← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
A
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B
It'S Tim Miller from the Bulwark here. I wanted to jump on with a guy named Alex Bronzini, vendor. Is that your real name?
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C
That is my real name, yeah.
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B
That's an amazing name. Alex Bronzini, vendor.
- [01:13]
C
Thank you.
- [01:14]
B
That's going to be good for you, Brandon, going forward as you try to build a personal brand in our dystopia. He wrote for the New York Times this opinion essay. At Harvard and elsewhere, the new campus orthodoxy is even more stifling. This is topic that I would have been talking about with Kam Kasky on the old fypod that unfortunately he abandoned me to run for Congress. So I'm going to talk about it with the actual author instead. You're at Harvard? I am. Congratulations. That's really nice. Is that how you introduce yourself usually to people?
- [01:47]
C
I try not to.
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B
Try not to, yeah. Yeah. Well, we're all really impressed. I want to go into it because A, I thought it was really compelling, the case you made with some of the anecdotes and B, it kind of speaks to something that I've been hearing about when I talk to Gen Z folks on campuses and I think is a good corrective on some of the things that I've been talking about because I've. I'm incre. I am concerned and remain concerned about increasing kind of Gen Z, Gen Alpha antisemitism and some of the stuff that you're seeing online, some of the stuff you're seeing on campus Simultaneously to that, like there's, there's another thing that's happening that is creating a backlash, which is I think a lot of the stuff that you, you write about here. So why don't you describe your own column and then we'll go into it from there.
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C
Yeah, so in the piece I argue that the American right has kind of repurposed many of the methods of speech policing that we saw during the period of, during the woke period as, as I, as I call it.
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B
Yeah, Peak woke.
- [02:47]
C
Peak Woke. Roughly the 2014-2023 period in some fairly literal ways. I mean you have at Harvard we all had to complete this, what was essentially a sensitivity training on the matter of anti Semitism. At other schools like Northwestern, you have these sensitivity trainings that are, that are far, far more heavy handed than the ones that I had to complete, which sort of basically force certain political arguments about Israel. In the case of the Northwestern one, they literally show a map of Israel, Palestine that includes the west bank as Israel. Then you also have these extremely broad definitions of anti Semitism that precludes certain political arguments about Israel. You're not allowed to hold Israel to certain double standards at schools like Harvard. Or so the definition of anti Semitism that they've adopted under pressure from Trump goes. And what this all adds up to, in my view is a speech climate that is even worse on college campuses than the one which preceded it. And in part this is also because unlike the speech climate under peak woke, this is coming not from social oppobrium, which is a powerful force. Yeah, sure, but it's coming by government mandate. The federal government has literally told Harvard no, these are certain, there are certain speaker series, for instance, that we do not think are acceptable ways to talk about the matter of Israel, Palestine and we think they should be shut down. The Obama administration never went to a school like Harvard and said no. You have certain professors who we think are not going about talking about this issue the right way on say structural racism. Right.
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B
So you wrote here you had to take a training video and corresponding test. All, basically all training videos are bad. I should just say I'm basically anti HR across the board. I mean I'm pro HR in that there should be a department that makes sure that people don't abuse other people. But most of the like performative stuff like is like basically for nobody except for the lawyers. But you had to take a video, you'd look at a video, just talk about like what was, what was included.
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C
They show you several slides about antisemitism about, about the, the percentage of Jewish students who felt unsafe at Harvard. The, Some, some things that I think were, you know, I, I am personally of the view that, that as you say, that you can't really deal with prejudice through these kinds of DEI trainings. I think that we learned that during the era of peak woke that DEI.
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B
Trainings were generally extremely solve racism.
- [05:35]
C
Generally these things were extremely ineffective at dealing with workplace racism. And we saw that in studies that were done on the matter. But one of the things that Harvard's antisemitism training does specifically is it encourages us to review the examples of antisemitism that are provided by the IHRA definition of antisemitism and which is the official definition that the Department of Education uses. It is one which it has strong armed Colombia into adopting in I think the first round of demands that Colombia acquiesced to. Trump made his demands of Colombia in two rounds last year. Again, as I've said, it precludes holding Israel to double standards. It considers accusing Israel of, it considers likening Israel to Nazi Germany also anti Semitic conduct. That's not an argument I would personally make. I find it a little too edgy. But it is protected political speech by any reasonable definition. The other thing, I think a point that fire, which is a free speech advocacy group, has made about defining antisemitism and efforts to do so, is that you don't actually really need to. Even during peak woke, we never had a definition, an official definition of racism that colleges adopted. We just defined in the Civil Rights act certain groups as protected classes. And when there were cases of anti Semitism at Harvard that went unpunished, it was not because we had insufficient rules to punish them. It was just because administrators didn't want to. You don't, you don't need new rules, you just need to enforce the ones that are on the books.
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B
So just kind of like doing a little baseline of where you're at on this. I mean, do you do even agree with my throat clearing at the beginning, the sentiment that there is some concerning elements of anti Semitism on campus right now that's maybe separate from criticisms of Israel?
- [07:41]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's difficult not to argue. Excuse me, it's difficult to argue that there is absolutely zero antisemitism on college campuses. At Harvard, one of the big pro Palestinian groups put out a flyer, believe this was last year, that had a boot stomping on a Star of David. I think it's fairly difficult to argue that that kind of conduct is not anti Semitic. Where I disagree with, where I disagree, I think with the way that the climate at Harvard gets characterized a lot is that I don't think that anyone is unsafe at Harvard. First, Harvard is like the safest place in Cambridge, probably the safest place in the Boston area, which is one of the safest cities in the world. But then more to that point, I mean, Jacob Miller, who graduated last year, he was one of the sort of, he was a recurring Fox News guest, he was the Hillel president, one of the sort of loudest pro Israel voices on campus, wrote in a column in the Harvard Crimson and that he had never felt unsafe at Harvard. Right. I think that often when people make these claims of unsafety, they're doing so because one of the ways that you can trigger universities to take action on your behalf, both just legally, because universities are obligated to ensure that protected classes have safe environments. It is by speaking of unsafety, which is just if any, I think, serious student, even those who are the most loudly pro Israel ones have said that's not really the case.
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B
I want to get back to antisemitism, but the safety thing just piqued a curiosity I have because I always felt this way. But I'm coming from having been on the right or at least on the center right and having rejected a lot of what I saw there. I always was very uncomfortable with the language coming from the progressive left or the identitarian left or whatever around like safety. I feel like that was kind of like a left concept. Really. That has been, again, as you're saying, there have been elements of that has been adopted by the right. I mean, did you feel that way in that context where there's, you know, where left folks on campus talking about the need for safe spaces or talking about, you know, you know, words as violence, like where do you kind of come down on that discussion more broadly?
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C
I think it's absolutely the case that on some level the discourse of safety is a two sided thing at Harvard. By that I mean that there was also a report on Arab students at Harvard and anti Arab bias that the university produced last summer, which also traffics in, I think these pretty preposterous claims about, you know, something like 40% of Arab students feeling unsafe at Harvard. I find it difficult to believe that 40% of Arab students are unsafe. I find it especially because, I mean, like you can look at the crime statistics, right? There are hate crimes that happen and I don't mean to minimize those, but they also are generally like vandalism that sort of thing. Graffiti someone chalked. Nick Fuentes is right about everything outside of the main gate to Harvard Yard. Obviously, yes, I understand why that would make someone feel uneasy, but the claim that that constitutes physical unsafety to one's person is just not backed up in the data. But to. To your point about safe spaces, I absolutely do think that the right is repurposing the methods of the left. Now, I should be upfront, like, I'm 19. I wasn't really around during the era of peak woke, and I spoke to 15.
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B
You're in high school. Where did you grow up?
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C
I grew up in New York.
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B
Okay, so I'm sure that you had some like, you know, high school protest action happen.
- [11:43]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, to use a very concrete example, in the DEI bans that many red states have passed, they exclude what is. They include what is effectively a de facto antisemitism exception in that you are allowed to do DEI trainings as long as they comply with unspecified federal regulations. Right. Now, if they were so convinced that DEI is this illegal thing, then why would you permit certain cases where you're allowed to do it? To me, that seems like a very obvious case of the right using the methods of the left and the right turning against the left.
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B
The.
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C
The precedents that it created and certainly the language of safety. I think both sides are trying to make these competing claims of unsafety in a way that doesn't really accurately reflect reality. Only because the university set the precedent over the last decade that this is one of the ways that you can get it to do things.
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B
Back to the anti Semitism thing, what I alluded to at the top was I heard some pretty compelling feedback from some younger folks when me and Cam were talking about this a month or two ago, where that, that said something essentially to the effect of yes, it's, it's pretty concerning sometimes. How many young Gen Z's are excited about Candace or Nick Fuentes or whatever, insert your left and you know, like that some of this rhetoric that I've that we're hearing on campus is like different from criticism of Israel and like traffics in more traditional anti Semitic tropes. And that's concerning. Simultaneously though, the feedback I got was that a lot of the universities, the cracking, the people that actually suffered consequences on campus or either expelled or had to deal with some other type of university consequence, were people who were not doing that, who were criticizing Israel, who were speaking out, which was their right, by protesting on campus or writing letters or doing something of that nature. And that has a radicalizing effect on people where it's like, okay, well, you're telling me that, like this, like the big, you know, that the people that are suffering consequences on campus are Jewish kids that feel unsafe. And while that may be true, like, the people that have actually suffered consequences on campus are people that were, like, expressing their free speech rights to criticize a foreign government. And like, that's crazy. And I wonder if that. If, like, you sense that that is like, something that you've seen as you are kind of writing this up, like.
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C
Insofar as people get radicalized into, well.
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B
Not rad radicalized is an exaggeration, but just this notion that the actual punishment and ramifications for people, not just this year, but in the recent past on campus have been people that are either criticizing Israel or, to expand it out from this, criticizing Charlie Kirk, like, et cetera. And that, like, so to them, like, this notion that, you know, like, that there are some consequences that are being suffered by, you know, the people that are really, you know, the victims, whatever of this sort of campus action are right wingers. Like, is it resonating with their experience, right. Of what they're seeing on campus? And I guess I wonder how you.
- [15:19]
C
I think it's absolutely the case. When I interviewed Steve Levitsky, who wrote the book How Democracies Die, one of the things that he said is that over the last, since October 7th, there's not really been a single cancellation of someone on the right at Harvard. If you look at fire's Free Speech Incidents Tracker, FIRE is great, by the way.
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B
They're the only existing free speech Org that is really just calling it straight.
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C
I have issues with fire and we can, we can get into them. I think that they're great from the perspective of the cases that they've brought against the Trump administration and the cases that they brought during Peak Woke, I thought that they've maintained a really principled stance and I admire them a lot. If you look at fire's incident tracker, this is maybe something I would criticize them on, which is that one of the incidents of deplatformings from the left was when Climate Defiance stormed an event that Joe Manchin was stormed. Like an interview with Joe Manchin at the IOP at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School. So, yeah, there have been certain cases of de platforming from the left, but that involve, like, outside activist groups, like running onto Harvard's campus and screaming at Joe Manchin. The speech climate at Harvard right now, it's much, much Harder to be on the left at Harvard, actually, maybe. I don't know if that's. How can I put this? Cause it certainly is the case that like the vast majority of Harvard undergrads are on the left.
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B
And I don't think crackdown is. Maybe it's not that it's harder because you said at the top the social opprobrium. It's not that it's like that the risk of suffering some kind of consequence in the administration.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's absolutely the case. And I mean, the Harvard Salient, which is our undergraduate conservative magazine, they put out an article that quoted Hitler, like just straight up Hitler, quote. And the college, the dean of the college said that they would not do anything about it. After the dean of the college, the preceding dean.
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A
We.
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C
There's a, there's a new dean this year, but the old one said after that pro Palestinian group put out the images of the boot stamping on the Star of David. The college condemned that. But when you have these right wing publications that quote Hitler, that does not get condemnation. And it very, very much does seem like there's a double standard around the condemnation of anti Semitism from the left. And to what extent that constitutes a problem to be remedied on an institutional scale by statements from administrators versus anti Semitism on the right, which generally gets crickets.
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B
Do you feel like, I mean, are you kind of an out? I don't, you know, I guess you don't do a poll of everybody, but just like as a social, you know, exercise, like, do you sense that other left kids at Harvard and other places that you talk to share your sense that, like. Well, I may not share is not the right word, but do you think that other kids are like, is there any sense of. Oh, I don't know either. Like the millennial lefties were too cringe with her identity.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
Woke stuff. Like, do you sense that out there or not or not really?
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C
I think it's absolutely the case that a lot of people on the left have come around free speech. That's like a very low bar. But like, it is, it is I think the case that the people who I know, and granted, I'm not like the biggest activist, but have come around, around to the idea that the sort of free speech absolutists of the 2010s got more things right than they did wrong. I think people still have a ways to go around.
- [19:39]
B
Eric Kirk started doing a campus tour. Do you think that she's gonna get the like, ban Erica Kirk from speaking here, because, like, that's the shit that was happening. It's kind of funny to think back like 10. This is, this is right before your time. Probably like thinking back 10 years ago, like there was like, the big brouhaha's were like, you shouldn't even allow Ben Shapiro to speak at Berkeley. And it's like, this feels kind of stupid now.
- [20:01]
C
I don't know. I mean, at Harvard, we, we had like Joe Lonsdale, founder of Palantir speak. Yeah, you get conservative, conservative politicians coming through all the time. You would. You had John Fetterman speak. Someone who, you know, a lot of people, including myself, believes says a lot of extremely distasteful things. I don't think that there's been a real sizable movement to deplatform those people. Obviously you get groups like Climate Defiance that like come in and scream at them occasionally. It's. And I don't know if this is because the students are better. Anecdotally, I do feel like, like, again, many have come around to free speech as a sort of normative principle.
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A
But.
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C
Also because the college administrations have made it clear that like, they're not going to do that, that they're not going to respond to those, they're not going to respond to that kind of pressure anymore. In part that comes from Trump, but I wouldn't give Trump too much credit on forcing that change. And again, I think this comes back to why I consider this era worse than Peak Woke is because there was this one incident back in. I forget exactly when this was. It was 2021, when there was a biologist at Harvard, Caroline Hooven. Caroline Hooven, was that her name? Carol Hooven, excuse me, who essentially got bullied out of her job by a DEI administrator over her remarks about biological sex. And I believe the case was that she had said some fairly indisputable things around there are two biological sexes. And that got a lot of people very upset. And she ended up leaving Harbor. And I think that this is probably the worst case of repression of academic inquiry by Harvard administrators in the Peak Woke era. Now, right after Hooven left, bullied out by these DEI administrators, the college, immediately after outcry from other faculty, implemented all these measures to prevent such a thing from happening again. They started this initiative called the Intellectual Vitality Initiative, where they host these speaker conversations with a wide range of people on the, on the political spectrum and so forth. And we've had incidents like that lately where there are professors and there are speaker series which get shut down in there Was there was one. There are two actually that there was the center of Middle for. On I think center on Middle Eastern Studies. I forget if it's on or 4, there was. People figured out the religion. The, the. There was the RCPI initiative which I believe stands for Religion, Conflict and Peace, which, which was in the Divinity school. Two centers and initiatives that held these speaker series on the subject of Israel, Palestine, which the Trump administration cited as going about the issue in the wrong.
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A
Way.
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C
And which have been sticking points in the university's negotiations with Trump. And the university shut them down. In the case of the center of Middle Eastern Studies, they removed the administrators and then they put new ones in who are, who are hosting and it's essentially a defunct center at this point. They host very few events. And then in the case of rcpi it's done.
- [23:52]
B
Yeah.
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C
And there's no redress around that. There's no way that you can appeal that decision because that's top down censorship that's coming from the federal government. They are saying there is a specific way that we of speaking about this issue that we consider legitimate academic inquiry and there is a certain way that we do not consider that. We do not consider legitimate academic inquiry and you're not allowed to do that. And if you do that, we take away your funding.
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B
All right, Alex, anything else happening out there about 19 year olds that I need to know about?
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C
Anything else?
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B
You're my Cameron. Stand in now for the month. Anything happening in the world?
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C
Let me think about this.
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B
It might be like outside of my field of vision.
- [24:33]
C
Recently there's been some question about whether the 6, 7 meme is dead.
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B
Oh yeah, what do you think about that?
- [24:40]
C
My personal view of the 6, 7 meme is that you have very interesting phenomenon where 2, 5, 6 year olds. 6, 7 is dead. But actually for people my age, 6, 7 is funnier and funnier.
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B
Oh, is that really funny?
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C
So it's kind of progressing up the age scale.
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B
I had a. My friends, I can help with this. I don't know a lot about what's happening with 19 year olds, but I know what's happening with 6 and 5 year olds. One of my friend's kids, to exactly your point when something came up with 6, 7 and he said to. Oh yeah, what's you know, are you still doing that? Are you still doing six, seven, six, seven. And the kid said no, no dad, that's over. But there's a new number out there. We don't quite know what it means yet, but it's six, nine. And he was like, oh, really? 69 is the new out there. So that's what's happening. I don't know.
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C
Yeah. At the Zoran Mandani election at the inauguration, one of the speakers was like, oh, I've known Zoron for six or seven years. And he sort of smirks to himself and then stops. And I think that's a very, you know, that's where we're at in the 6, 7 meme. It's funny. It's funny to Zoron, but not to the five and six year olds.
- [26:08]
B
That's the six year olds anymore. All right, man. Do you have an endorsement you want to make in the New York 12 race? Are you endorsement? Since you're from New York and my former POD host is. We have two former Bulwark pod hosts.
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C
I might be, I might be writing something on that race from an unbiased journalistic perspective.
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B
Okay, so I won't ask you to it.
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C
I will keep it myself.
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B
But yeah, it's important that you're. I'm not sure that unbiased journalism is really a thing anymore.
- [26:35]
C
Right.
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B
I think that what you do what you.
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C
But now people from an open mind, open minded perspective.
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B
Okay? Open minded, like authenticity. You know, people don't want the fake non bias anymore. They want, they want to know what your real perspective is. But we'll wait and it's a nice tease for the next content you've had. It's good to meet you, man. I appreciate it. Good luck with classes. Classes.
- [26:54]
C
Thanks for having me on. Harvard has a ridiculously long spring break, so I have three more weeks left until classes start.
- [27:03]
B
All right, well, thanks for spending 20 minutes.
- [27:05]
C
Spring break, winter break. I don't know. Winter break.
- [27:06]
B
We got it. We got it. That's Alex Bronzini, vendor. The article was at Harvard and elsewhere. The new campus orthodoxy is even more stifling. Go check it out. Subscribe to the feed here. We'll see you all soon. Bye.