The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - What's Up With This New Anti-speech Anti-Semitism Bill? Professor Jeffrey Sachs

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

Professor Jeffery Sachs tells us all that's wrong with the proposed Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. Does it violate the First Amendment? Is it hypocritical? https://pen.org/the-wrong-way-to-fight-campus-antisemitism/

Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Live from the Table. I'm doing one of my ad hoc one-on-one interviews that I do sometimes when I can find somebody who's ready to help me out. Today, my guest is Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of political science at Acadia University. He specializes in law and courts in the Middle East, as well as on campus free speech and academic freedom issues in the United States. He has written widely on both topics and since 2021 has been a research analyst and a consultant for PEN America on legislative censorship in higher education. Welcome, Mr. Sachs. Happy to be here. You get confused with a lot of the other Sachses that have a lot to say on Israel, right? Yeah, never happily. There's a lot of people who follow me online,

uh, purely to shit all over me because they think I'm that guy. Who, who's the worst of the sexist? Jeffrey Sachs, the, uh, economist.

I think he's at Columbia now, maybe Harvard, but he's all over the place talking about Israel, talking about Venezuela, Pakistan. And inevitably I catch a lot of the, the fire for that. All right.

All right. So, um, there's this, um, new law of the fire for that. All right. So there's this new law. It went through the House of Representatives. I guess it's going to the Senate. I don't know if it'd be in the same version, which is codifying in some way the IHRA. What does IHRA stand for? The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. So it's codifying in some way their definition of anti-Semitism to be used in the enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act Title VI enforcement, correct? Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, I said enforcement twice free speech guy, and in campuses but throughout the country. So all of a sudden, when the free speech banner is raised here, while I do support that, I'm saying, wait a second, what's really going on here? Is this about people discovering their love of free speech? Or is this a reflex against the fact that Jewish groups are now making the same arguments that we've heard for for years from other groups um and people looked favorably on those groups okay so where should we start first let me just ask you just to build it from the ground up you support title six as a as a framework the civil rights act absolutely yeah no but specifically the notion of um that speech in some way could be harassment. Speech can be harassment. Yeah. So Title VI of the Civil Rights Act is designed to protect students and faculty and anybody who is at any university or college that gets federal financial support, protects them from speech or conduct that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies that person equal access to education. Okay, so Title VI came out of a context where

Black students were being denied admittance in colleges or Black faculty weren't being hired. What the Title VI says is if you're going to take federal dollars, you can't allow that to go on. Now, here's the thing, though, and this is why this runs into speech and issues of the First Amendment. It's obvious that you should prohibit, I think most people at least, I hope that you should prohibit a college or university that accepts federal money, taxpayer money, from discriminating on the basis of race, okay? Where you get into problematic issues is that it very quickly became evident that a lot of the discrimination, the barriers, weren't official policies. It was universities and colleges turning a blind eye to toxic, pervasive discrimination, right? They knew it

was going on. They knew people were creating hell for these employees or these students, and they just ignored it. So how do you handle that kind of issue? That's where Title VI tries, or that's where the courts have tried to develop a method. And one of them is to build out this notion of harassment and discrimination that encompasses some kinds of speech. So, and how is it, do you agree that Jews should be protected under Title VI? Title VI specifies race and ethnicity, doesn't specify religion, I don't think. No. So you agree that Jews should be included in that? No doubt. Absolutely. Of course. Yeah. I mean, when the Civil Rights Act was written, it protected three groups. It protected

groups, people based on their race, their sex, and their national origin. It did not protect people from discrimination based on religion because it wanted to allow religious colleges and universities to continue to discriminate. If they only want to admit Catholics, if they only want to admit Jews, Yeshiva University and Notre Dame should be able to do that. So they left religion off the table. The problem is there's a lot of anti-religious discrimination out there. And that's why Title VI and kind of the broader set of rules around it have been rejiggered over the years to include discrimination against a Jew on the basis of being Jewish. And you agree that being Jewish is an ethnicity, not just a religion?

Yeah, it's an ethnicity, it's a religion, it's a culture. It's impossible to define because it's like none of those things and all of those things at once. But yes, I completely agree. Okay, so then how would you define anti-Semitism in a way that would be acceptable to you. So, for instance, we know that someone who hates Jews in this day and age could simply never say the word Jew, just refer to Zionists, and then claim I wasn't talking about Jews. Well, for instance, at Berkeley, like two years ago, Berkeley Law School, there was nine different student groups said they would not invite on campus any longer any speaker who was a Zionist. Even if they were speaking about economics or volleyball, would you think that's a Title VI violation?

No, I don't think it would be. Okay. Because what you're doing there is you're prohibiting, you're denying people's right to, not right, you're denying people your forum on the basis of their political ideology. All right. Zionism is many things, but it is primarily and fundamentally a political ideology. So on that basis, unless we're going to get in the business of saying certain political ideologies should be discriminated against or should be prohibited, then I don't think we want to. I think we have to suffer that. We have to let that happen. happen at a campus that would allow that do you think the same campus would allow campus groups to deny anybody who supported gay marriage the right to speak on campus i i i think they would never allow that i mean you're not gonna face much resistance from me on the hypocrisy front like

i'm gonna agree with you there's a lot of hypocrisy going on right now. There are a lot of people who talk to big, who are currently talking at big time. Before you tell me, just so you agree with me. What's, wait, give it to me again. You agree they wouldn't allow that. No, give me the example again. I want to hear it fresh. That none of the campus groups on college, they all said, we're not going to allow any speaker on any subject who supports gay marriage. Right. And you're asking me whether they would go ballistic, whether they would go ballistic if someone had a similar rule about it. Whether the university would allow that, would anybody deny it's a Title VI violation.

I mean, you hate gays. Everybody knows you hate gays. So we're not, you know. Yeah. I mean, like, there are definitely groups out there. Yeah. I'm sure all these people would lose their minds. I don't know if the university, universities don't have a policy that says you can't invite somebody if they, if they oppose gay marriage. I have no,

I know of no public university in the country that has that kind of rule or has that kind of policy even running in the background. But obviously these student groups, I'm sure many of them would be furious if some, you know, some and tried to put that rule in place. Of course. What I'm saying is that the university would rescind the charter of these student groups. They would say that they're discriminating, and that I'm sure is against the rules, and they just wouldn't allow it. And I think of other scenarios where they just wouldn't allow it. And this is the rub, even before we get into the definition, is that if we agree on this, then the question is, why are we then just rubber stamping the hypocrisy? I mean, well, I'll let you respond. game theory of of uh of an agenda that i'm not deaf to which is where i'd like to see the world

go and what steps realistically need to be taken what battles realistically need to be fought in order to move that pendulum towards the principle actually but anyway i'll let you comment well let me know let's follow that for a second yeah i i know i think i understand what Towards the principle, actually. But anyway, I'll let you comment. you know, conservatives or many centrists, even any kind of space on campus, whether they want to create a group, whether they want to invite a speaker, whether they want to found an institute, you know, whatever. We all know the litany of examples and they are many. And now those people, you know, the shoe is on the other foot. And many of them are now trying to, you know, assert for themselves, you know, their own right to be saying horrific things on campus. And so I get the hypocrisy.

And I think like the game theory component of it, I assume is something like, let's, you know, this part of you maybe that wants to really fuck these people up, that really wants to, I don't think it's the dominant part, right? Because I think, you know, you're being pretty clear here that you're holding to your principles. up that really wants to um i'm not i don't think it's the dominant part right because i think you know you're being pretty clear here that you've you're holding to your principles but maybe the idea that if you want to stop the pendulum continuing to swing in this bad way you've got to push it back the other way is that basically it well i mean in a certain way it's not that i want to fuck people up i mean it's to make a very simplistic analogy, if you're playing a game with somebody and they're cheating.

And they say, well, I mustn't cheat. This is kind of silly at some point. are they would not allow the distinction between vehement opposition to gay marriage and being an anti-gay bigot, then they should spread that charitability to every cause. So let's just take example. So Amy Wax, you know the Amy Wax case, right? So Amy Wax was relieved from duty, I don't know if she's actually been suspended or not, for saying things in class like black students do not perform as, or some of this might have been in class, some of this might have been in the faculty lounge. Black students do not perform as well

as white students because they are less well-prepared and they are less well-prepared because of affirmative action. This is an opinion, right? Maybe even she can back it up empirically if she had access to the data. I'll just come right out and say it. On average, blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites. You know that's just a fact, and this is very disturbing stuff. I wouldn't want, I wouldn't choose to be a black student in her class by any means. Don't get me wrong.

But so are some of the stuff that they say about Israel. And the Zionist is quite disturbing, and I wouldn't want to be a student in the class knowing someone who thought that my family were no better than Nazis. Groups have different levels of ability, demonstrated ability, different competencies that they, you know, don't just say that given the realities of different rates of crime, different average IQs. People have to accept without apology that blacks are not going to be evenly distributed through all occupations.

They're just not. And that's not a problem. That's not due to racism. That's due to these differences. So she's, you know, I don't think she's ever going to see the inside of a classroom again. She's teaching right now, I think.

Well, they're not going to put her in first year. They're not going to have any required courses. No, they might allow people her ilk to take her class. So the same people who are now taking a stand for free speech were not taking a stand for free speech for Amy Wax. And it's just a bit rich to me, you know. Yeah, I mean, again, I completely agree. Now, there's all kinds of legal distinctions here that are kind of boring, but they do matter.

They matter. And the main one being here, there is a law recognizes a meaningful distinction between harassment targeting a person on the basis of their race or their sex or their sexual orientation and targeting them on the basis of their political ideology, right? So that's where I keep coming back to this distinction. It's one thing to target someone because they're Jewish or Israeli, and the law recognizes that as one type of thing.

It does not recognize targeting someone on the basis of being a Zionist the same way, which obviously you can be a non-Jewish Zionist. You can be a non-Israeli Zionist. So I just want, I keep coming back to that point because that's, that's the key point, but it's also the key fiction because we know that the words are used strategically. We know this. And, you know, I don't know if you saw Norman Finkelstein took a principled stand at Emory University, wouldn't get on the dais with somebody who made some anti in his in his view, anti-Semitic tweets. Oh, the Jews being a Jew. Oh, he was a Jew all along. Oh, we always knew he was a Jew. All the people who had never used the words Jew, they'd always just talk about, we're anti-Zionists.

The second Finkelstein disappointed them. What we knew was there came out. And there is something about very smart people that find it unbecoming in a way to say, wait a minute, we know what's going on here. I mean, they'll find dog whistles everywhere they want when, if it's the opposition, but they'll hide behind technicalities, which in the end will make a mockery of the positions that they took. And that's really just what I'm struggling with here, is that I don't feel that you may be an exception, that what we're seeing here is people embracing free speech and free expression. The same people who are against this Holocaust society's definition

will not think twice about disinviting Charles Murray or any campus, or John Brennan from the CIA, or any of that. They don't believe in free expression. They are rallying to fight the other side picking up a weapon. I mean, I completely agree. I can think of exact examples of people. So about in February, a group of Jewish students invited an Israeli academic who served in the IDF to talk at Berkeley's law school or something like that. And there was a full on riot.

People broke windows. They battered down a door. They stormed after, they chased the crowd that had come for the talk right out of the building. And I know for a fact that some of the faculty who defended that or excused it have been shouting bloody murder about attacks on free expression and student free speech for the last two months now when it's the encampments at stake, right? So the hypocrisy is overwhelming. And I completely agree. I guarantee a lot of these people do not care about free speech. They do not care about academic freedom. They just care about their cause. So we, and I think we're pretty like-minded on this, we who want to fight for that principle,

are we fighting for our principles by defending the arguments against this proposed law when we know we're playing into the hands of the people who think exactly the opposite of us. Okay, so let me give you what I think is a really important reality check that I try to give out with this sort of stuff. It is not the case that they are the only side being hypocritical. Okay. And it's not that the pendulum only started swinging the other way in the last four or five months. The attack on the academic freedom and campus free speech of pro-Palestinian activists has been ongoing for years and years. And it is really significant. So we talk about the IHRA definition, and we can talk a lot about that and get into the specifics if you want. But the push to get that in place and to explicitly use it to censor speech relating just to pro-Palestinian speech,

that's been ongoing in the United States, in Canada, throughout Europe for a decade now. So this is a very – and that's just one dimension of the anti-Palestinian speech kind of front. So it's not just the case that this is some sudden correction. This is like an ongoing thing. Let me see you and raise you. I'm sure you're right about that. Although I spent some time today on the FIRE Foundation. What is it? It's Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It's an education.

They got a revamping. Yeah, it used to be Education, now it's Expression. Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And I didn't see much of the policy. There was a few. There seemed to be more Jewish, but the ultimate censorship in what you're talking about is not even in that. The ultimate censorship is in the hiring. And we know that, according to Steven Pinker, 99 point something percent of professors at Harvard identified themselves as left. And the few that were there were, you know, you know, like Joe Biden's age. So again, you know, like if you really want to really get to the real truth of what's going on, sure, you can point out some examples there. But the real censorship is in the lack of hiring so that these views are never

heard in the first place. So nobody even has to complain about them. They're stamped out. Am I wrong? Well, I don't know. I mean, you're definitely right that there's a massive political imbalance. There's way more liberals. Last time I, there was a,

like the gold standard survey is something called HIRI, the Higher Education Research Institute in, I think UCLA. They do an annual survey. They had one from just like three or four years ago. And I want to get this right, but I'm pretty sure I got it here. It's something like 49% of all faculty in US schools, like four-year undergraduate degrees, granting universities. 49% are liberal and only about, I 11 are conservative there are more people identifying on the far left than the mainstream right in american universities so it's and this is this is self-identification this is people just saying this is who i am so yeah i mean it's it's it's ludicrous how

unbalanced it is whether it's the steven pinker told a story. I'm sorry to interrupt. Steven Pinker told a story I put on my Twitter feed. It's a survey of the Crimson. Now, 3% of Harvard faculty identify themselves as conservative. And those 3% are, a lot of them are like in their 90s. So we kind of know where that's going. But it's not just the left-right spectrum, but there can be dogmas that become entrenched within academic fields. So, for example, our program of women and gender studies,

I don't think you could use the word chromosome, hormone, sexual selection. That would just be not an idea that is thinkable. I was on a hiring committee for another department at Harvard, not psychology. And there was an excellent candidate who was, by any standards, including his own, a political liberal, but he had some heterodox positions. He was opposed to affirmative action, for example. And the department chair said, we can't hire him. He's an extreme right-winger. Extreme right-winger, meaning he had criticism of affirmative action.

You often think of academia as being at the left pole. You know that the north pole is the spot from which all directions are south. So the left pole is the hypothetical position from which all directions are right. A notorious practice of the last decade in many universities has been the so-called diversity statements, where job applicants have to submit not only a statement of their research project, their teaching philosophy, but also their commitment to diversity, which in practice means endorsing a certain set of, a certain canon of beliefs that there is systemic racism, that its only remedy is racial preferences, that racism is pervasive, that it is the only cause of any disparity in racial proportions. So if someone in their diversity statement says, I believe that the most defensible policy is colorblindness

and that the reason for racial inequities in universities is because of our educational system in high school, their application would go into the circular file. It's a shame that almost 200 years ago, we still have to recite the arguments from John Stuart Mill about why you should allow to arguments that you disagree with. Namely, maybe they're right and you're wrong. Unless you're infallible, you really should listen to other viewpoints. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between. Maybe there's some third position you haven't thought of that would

only occur to you if you hear the problems with your own position. And even if you're right, your position is only stronger if you have to defend it against legitimate criticisms. Yeah. So, and this is Steven Pinker, so you can take it to the bank, right? Yeah, I'm with it. So, it's such an ugly cauldron of hypocrisy. I just don't know how you take a stand on this one issue and feel that you're really doing justice to the cause. Although again, I think in the end that you're right about this issue. So, okay, you want to give us the overview of what this law is and why it's wrong?

Yeah, sure. All right. So this is a bill that's been introduced a couple of times now. And this year, it actually passed the House for the first time, I believe. So this is called the Anti-Semitism for the purposes of identifying when someone's civil rights have been violated. All right. So what is the IHRA definition? It starts out pretty simply. It just says that anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews as Jews. And that's basically it. Okay. But that's useless. That's like inert language. It doesn't do anything. So what it then does is it lays out 11, what it calls contemporary examples that may constitute antisemitism. All right. Now this, that word may constitute actually ends up being really important, but let me just give you some of the examples it cites. So some of them are pretty, I think, like innocuous. And anybody who is in any way aware of the world around them would agree is anti-Semitic.

So an example would be accusing Jews. I'm quoting now from the definition. Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even acts committed by non-Jews, or calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of radical ideology or an extremist view of religion. Okay, so I mean, yes, there are going to be, you know, monsters and idiots who will even object to those, but there's several examples given that are pretty straightforward anti-Semitism. Where all the fire is though, where all the controversy is in the examples that link

to Zionism and Israel. All right. So some of the, of those 11 examples, like four or five are about Israel. So here's an example, denying the Jewish people, their right to self-determination, for instance, by claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor or applying double standards by requiring of Israel, a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. All right. So this is this is the tension point. There are those parts of the IHRA definition that most people would probably be fine getting rolled into federal law and being used to inform investigations by the Department of Education into Title VI violations. But it's those ones about Israel that that's where the controversy is, because the argument

being, essentially, you should be able to criticize Israel in any way, shape, or form, more or less, without being accused of anti-Semitism, absent any kind of other specific information. And you shouldn't, in no circumstance, launch a Title VI investigation of a university on the basis of their failure to somehow block or prohibit criticism of Israel. That's essentially what this is all about. There's nuances to it, but that's the heart of it. Yeah.

So let me just, so, and obviously the issue is not just these cases as they may come up, but the chilling effect that it would have on them. And this is, this is always the case and throughout so many, um, related issues that it's not the few examples that make it to the courts. It's all the people who are afraid to be on the wrong side of a lawsuit who figure it's better just not to talk about it. And by the way, this is in employment as well. I was reading, I think 99% of all the Fortune 500 companies have been accused of racial discrimination in lawsuits since year 2000. Basically, it's just, it's a cost of doing business so when that happens to you you freak out about any employee talking about anything that could in any way be considered

like you don't want your manager talking about the fact that they might be against gay marriage because you know you're gonna get smacked with a lawsuit right Because people have visions of being a plaintiff in their head. That's the cynical one. So now what stock do you put in this part of the law? The Department of Education shall take into consideration the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism as part of the department's assessment of whether the practice was motivated by anti-Semitic intent, meaning that it's not the definition of it. It's just something, a factor that you should look at. Yeah. I mean, I think that's meaningful.

And this is the thing that a lot of people have focused on is kind of rescuing the bill. It does not say if you hear someone say Israel has no right to exist, that is by definition anti-Semitic. The bill would say you have to take it into consideration and then you kind of look more generally at what's going on and you draw an appropriate conclusion. What do I think about that? I think that that's very rarely going to save anybody who's accused of anti-Semitism. When one of these complaints gets filed with the Department of Education, they launch, I mean, they don't always, but they almost always launch an investigation there they have an office of civil rights i just checked like an hour ago there's something like 61

different investigations of universities and colleges in the u.s since october 7th that are on were launched on the basis of an alleged violation of national, basically a violation of, so screening against someone based on the basis of national origin or shared ancestry on the links to religion. Essentially, these are going to be cases that are about anti-Semitism.

There are going to be a lot of cases like this. They're expensive. They're time consuming. They go on for years. The phrase, you know, just consider it, it's part of the definition, but not all of the definition, that's not gonna save these schools.

The investigation itself is so time consuming, so expensive, it almost always ends in some kind of settlement. And if you want to avoid a chilling effect, that language is not gonna save you. And of course, to avoid a chilling effect, that language is not going to save you. And of course, there's a tension between the First Amendment and Title VI. I don't even know how that tension is resolvable because everything we're talking about are things you're supposed to be able to say. You're supposed to be able to say anything you want in America. Well, no, no, no, no. So there is a way. There is a better way. And the Biden White House

has screwed it up. And the Obama White House screwed it up. And groups like FIRE do have a better solution. OK, so it looks like this. Title VI says you cannot, universities and colleges that accept federal money cannot allow a hostile environment to form that effectively denies someone the basis or access to education on the basis of discriminatory speech or conduct. All right. So the question is, how do you identify that? How do you protect the good kind of speech and prohibit the bad? It's not perfect, but there is a standard articulated by the Supreme Court called the

Davis Standard. And it essentially says that speech that is not protected is speech that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it denies people their access to education okay now again those those four different things it's severe it's pervasive it's objectively offensive and it denies people access to education that's what fire has been pushing for how does speech deny you your access to education because if i go go, if the, think of it this way, if a university allows people to follow a Jewish faculty member around every part of campus, screaming anti-Semitic epithets at them, mocking them, you know, all that, and it's just so ongoing, so pervasive,

so severe, and so objectively offensive. 99% of people are going to find that an impossible work environment. They're going to leave. Okay. But the obvious answer is that you're following somebody around. That's the conduct is the key aspect of that. No, because if I followed you and just said nothing, or if I followed you and complimented you, that's not going to trigger this. No, no, no. But that would still be harassment. Following anybody is enough. You know, that would be enough for me to say you're harassing me.

I can change it then. I can just say it's something like, let's say the university itself puts out statement after statement. Or let's say someone's emailing you all the time, or somebody is flyering the building that you work in. I mean, I don't know how you want to like, you know, paint this picture. But is it the flyering or is it what the flyers say? In other words, I mean, you're, I mean, it all sounds good until you actually try to put meat on those bones. Like, what does that mean? What was the phrase that you're making, obstructing my ability to get an education?

Denying you equal access education. Denying my, I mean, that's really going to be me saying, I just can't take it or, oh, fuck you. I can handle this. I mean, the good news is the courts generally have been hesitant or they've been pretty good by and large about applying that standard in a rigorous way. But here's the problem. And this is why I said the Biden and the Obama administrations really screwed it up, is they lowered the standard. They lowered the standard as recently as a few months ago. They changed it so it can be severe or persuasive, not severe and persuasive. They changed it so it can be not just denying you access, but limiting your access to education. They've softened the standard a lot, and they've softened it mainly because they want to create more ways for people to address sex-based harassment on campuses. But it's certainly,

you know, one of the consequences is it's just much easier for people to abuse the process or to target speech they don't like. Well, I'll tell you a story that was really shaped me. When I was like 14 years old, I was in summer camp and some kid wrote a swastika in the bunk near my bed. I don't even know if it would have anything to do with me. It probably didn't. And I was making noise, and I made a fuss about it. And I got in trouble because I wasn't behaving. And the head counselor, his name was Karl Lover.

He was a great man. I think about this man to this day. And he was reprimanding me. And I started with him you don't understand as a jew blah blah blah i don't know and he said essentially oh shut up don't give me that crap you can handle it and when when the time is when it's proper we will erase it you know and he called my bluff and of course he was right of course i could have handled it. I, I, I, you know, even at that young age, I smelled that maybe I could put him on his back foot by playing that cynical card that I just couldn't, I couldn't spend one more minute in that bed swinging a swastika. And he sized me up

immediately and say, yeah, you'll be fine. You know, you see these things all the time. And he was right. And, and like I said, it was, it was a pivotal event in my life because I know that's the case with so many people who are screaming offense. They, uh, they can handle it. You know, you can hear this stuff. You'll, you'll survive. And, uh, you know, as you say that people will accuse you of all horrible things. And I feel exactly the same way about the Jews. How many professors have been fired for using racial slurs or suspended in classrooms in discussions about racial slurs when nobody could possibly in a million years have thought these people were racist? And was somehow a violation of of rights it's it's like i said it's just it's just more than one person can can take um so the okay so

a lot of what the complaints that are being filed are about like those 60 61 that i mentioned a lot of them probably look a bit different than what you're thinking about, okay? So some of them that are speech-based are things like doxing, which is speech. It's a kind of speech, right? Or they are, again, they're targeting people where they work, putting flyers up with pictures on there of, of a certain professor and saying, so-and-so, you know, wants babies dead, right? Professor so-and-so, uh, wants to, uh, you know, supports rape, things like that. So really, I don't know. That's not, that's not okay. Saying so-and-so, I mean, like it's the question of, uh, the law, whether it is so severe.

You know where I'm going with this? Cause that's what they accuse every Zionist of. Yeah. But I'll give you, I mean, look, the Zionists, so these lawfare, there are these groups out there now that are filing these complaints, Jewish groups, like the Lawfare Project and the Brandeis Center. These are organizations that are using the Title VI language to file complaints. And they are citing cases like this, right, to build out an argument for why these schools are out of compliance with federal law. You are also seeing now pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab

groups doing the exact same thing. And they are citing very, very similar examples. They're filing dozens of complaints. Again, I just checked like an hour ago, just doing some searches on the websites of the Department of Education. There's case after case of groups like Palestine Legal, or the Council on American-Islamic Relations. These are groups that are filing their exact same investigations. And it's the same sort of stuff. They're now just like trading blows back and forth with one another, targeting schools. This school hates Zionists. No, this school hates Palestinians, and they're going back and forth over it now. Is there a working, so if you're going to have a law which needs to take into account anti-Semitism, at some point it has to be defined either through a legal decision or legislation.

Do you have or have you seen a working definition of anti-Semitism? Well, I don't think it does. Do we have a definition of racism that has lots of examples like the IHRA one does? No, we don't have one legislation, but I'm sure we have various legal opinions that have decided whether something was racism or not. And by doing that, they have to. Yeah, I mean, what's different here is this is a specific, it's the examples. It's those 11 examples that have everyone so angry, right? There are state governments in the U.S. that have passed laws adopting the IHRA definition wholesale with the examples.

And that just say flat out, these examples are anti-Semitism. Not they might be, not they must be considered, but just they flat out, these examples are anti-Semitism. Not they might be, not they must be considered, but just they flat out, they equally. So they go further than the current federal. Yeah. So Florida did it in 2019. Indiana did it last February. These are states that are saying, if you deny Israel its right to exist or call it a racist endeavor, then that constitutes anti-Semitism in the state of Indiana and the state of Florida. Yeah, well, let me ask you another question and we're almost going to wrap it up.

Do you, I'm assuming you're not a Trump supporter. No. But can you give any begrudging credit to the conservative Supreme Court, which I believe is much more sympathetic to the arguments that you make than Ketanji Brown Jackson would be? I mean, this Supreme Court is generally good on the kind of classic theories of free speech. Yeah, I mean, I don't mind saying that. And the alternative court, the Hillary court, might very well not have been. Yeah, it might not have been.

It might have been worse in other ways. Absolutely. Yeah, on this issue. On this issue, I mean, we will see. I'll give you an example of something that we can chew over, you know, that we can think about. This is completely unrelated to the issue of anti-Semitism, but it's definitely about campus free speech.

A public university in Texas, I think it might be Texas A&M. I'm not positive, though. About maybe four months ago, the president blocked the local campus pride organization from hosting a drag event on campus. He just said flat out, no. He said, this conflicts with my Christian values and the Christian values of the state of Texas. It's not going to happen. So the group sued and FIRE has provided legal support. They've argued this. They argued it in the Fifth Circuit and were shot down. And so they appealed it, which is, by the way, filled with Trump appointees as well. And then they appealed it to the U.S. Supreme Court. And then just last week, I'll have to read

what was said, but the Supreme Court basically punted. They passed it back down to the Fifth Circuit for more consideration. But crucially, they refused to enjoin or to block that ban on drag events, right? I only bring this up because there are real worrying trends, both in the Supreme Court and in circuit courts like the Fifth in particular. These are Trump appointees by and large and they are not friendly to free speech and especially not free speech on campus it seems was it been dragging for children was it no no it was just a campus event like for just oh that's different for some reason i filled in the blank with thought it was for because there's so many you know story time fragments um i i can't imagine the supreme court cutting out an exception for drag expression, but if they do, I'm sure I'd oppose it.

I don't think they will. It was the conservative court that included transgender in the civil rights laws. It's not as if they've shown – I, that was a pretty charitable interpretation of the law and it came from the right, you know, or at least a number of them from the right. So, I think this, yeah, yeah, Gorsuch, I think this court is pretty good on that general issue. Again, I think better than it would be from the left. All right. Any, any, and, and I'm happy for this court getting rid of racial preferences in universities. I think that is thawing the ice of racial preferences throughout our entire society at a time when the country is becoming so diverse that you just have to do that. We can't have a zero-sum game of cutting up the pie for each ethnic group.

And the fact that Asians had to get 30%, 40% higher on their SATs just to be treated like regular human beings, I thought this was untenable. So I'm one of these people who thinks that Trump was a terrible person to vote for, but now that he's out of office, I'm not so sure the counterfactual would have left us better off. I think this Supreme Court has done a lot of good

things. Anything else on your mind that you want to mention about this issue? I just want to really ask, you know, you and everybody and probably myself most of the time too, to just get over the hypocrisy issue at the policy level okay the there are those people who i'm just never going to forget never forgive and never trust again because they're so hypocritical on this stuff and that's fine but i don't want to let the hypocrisy i don't want to let my anger about the hypocrisy uh distort my commitment to the basic principle about free speech. No, I think that's what I 100% disagree with you because unless the campuses or the decision makers actually say, look, we realize we were wrong in the past. It's taken this issue.

We're going to move in the direction of free expression. And going forward, we are going to apply this same new standard to many of the things we got wrong in the past. Then I would say, okay, there's some contrition there. There's no point digging in. But what's going to happen here is that they're going to prevail on this free speech issue. And then the next issue is going to come up and say, wait a second. When it came to the Zionists, you didn't have that opinion. And they're going to say, no, no, that was just anti-war protests. That never had anything to do with the things you're talking about. We actually

didn't ever change our policy. Our policy is always as it was. That's what's going to happen, mark my words. And that's why the hypocrisy issue was so important. It's fine if going forward you have some hope of changing future decisions, but I think, no, we're just cutting out an exception here for things which pertain to Jews, and then they're going to continue unabated in the way they behaved all along. That's what I think is going to happen. And that's why I disagree with you. Although I can't, I can't from that get to voting for this law because I mean, one example would be, well,

what if the Jews really do start put Palestinians in concentration camps, just like the Nazis, you're going to say it's illegal to say they're Nazis. You can't have a definition now that would apply to things in the future when you don't even know what they might do in the future the law the definition doesn't hold but still i think i'm not i think it sounds like we're agreeing though right because i'm also saying like i'm not going to forgive these people and i'm not going to forget but i just don't think you need to then you should then use that as a reason to totally flip on your commitments to free speech. Yeah, but this is what, if I were you, the article that I wrote on this would have been disdainful, sarcastic, mocking of these people.

And at the end, I would have said, yes, you're right. This law is wrong. But who do you think you're kidding here? How dare you pretend that you care about free speech? That's what needs to be said. It's not coming down on the fact that this law shouldn't go through Congress. It shouldn't. But that anybody should read any opinion on it and think that there's some principle at work here other than a riscible, disgusting amount of hypocrisy. different ideologies that are swimming in people's minds. The idea that if there was no such thing as anti-Semitism,

there would be total unanimity of support for Israel is ridiculous. So it can't be just anti-Semitism. But however you want to put it, in some way, there is some exception here that is an expression of a lack of sympathy for Jews as compared to other groups. It just is not that the heartstrings are not moved on this issue when it comes to Jews seeing themselves portrayed as Nazis. Jews being accused of genocide in a historically illiterate way. If you take two seconds to view other genocides, whatever it is, there's just a, it's an open season.

And we're kind of repeating ourselves. There's this kind of rubber stamping this open season by saying, well, no, the principle is what matters. It just, it just doesn't, it won't stay down with me. I would not vote for the law, but the way people are writing their opposition to the law is not sufficiently disdainful of what's going on. I'm not blowing the whistle.

I'll just say this. Because I think anti-Semitism is a real problem on campus and a big problem, and a lot of it flies under the flag of anti-Zionism, I do believe it's a problem. The good news, I guess, is that we don't need this definition to address it. There are tools there. Um, they are already in motion. Um, you can't change a culture. You can't change a culture overnight, at least. Um, but the tools are there and there are better ones than censoring people through this definition. But I've always had this torn element to it where I don't really necessarily want to chill the anti-Semitism because I always think there's something salutary about people seeing that it really exists.

I don't really mind so much that they're showing their true colors here about how they feel about the Jews. This was the fucking wake-up call that left-wing Jews have needed for years. I mean, I've been arguing for years with all my Jewish friends who are, you know, I'm really nonpartisan, but like very loyal Democrats and very loyal to the left wing. And for years, I've been saying, look, I understand that the right wing anti-Semites may shoot up a synagogue from time to time. I understand that they're more prone to violence. But my kids are not going to be living in that world.

My kids are going to be living and getting jobs and working in the institutions where they view Zionists as racists, as Afrikaners, and where you couldn't march at the Women's March if you showed a Star of David. I won't rehearse all the issues. And I say the doctrine of intersectionality means that the Jews are always going to be wrong in any dispute they have with any other group. And, you know, now they all woke up. And just when they all woke up, what's bubbling up on the right? Alex Jones for the first time now we're actually seeing a right wing anti-semitism bubbling up which is also now scaring me which is for the first time you're seeing that? for the first time in a long time

there was no prominent conservative thinker that I knew that was preaching anti-semitism in any meaningful way over the last 20 years. Nobody on Fox News, no Republican, no Tucker. I'm not going to go down this road too far with you.

I mean, like, I can throw out examples. Give me a name. I mean, like, Donald Trump had dinner with Nick Fuentes. Okay? Like, I don't know. No, no. But we know. What do we know?

What do we know about that? No, we know that he didn't, that Nick Fu definitely was brought to the dinner that trump didn't know look trump i i think that it's a reach to say trump is an anti-semite he's so surrounded by jews they named a town after him in israel he's he's obviously not keen on Islam. He has Orthodox Jews in his family. No, no. I'm going to say this. I take your point. And I know that maybe your kids aren't in that kind of environment.

I mean, I'm a Jew. I live in a town of like 2,500 people. You know, it's different for people who aren't in cities where everybody you interact with is a liberal. Right. It's different if you're not in Columbia or NYU, but instead you're in a small like, you know, campus like I am in the middle of nowhere. So I just I mean, there's all there's all kinds of ways we can split this. Obviously, I think like I don't wear a kippah. I don't wear, you know, tefillin. So I don't I don't code as visibly jewish the way a lot of other like you know an orthodox would don't kid yourself yeah yeah yeah

they'll never know they'll never know i slip right by yeah people listening with the audio they don't know they gotta see the picture uh yeah so i mean like it's just it's complicated but i think that uh you know everybody's got their own kind of experience. I don't know. I don't know where I come down and, like, which side is worse. This has been a wake-up call for me insofar as I definitely see tolerance for anti-Semitism from people who I just never imagined would. And I also see people who are, I guess, not like, according to Hoyle, anti-Semites, but sure are way too comfortable with Jews dying in Israel, right? With Israelis dying. That's terrifying to me. The polls are pretty clear on where the support for associated issues like Israel are. But listen, as I said,

I see an opening now on the right. Alex Jones just came out with this whole thing about the Jews being responsible for 9-11, the Jews being responsible maybe for killing Jack Kennedy. Tucker Carlson goes on Joe Rogan and says Alex Jones is getting a lot of things right and is channeling the truth. Then he goes on Twitter and says that this law is making the New Testament illegal. Then he goes on his show and he finds one

rapidly anti-Israeli Palestinian Christian and says that why are we giving money to a country that is persecuting Christians? This is Father Coughlin stuff. This is new. There was nobody on the right of a Tucker Carlson level saying stuff like this. And I'm just being fair-minded here.

I'm worried now all of a sudden of a horseshoe anti-Semitism at the worst possible time. Hopefully, Tucker Carlson is so wacky now with his i don't know if you've been watching that he believes in aliens from satan and um he literally he thinks that aliens are messengers of a dark force uh that kill people i mean just so maybe people just chalk him off as crazy but he's an influential guy right and and they go on the joe rogan show and i don't think joe rogan is anti-Semitic, but I wish he wouldn't allow these people to speak so freely on his show. Anyway, all right, listen, you've been a great guest, and I thought we'd disagree way more, which probably not – Sorry about that.

It makes it less entertaining maybe, but it's still nice to hear that we don't really disagree about that much, actually. If at all, to tell you the truth, I'm not sure we disagree about anything. I don't know. Maybe you disagree about the pendulum business. I don't know. But yeah, I take your point. It's nice that we agree on the big stuff, at least. Well, let me ask you, Dr. Gay, is it harassment for students to call for the genocide of Jews on campus?

Jesus Christ, that's already ended one career. No, the truth is, it is probably not. It's probably protected speech to call for genocide. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's protected speech. It's protected speech because it's about a group in general and not somebody saying this, this student deserves to die. That's, that's the difference that she should have given at that, at that hearing. Yeah. I listen, I'm fine with it. As long as is it, you know, as long as they're going to apply that rule across the board, I predict they're not. and I'm going to contact you to come on the show and take it. You're going to take your beating when I turn out to be right. Oh, no, no, no. I'm not denying.

They're going to be hypocritical. Of course they are. Yeah. I mean, going forward. Yeah, they will. They're going to pocket this victory and move on. Well, I don't I don't think the Senate's going to pass the law. No, no, no.

I mean, look, that's not going to pass it because they don't need. Look, the the the unofficial levers of power that are coming crashing down on these universities is so enormous. You don't even need the law. If you look what's going on right now, calling in the police, canceling student groups, rescinding their certifications, it's severe. It's massive, this kind of crackdown. There's no need to pass a law. You just do it through informal mechanisms of pressure. The student groups, by the way, were very unwise in the way they conducted themselves.

Yes. There was no reason to push this. They had administrators who were obviously looking for a way to not have to act. Just, you know, set up your, just go home at night. That's all. Protest all day. Behave at night. Yeah, I was thinking more like students for justice. Columbia banned students for justice in Palestine.

Brandeis did as well. A couple of universities have been banning these groups. This is even before the encampments, right? You know, students for justice in Palestine, is that the one that said Hillel should be banned from universities? Now that semesters in Tel Aviv University

should be banned. Yeah, they want a full boycott of all academic institutions. But Hillel, I mean, they kind of gave themselves away because Hillel is just the campus Jewish group. It's not. Do you want me to tell you what they would say?

Like, I don't know how far you want to go. Yeah, yeah, tell me. Then we can go. Tell me. All right. So what was it? Was it Harvard that did this? I can't remember which school did.

Anyway, it doesn't matter because what they said is, I think it was Yale, actually. They said that they wanted the university to sever ties with Hillel International, which is the international umbrella group for all the national and collegiate Hillel chapters. And they said in follow-ups, we don't want to ban Hillel at Yale. We just want the university to sever ties with the international organization. So that's the way they split it. They said that the international organization is this, you know, it's in the pocket of Israel is what they said. Whereas Hillel, Columbia or Hillel, Yale, these are student groups like any other, and they can do what they want.

That's what they say. All right. I know. I don't, I don't, I don't even, I don't know enough to challenge that and I don't want to make myself. Yeah. All right, sir. It's really been a pleasure to meet you. What town are you in? Uh, I'm in, uh, I'm in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, way up here in Canada. Oh, you're in Canada.

Yeah. Um, uh, all right. Well, if you ever got to New York, uh, you know, I'd be happy to, to break bread with you at the comedy cell. I don't know if you ever get there. I'm looking forward to it. Okay. Take it easy.

Don't, don't hang up until it says a hundred percent uploaded. Okay. Sounds good.