Morning Wire - Harvard Professor Targeting & Israel’s Invasion Plans | 2.20.24

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

A black Harvard professor speaks out against former Harvard President Claudine Gay, questions about how the media reports on race surround the Kansas City shooting, and Israel threatens boots on the ground in Rafah if hostages aren’t returned by Ramadan. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. Good Ranchers: FREE bacon for 4 Years! Use promo code WIRE at checkout. https://www.goodranchers.com Shopify: "Get a $1 per month trial at https://www.shopify.com/morningwire" Netsuite: Take advantage of no payments and no interest for six months at Http://www.NetSuite.com/MORNINGWIRE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I just love my job. Get tickets now. The Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters May 1st, directed by David Frankel. A Black Harvard professor is now. speaking out, saying Claudeine Gay opened an investigation into him after his research showed no racial bias in police shootings. I collected a lot of data. And it was in this moment in 2016 that I realized people lose their minds when they don't like

the result. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Tuesday, February 20th, and this is Morning Wire. Controversy and accusations of racism after the identities of the suspects in the Kansas city shooting come to light. Is there a media double standard when it comes to reporting on race? In order to be conscious about reporting about crime, you have to have a racial lens. And Israel is threatening a ground invasion of Rafa if the remaining hostages aren't returned by Ramadan. Hamas is trying to negotiate the return of hostages in order to live another day. And Israel is saying,

you cannot live another day. We will give you something else in exchange for those hostages. messages. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. Did you know that over 5 billion pounds of meat is imported and sold in the U.S. every year? That's why you've got to make the switch to Good Ranchers, our number one choice for American-made meat. And right now, when you subscribe to any of their boxes, you'll secure their leap year offer of free bacon for four years. Go to goodranchers.com, pick your box and use code wire to get the meat you can trust. That's Good Ranchers.com. Use code wire to claim over $900 in free bacon before their leap year sale ends. Good Ranchers, American Meat, delivered.

A black Harvard professor has begun speaking out against former Harvard president, Claudine Gay. He says she was involved in ideologically motivated targeting that wound up getting him suspended by the university. Roland Fryer says he received death threats when his research failed to confirm racial stereotypes about police shootings. Here with more is Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham. So first off, Megan, who is Roland Fryer? and what did his bombshell study find? So Friar is a professor of economics, and he was also the youngest black tenured professor at Harvard.

He's won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship and a John Bates-Clark Medal, which is a medal that's awarded to economists under 40 who have made significant contributions to the field. So I think it's very fair to say that he is a well-regarded scholar and researcher, and he's also known for his pretty compelling biography. He was raised by grandparents

because his mother was largely out of the picture, and his father was in jail when he was growing up. So his study found that while police were more likely to use excessive force against racial minorities, they were actually less likely to shoot them as compared to white suspects. And at the time, that very much cut against the grain of conventional wisdom in the wake of police shootings

like those against Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile. So this was how Friar described his results to free press publisher Barry Weiss during a recent interview. So what my paper showed was that, yes, we saw some bias in the low-level uses of force every day pushing up against cars and things like that. People sent to like that result, but we didn't find any racial bias in police shootings. Now, that was really surprising to me because I expected to see it. The little-known fact is I had eight full-time RAs that it took to do this over nearly a year. When I found this surprising result, I hired eight fresh ones

and redid it to make sure. They came up with the same exact answer, and I thought it was robust, and then I went to go give it, and my God, all hell broke loose. So Friar says that his friends in academia told him that he could publish the first part of those results,

but not the second. And he says that when he rejected that advice and published it all anyway, he was targeted. Now, what do you mean by targeted? Well, probably what you remember is that there was strenuous outcry in academic circles, so much so that he felt he had to go out and give a number of interviews to outlets like the New York Times defending his work.

But he also says that behind the scenes, he was getting death threats. I lived under police protection for about 30 or 40 days. I had a seven-day-old daughter at the time. So I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with the armed guard. It was crazy. It was really truly crazy. Also behind the scenes in 2017, Claudine Gay, who was at that time, the dean of Friar's department opened up a Title IX investigation against him.

So it involved claims that he had sexually harassed his subordinates. After about 18 months, the investigators found that Friar had joked about date, rape, oral sex, and biting an assistant. And these allegations were closely covered in the New York Times. So they received a lot of media attention. Gay ultimately suspended him without pay for two years, claiming that his research and conduct with other employees, quote, exhibited a pattern of behavior that failed to meet Harvard's expectations. And she also searched lab. But he wasn't fired or stripped of tenure because those actions could only have been taken

by the Harvard Board. In fact, he's actually back at work at the university. I went back to Harvard so that everyone knows here and everywhere else that I could because there was a lot of obfuscation of facts and things like that. So the question becomes whether retaliation for his research might have played a role in this investigation. Well, notwithstanding that behavior, which may have been inappropriate, there's no question Fryer was a quality scholar and you really hit a nerve with that research.

Yeah. Megan, thanks for reporting. Anytime. Is your business selling a little or a lot? Shopify helps you do your thing, however, you should ching. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business, from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million order stage. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best.

converting checkout, which is 36% better on average compared to the other leading commerce platforms. Get a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash morning wire. That's Shopify.com slash morning wire. The mayor of Kansas City has accused Missouri's governor of using what he claims are racist dog whistles in response to last week's shooting at the Chief's championship parade. Mayor Quentin Lucas objected to Governor Mike Parsons' use of the term thugs to describe the alleged perpetrators of last week's shooting that left one. undead and 22 injured. Both juveniles arrested are black, a detail that many outlets have gone out of their way not to highlight. Here to discuss the allegation and how the media deals with

these thorny racial issues is Daily Wire contributor David Marcus. Hey, Dave. So first, what exactly is the mayor accusing the governor of here? Morning, John. Typically dog whistle means that somebody is saying something intentionally racist that is subtle enough to be deniable, but clear enough to be understood. It's not clear that Mayor Lucas is accusing Parsons of having that intent, but he's arguing that use of a word like thug contributes to stereotypes about black people being violent. It is certainly quite plausible that the governor would have used the term thug regardless of the alleged shooter's skin color, but it highlights the difference between Americans who believe that our society should be basically colorblind and those who believe we need a set of rhetorical

practices or rules that combat what they see as dangerous and systemic bigotry. Yeah. Now, Anne Coulter suggested on a recent Bill Maher show that if the alleged shooters in Kansas City were white, we would have known it right away, but that the government and media try to hide the race of black suspects. Does she have a point? So in this particular shooting, the suspects are juveniles. So that may explain the lack of details. But in general, yes, absolutely. The news media has concerns about how they cover black suspects that are different from how they cover white suspects, just as presumably nobody would object to a white parade shooter being called a thug. We see this with trans shooters as well, famously with the suppression of the Nashville school shooters manifesto. We also often see it in a rush to ascribe racial motivation to white suspects while avoiding that in regard to non-white suspects.

And look, some journalists will point to the FBI and Biden administration, calling white supremacist violence our greatest domestic threat as a justification for this double standard. How mainstream or institutionalized are these double standards in regard to identity within journalism? Are there written or unwritten rules driving this? I mean, mainly unwritten. Newspaper style guides don't have intersectional racial and identity conversion charts to indicate when to bring up race.

But it is something that the industry invites and is intentional about. Just last month, the National Press Foundation held a conference in which it was argued that crime has to be covered, quote, with a racial lens, end quote. Check out this audio from the ACLU's Alana Odoms addressing journalists as to what their responsibility is in this area. When I think about reporting, particularly when I think about crime and reporting, I think we have to have that race conscious lens. So constantly being conscious that we're not just reflecting a system that has a certain set of statistics. or a certain demographic or a certain ideology. So the job, she says, is not to coldly, objectively present the facts, but rather to do so in a way that promotes a progressive vision of social justice that changes the system.

Those are two very different ways of describing what the job of news is. When consumers see news organizations putting their thumb on the scale of what and how they cover events to promote social justice, that is the news media misleading them. even if it is very well-intentioned and enlightened, it is still hiding relevant information. People sense that there is an agenda because often, John, there is. Dave, thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me. Israel has set a deadline for Hamas to return dozens of hostages or else face a ground invasion of Rafa in southern Gaza. Here to talk about the Israel-Hamas war as Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce. So, Tim, first, update us on the state of the war. Where is Israel at and its operations in Gaza? Sure, militarily, Israel's war has been very successful. It's destroyed Hamas infrastructure all over Gaza and blown up miles of terror tunnels. They've also confiscated weapons, ammo, explosives, anything that Hamas could use in another terror attack. Rafa is the last major stronghold of Hamas and is suspected to hold thousands of fighters. Israel has hit targets in the city with airstrikes and conducted a rescue operation to save two hostages about a week ago, but it hasn't yet moved in with its full military. That could happen.

in the next few weeks. The timeline seems contention on a couple of things, planning the invasion and what to do with civilians and negotiations with Hamas. Well, now negotiations haven't progressed much recently. What are the holdups? Well, Israel walked away from negotiations in Cairo last week because Hamas wanted a complete withdrawal from Gaza in exchange for the hostages it still has. Negotiations have still been going on. The Biden administration wants to negotiate and end to the war as quickly as possible for several reasons. but it appears the U.S. has held talks with minimal input from Israel. Morningwire talked to R.A. Lightstone, the former senior advisor to the U.S. ambassador to Israel about that.

It's not like once you resolve Gaza, you're now done and everybody can go back to work in a regular way. Israel is in a really bad neighborhood with people who are dedicated to destroying it. And it's not going to end tomorrow. And there's this wishcasting going on from the Biden administration that, hey, this. is politically inopportune for us from a timing perspective, can you knock it off? And Israel doesn't have the ability to stop the war now without completing its mission. So the dynamics are just not there for a peace deal. Hamas could get maybe a longer ceasefire and more aid for Palestinians in exchange for the hostages. But Israel has been clear from the start that Hamas

has to be destroyed. Now, what do we know about the state of the hostages? Very little. And what we do know is bad. According to some reports, Israeli intelligence suggests that roughly half of the over 100 hostages still in Hamas's hands are dead. For those that are still alive, they're most likely not getting the treatment they need. Israeli troops actually found sealed boxes of medicine and supplies addressed to specific hostages when they cleared Nassar hospital. None of it had been dispersed to the hostages it was meant for. Alongside that, the IDF found weapons and explosives stored in the hospital, and it arrested hundreds of terrorists who had posed as hospital staff. Now, there's also another parallel negotiation being brokered in Moscow, of all places.

Tell us about that. Right. The Kremlin has invited Palestinian groups to Moscow later this month to negotiate a Palestinian coalition. Lightstone says this is Russia's attempt to drive a wedge between the U.S. and moderate Arab states. So along with Hamas and Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, known as the PA, is the other major Palestinian governing body. It's located in the Judean Samaria area, commonly referred to as the West Bank. Palestinian authority leaders have offered to meet with Hamas and Moscow on the future of Gaza. The PA has been approached by the U.S. and others as a likely candidate to take over Gaza after the war is over.

If that were to happen, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohamed Shdai said he would prefer to work with Hamas rather than replace it. The Prime Minister was asked how he felt about a partnership with a group that had orchestrated the mass torture, rape, and murder of hundreds of Israelis, last year. He said that one should not continue focusing on October 7th. For its part, Israel has rejected any plan to turn Gaza over to the PA. Well, it seems difficult to find a good faith partner to negotiate these things with. Tim, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more news you need to know. Netsuite turns 25 this year. That's 25 years of helping businesses do more with less, close their books in days, not weeks, and drive down costs. Manage risk, get reliable,

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