Morning Wire - Campus Chaos Response & Foreign Aid Passes Senate | 4.24.24

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Anti-Israel protesters clash with police on college campuses, foreign aid for Israel and Ukraine crosses a critical hurdle in the Senate, and new investigations uncover more evidence of plagiarism by DEI college officials. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. Birch Gold: Text "WIRE" to 989898 for your no-cost, no-obligation information kit. A’Del Cosmetics: Get 25% off your order with promo code WIRE at http://www.AdelNaturalCosmetics.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chaos and controversy erupt as anti-Israel protesters clash with police, and both President Biden and former President Trump respond. We have the latest on the escalating situation and its political fallout. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with guest co-host, Sage Steel, host of the Sage Steel Show. It's Wednesday, April 24th, and this is Morning Wire. Foreign Aid for Israel and Ukraine crosses a critical hurdle in the Senate, despite fervent opposition from one.

Senator. If you support a fair and open amendment process, if you want to improve the bill, you should support my motion to table. And new investigations uncover more evidence of blatant plagiarism by college academics involved with DEI programs. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. As our national debt continues to skyrocket, you need to be confident in the companies that you work with, especially regarding your money and future. Birchgold understands that navigating financial decisions can be daunting. That's why their expertise coupled with their customer care process ensures that your purchase or IRA setup is a breeze. If you're considering converting an existing retirement account into a precious metals IRA,

their dedicated in-house IRA department guides you every step of the way, making the process feel as simple as a walk in the park. Text wire to 989898989.98 to talk to one of Birchgold's experts and claim your free info kit on gold. That's wire to 989898 today. Growing anti-Israel protests have taken over some of our nation's college campuses, prompting responses from both leading presidential candidates as well as other high-profile political voices. Here to discuss the political response to the escalating situation on campus as Daily Wire contributor David Marcus. Hey, Dave. So let's start with President Biden. He's been under fire from both sides on this issue. How has President Biden responded? Morning, John. So over the weekend, Biden released a strongly worded statement

calling the anti-Semitism on display of Columbia and Yale disgraceful. But then a comment on Monday has now really become the focus of headlines. Here's Biden addressing a reporter's question as he was leaving an Earth Day event on Monday. I condemn the anti-Semitic protests. That's why I've set up a program to do with that. I also condemn those who don't understand what's going on with the Palestinians. This immediately drew parallels to Trump allegedly saying that there were very fine people on both sides of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017. Now, to be clear, Trump at no point was praising neo-Nazis. His very fine description was a reference to some of those who argue against toppling monuments. But in this case, Biden absolutely did condemn both the anti-Semitism on display and people who he deems insufficiently worried about civilians in Gaza in the very same breath. Likewise, his education secretary Miguel Cardona expressed condemnation for both anti-Semitism.

and anti-Muslim behavior, even though there's been no example of the latter in these protests. Now on the other side, we have Trump. He's also addressed the campus chaos from the courthouse in his hush money trial. Did his comments differ substantially from Biden's? They did, yes. Trump's statement notably does not address both sides. This is a full-throated condemnation of the anti-Semitism, which he calls disgraceful, but also a condemnation of Joe Biden, and specifically in regard to his attempt to appease both pro and anti-Israel factions in his party. Here's some of that. What's going on at the college level and we colleges, Columbia, NYU and others is the disgrace.

It's really on Biden. He has the wrong signal. He's got the wrong tone. He's got the wrong words. He doesn't know what he's backing. And it's a mess. Now among politicians who are not running for president, there seems to be agreement among Republicans that these protests are unacceptable,

but a little more division among Democrats. Where do those breakdowns stand? Yeah, that's pretty much spot on, John. Republicans are united in opposition to the protests, and many have now called for the resignation of Columbia University's president from the new Shafik. In fact, the entire GOP congressional delegation from New York, all 10 of them has done so.

Senator Tom Cotton has also said that any protesters in the U.S. on student visas should be expelled from the country. There's Democrats like Senator John Federman, Representative Ritchi Torres, who have been steady and vocal supporters of Israel. And this week also saw Florida Congressman Jared Moskowitz travel to Columbia to stand with Jewish students there as well. Of course, at the same time,

you have Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praising the protests at that event with Joe Biden, Ilhan Omar, whose daughter was arrested protesting, and others on the far left who supported. who support these campus occupations. Joe Biden is between the dome of the rock and a hard place here in a way that Donald Trump just isn't. Yeah.

Do we have a sense of where this goes from here, how long it might last, or whether it could continue to spread to further campuses or even non-college environments? Look, things have been moving fast, so we'll see what happens over the next few hours, but there really is no sign that the encampment at Columbia is going anywhere. The university announced classes will be hybrid

or maybe even completely remote for the rest of the semester. So that suggests it could really linger. It's also leading some students to demand refunds since they thought they were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an in-person college education, not a PowerPoint presentation on Zoom. NYU is a different story. It's a massive school,

but it has very little actual traditional campus. It just kind of snakes through the West Village. So the school is putting up walls between private university spaces and public spaces to keep non-students out of the student protests. And that's a real fear, John. The NYPD has warned that professional agitators and others are seeking to cause mayhem. They crack down late Monday arresting some 150 protesters and have made clear they will continue to take action when warranted. Yeah. Dave, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. Hey, ladies, it's Leanne from Team Morningwire. Does your makeup game need a change? then you need Adele Natural Cosmetics. Their products are made in Texas, and they carry everything for your daily skincare needs, including a full line of color cosmetics. Their cream blush line is so vibrant and light,

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That was a vote in the Senate Tuesday to advance a $95 billion funding package that will provide military aid to Ukraine. The bill also includes a provision that could ban the popular social media app TikTok. Here with more is Daily Wire Culture reporter Megan Basham. So Megan, with an 80 to 19 vote, it seems pretty likely this bill is going to pass. And President Biden has said he will sign it when it gets to his desk. The big question, important question, what's in it? Well, you know, the headline news here is that the package will immediately provide $60 billion in additional military aid to Ukraine for its fight against Russia. So Ukrainian president, Volodemir Zelensky, has said that he needs this funding in order to have a chance at victory.

And then it also includes $8 billion for Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific and $26 billion for Israel, including humanitarian aid for Gaza. Now, that aid has become somewhat controversial. It's faced a lot of criticism because there are increasing reports that Hamas is seizing food and supplies as it enters the region. And it's even killing aid workers reportedly. So critics say that the aid is not getting to the people who need it. And then there's the one of these things is not like the other provision. And that is the fact that it will also force TikTok's parent company bite dance to sell the social media platform within nine months because of its ties to the Chinese government. And if it doesn't sell, the app is then going to be banned in the U.S. Now, the Biden administration has signaled that it might expand that time frame to a

year, which would mean it would be less of an issue this election season. Probably worth noting that TikTok is extremely popular with young Americans, and they might not respond well if Biden bans their favorite app. But either way, NBC is reporting that it has seen an internal legal memo from TikTok that indicates the company is planning to challenge the law in court if it does ultimately pass. This seems unique, maybe, Megan, to say the least. You've got billions of dollars in aid packages for countries, along with, albeit a controversial social media app out of left field, maybe. Yeah, a little bit. And the argument is that all of these things are in the interest of U.S. national security, though there are plenty of people, even on the right, who don't actually

think that banning TikTok is going to do anything to protect the American. and public. John McEntee, who was a political advisor in the Trump White House and is also a popular conservative TikTok creator, told Morning Wire that the issue was largely solved when TikTok was forced to store all their data with Oracle in Texas. You know who wants to see TikTok gone? Facebook and Google. The people that have been deplatforming conservatives, the people that ban the sitting president of the United States. The only app that didn't ban him was TikTok. The only social media company that didn't collude with Biden's government was TikTok. So I think it's more about control than these fake national security concerns. But there are plenty of lawmakers who still believe that TikTok poses a

security risk as long as it remains in Chinese hands. And at this point, it does look like they're likely to carry the day. Okay, so let's get back to the procedural opposition that this bill faced. A lot of Republicans in the House don't like the legislation. In fact, Mike Johnson's speakership has been threatened over it. And even though it passed handily, the same goes for some Republicans in the Senate. Megan, what do they want? Well, their major ask is that they wanted to tie this funding to border security. And a big part of the objection in the Senate in particular is that the senators were not given the chance to vote on amendments that they say would have improved this bill. So instead, they say they're being asked to pretty much rubber stamp the Democrats' priorities.

And that led Utah's Mike Lee to push to table this bill until amendments could be introduced that he says would prevent taxpayers from having to fund things like gender advisors for the Ukrainian military. An amendment might point to some of the weaknesses in the bill, some of the defects of the bill. It might prompt members to, I don't know, slow down and ask whether this is a prudent idea to send a lot of humanitarian aid to Gaza up to $9, $9.5 billion of it that could go there. with minimal guardrails, where Hamas will with certainty sees it to wage war against Israel. Or if the U.S. taxpayer should be footing the bill for, quote-unquote, gender advisors in Ukraine's military,

should they really vote for a bill that does this? But, though he's got some surprising support from Vermont Democrat Bernie Sanders, Lee's bid ultimately failed. Many very complicated issues involved with this. Bill. Megan Basham, thank you. Anytime. A few months ago, the president of Harvard resigned after she was revealed to have plagiarized. Now, the Daily Wire has teamed up with journalist Chris Rufo and found that the problem is pervasive. Earlier this month, Rufo and Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Roziak found plagiarism by Lisa D. Cook,

who Joe Biden appointed to a 15-year term on the Federal Reserve Board. Now, Roziak and Rufo found massive plagiarism by a DEI official at the UCLA School of Medicine. Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Roziak joins us now. Hey Luke. Hey John. So first, how did you come to look into this, the DEI programs at UCLA? Well, the UCLA School of Medicine has been in the news a lot lately for all sorts of DEI escapades. Future doctors were forced to take a class on quote structural racism and a Hamas praising guest speaker led students in a free Palestine chant. The school made plans to segregate students by race for courses on left-wing ideology. So when students are learning about, quote, indigenous women and two spirits, they're not learning about biology and

organic chemistry, the stuff that saves lives. So I wondered who was behind all this. The answer is a woman named Natalie Perry, who leads a DEI program at the medical school called the Cultural North Star, which aims to embed into the DNA of the school to change its culture. Perry has published just a single academic paper, her 2014 PhD dissertation from the University of Virginia, and it plagiarized thousands of words from 10 different papers. Perry copied and paste it in entire paragraphs, including the citations from those papers, without acknowledging the paper she was actually copying from even existed. Five continuous pages of her thesis, for example, are just one big copy and paste from another paper, without attribution or quotes.

Occasionally, she would change one or two words, and a lot of the time she did that, she would actually introduce errors by doing so. There's a section of the paper that relies on what she calls original qualitative data, which is really just her chatting with UVA diversity officials about their jobs. Plagiarism wasn't an option for that section, and at that point, the paper just kind of devolves into typo-ridden nonsense. All right. So, and to be clear, UVA greenlit, the Ph.D. and UCLA's medical school hired her as an administrator. Yeah, and despite all these red flags. And prior to that, she got a master's in education from Harvard. So this story really raises questions beyond one person or one medical school,

at least in the subset where people are really just writing exclusively about race and DEI. By the way, what was her dissertation about that you looked into? It was about why DEI program should be expanded at universities. Well, it's going to be interesting to see if UCLA decides to keep her on. Luke, thanks for reporting. Anytime, John. That was Daily Wire investigative reporter, Luke Roziak. Thanks for waking up with us.

We'll be back this afternoon with more of the news you need to know.