out of the mainstream. Is this an advertisement to his voters that essentially says elect Trump, throw out the civil service and throw out all these people who have been misgoverned you for decades? Look, Michael, I was eight years old in 1968. It was a kind of formative political experience for me as a little kid. And we all know what happened that summer in Chicago when there were street battles between activists, anti-war demonstrators and the Chicago cops. And that led pretty directly to, among other things, to Richard

Nixon getting elected. Of course, Donald Trump and the Republican Party are going to take advantage of anything that appears like chaos or an indulgence of chaos on the part of Democrats. So I think what we're seeing now on campus is probably a prelude to what we're going to see in Chicago, where the Democrats are going to have their convention again, I think for the first time since 68, as if they just couldn't resist returning to the scene of the crime this summer. And I don't think it's going to be a scene that will help them to show that Joe Biden's in control of the country. And that's sort of been

a recurring Republican attack that he is that the country and the world are out of control and he's too old and feeble to keep them under control. Can I say one thing about the demonstrators, which is I think they properly were horrified by the number of deaths of civilians in Gaza. And when they called for a ceasefire and peace, they seem to be calling for an end to this suffering. But that has shifted to calling for an end to Zionism, which is essentially an end to Israel. And in Arabic, from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free free is actually Palestine shall be Arab. I don't know if the students know that, but it's a call for the elimination of Israel. How is it that students have perhaps unwittingly embraced the ideology of Hamas?

I think it's because they have been trained and educated in an atmosphere where there really is only one truth. And that truth is that there are oppressors and they're oppressed. White Jewish Israelis, as they see it, are the oppressors. Non-white Arab Palestinians are the oppressed. And that's the end of the story. It's as if Israel's the last place where post-colonial theory can go to find oppressors and victims. And so it becomes a very simple matter. And the whole complicated history of those two people is erased. No, it's a 3000 years of history erased. And, yeah, they do genocidal chants from the river to the sea. They've adopted Hamas's ideology instead of instead of, again, protesting the deaths, the civilian deaths in Gaza. It's it's moved. It's moved in that direction,

holding up signs, talking about the final solution, saying no to states wanting to go back to 48. It could go on and on, Rev, but, you know, this extremism, this calling on college campuses for the elimination of Israel, the chanting, basically adopting Hamas's ideology in so many parts of these protests, leads up again. We talk about 1968. It leads up to the protests in 1968. And it just wasn't. It wasn't just white conservatives in Doraville, Georgia, watching Walter Cronkite in 1968 going, what the hell is going on out there?

I'm sure you can attest to the fact that there are a lot of people of color going, wait, wait, why are these elites on college campuses taking over president's offices? Why are they tearing up? And and so here we are, these same people that helped elect Richard Nixon over Vietnam and helped keep the war going for five more years. For five more years. They're doing the same thing now on the faculty of a lot of these elite Ivies. And they're helping Donald Trump. They're going to elect Donald Trump if they keep this up. They're going to elect Donald Trump if they continue stirring this chaos.

And if they don't, learn from the lessons of 68, if they don't start acting like adults, ref. No, I absolutely agree, because I remember in 1968, I was 13 going on 14 years old, but I just became youth director of Operation Breadbasket, New York's chapter. Dr. King had started that movement. Martin Luther King, April 4th, 67, had come out against the war in Vietnam. He was killed a year later. And in the marches against the war, he said we must do what we must do for the moral question of killing Vietnamese children, whatever he opposed and we all oppose in terms of the war. But when people started waving North Vietnam banners and Ho Chi Minh pictures,

they denounced that. Dr. King said, wait a minute, we're not here to support Ho Chi Minh. We're here to support peace. And in the battles, in the fights, a guy who lost for president in 1960, went home to California and lost for governor of California, was able to come through the middle with law and order, Richard Nixon, and win. And what I raise to a lot of those that I agree with on it is an atrocity what is going on in Gaza. It is absolutely wrong what Netanyahu is doing. But are we fighting that or are we being hijacked by people that are saying Hamas, who did the same thing to Israeli children, is what we're about? And I think at least the thing that we must address is the core reason these students started this and the hijackers now that have taken it somewhere else that are now praising people

who are doing exactly what we're supposed to be denouncing and losing the moral principle of what the protests about what Netanyahu was doing in Gaza in the first place. I think, Reverend, that's that's very well put. I mean, I have to although I although I was minus a few weeks, I was born in June 1968, I was minus a few weeks when the Columbia 68 protests began. They began, as you know, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

And Mika's dad, his big name, Brzezinski, Dr Brzezinski was a professor at Columbia then, and he differentiated between the broader student protesters, a lot of whom were very vague, but very ideological as well about, you know, being cogs in a corporate machine and protesting for meaningfulness in life, really spoiled what Dr. Brzezinski called bourgeois suburban brats. And then the demonstrations that he did support, which was the black civil rights ones who were saying, look, we're being gentrified by Columbia University out of our land. This gym has essentially a segregated access point. Dr. Brzezinski had great sympathy for those protesters

and they wanted to dissociate themselves from the more privileged student, very ideological ones, which were doing their cause great harm. And we're seeing the same today. To think that you've got pro-Hamas protesters when there's such a righteous cause here, which is protecting civilians, and you're getting people bringing in a Hamas agenda into that. This is a gift to Netanyahu. It's a gift to him. If the object here is to stop more civilian deaths in Gaza, you do not want to be giving gifts to Netanyahu. So the dumbness of highly privileged bourgeois students from the suburbs continues. It does continue. And they're helping Netanyahu.

They are helping extremists on this issue. They're helping Donald Trump. They're doing the same exact things that that the students that Dr. Brzezinski was talking about, 68, that they helped elect Ronald Reagan. Spoiled bourgeois suburban brats. Only Dr. Brzezinski could say that. By the way, I was fine. I will just so they also know this. I want to follow up on this. And we're we're we've blown this

out way too long. But I want to give final thoughts to Michael Beshalos and George Packer real quick. I was five years old. So just to just Michael Beshalos, let me go to you first as a historian. I was five years old. My first memories, 1968. Can I see Michael, please? 1968. I was five years old. My first memories. The 68 Olympics, RFK assassination, the chaos in Chicago. And what did I do? I looked at that as we most of us do through the eyes of my parents, through the eyes of my grandmom. And I just looked at their faces and I knew we weren't all right. And I will say, I think the chaos of my childhood politically, you know, and looking through the eyes of my parents, not only impacted me, impacted a ton of young people who voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

There's a long stem that moves from this chaos when adults don't act like adults and step up. And it is hard to talk about the consequences of inaction at Columbia, the consequences of inaction at Penn, the consequences of inaction at these elite schools to allow their students to continue chanting genocidal chants. And by the way, they'll lie and say, oh, it's just one sign here. No, you talk to the students who are trying to just go to school and they will tell you there is an anti-Semitism, a vicious anti-Semitism. And let me say it the way Dr. Brzezinski said it, not all Arab students from from Palestinian students. It's spoiled bourgeois suburban brats or as as. Well, I won't get too far into it. Just woke, white, elite, rich boys and girls going to college campuses, wanting to play radical

for a weekend, and they don't know the impact that they're having. Yeah, and above and beyond all of that, and all of us are for the right to protest, and all of us are, at least on this panel, are for the right for people to feel secure. But you're absolutely right. This election is being handed to Donald Trump on a platter. Because remember, in 1968, it was not only Richard Nixon, George Wallace saying the same thing. George Wallace said, any campus protester who wants to lie down on the street

and protest in front of my car, that'll be the last car he ever lies down in front of. And I would say the same thing about this year. If you like protest, don't hand the election to Donald Trump because he will make sure that protest in many ways is constricted and restrained and in some cases abolished in this country a year from now. Be very careful about what you do and say. NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss, staff writer at The Atlantic, George Packer, and Forbes editor-in-chief Randall Lane. The exclusive by Forbes this morning,

why employers are souring on Ivy League grads and this so-called new Ivies that are emerging. You can find that at Forbes.com. Randall, thank you for that.