Unnamed Speaker (4:36)

Yeah, maybe a couple of other brief headlines to note. One is that there is apparently ongoing discussions between Syria and Israel, the new government of Syria and Israel, about normalization or something akin to that. There appears to be a pretty good dialogue happening, which I didn't see coming and is, I think, an upside surprise here. I still harbor serious concerns about Trump's sanctions relief against the Syrians at a premature time. But it does look like things are moving in a positive direction. There's a lot happening in Lebanon that people aren't talking about, but it really actually looks like the Lebanese government and Israel are working together to destroy Hezbollah bit by bit, which I think is also positive. So there's some good things happening. And then there is the thing that is just so jarring to me that the Air Force has apparently agreed or the Pentagon has agreed to accept the 747 from Qatar just days after it was offered. I did not see this moving so quickly. I really thought that you'd have a bunch of lawyers and, you know, the folks that were overseeing the ethics of all of this, that they would have thrown, you know, up some serious roadblocks that didn't happen. So, you know, dizzying news cycle, you know, mostly scary with a couple of upside surprises.

John Podhoretz (6:00)

The Guttery plane just to, just to sort of. The thing is we're apparently going to take possession of the Guttery plane. That. That's the story, right? And yeah, that's the whether it can ever, whether it can ever be put in the air as an official aircraft for the president without being disassembled to its literally disassembled till every single piece is, you know, sitting on a Runway and then reassembled to make sure that there aren't Listening devices or whatever, and then have installed all of the things that make Air Force One. Air Force One. And two and a half years.

Unnamed Speaker (6:34)

Two at least. Right.

John Podhoretz (6:36)

Minimum. Right. So. So Trump won't even get the play. I think my guess is that the idea was, you know, bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. We'll just take the plane. We're just going to take it now. Na, na, na, na, na. See what you can do about it. The news cycle moves on. You're, you know, you don't like us taking it. We're taking it. And then it's just going to sit somewhere gathering, you know, being sort of gathering dust because somebody's going to have library.

Jonathan Schanzer (7:03)

Right. I mean, that's. That's the thing.

John Podhoretz (7:05)

But there is no library.

Jonathan Schanzer (7:06)

Yeah, right.

John Podhoretz (7:07)

There is no library. He made no move.

Jonathan Schanzer (7:09)

There will be.

John Podhoretz (7:09)

When.

Jonathan Schanzer (7:09)

When Qatar donates a library.

Abe Greenwald (7:11)

Fair enough.

John Podhoretz (7:12)

Well put. Okay, so the question now goes to how America is going to respond, both domestically and in terms of our own domestically, on all fronts, to Elias Rodriguez's assassination, essentially of two young Israeli embassy officials, one an Israeli, the other an American. The details of the shooting which came out yesterday in the indictment are so upsetting, I'm almost sorry that they appear in the indictment because that means that Sarah Milgram's parents have to read about her, her final minute of life when she's crawling away after having been shot in the back, and then he walks over to her and shoots her four or five more times while she's lying on the ground to finish her off. Is that something that, you know, I mean, I guess, whatever. It's just like. It just, you know, the depravity and then the notion that this is how you see her in her last seconds of life is just, you know, it is like reading about the hostage murders, you know, just it. Or the details of the hostage murders. It's just like. It's heartbreaking and bone chilling and all of that, and speaks to why they will clearly pursue death penalty charges against Elias Rodriguez. But what are we going to do about this? And how. How broad will the aperture be that says this isn't just about him? Great pieces yesterday. Barry Rice wrote one. The Washington Free Beacon has a great editorial. It is the globalized Intifada is now in America. They've been chanting it for 18, 19 months, and they brought it here to our shores. And if major measures are not taken, there are going to be more incidents like this. And the big question with Elias Rodriguez is, was he somehow. We talked about this Yesterday, was he somehow influenced or given a roadmap by Luigi Mangioni, who of course was not acting as a jihadist or, you know, or Jifada globalizer, but in a different capacity. But the, but the similarities in the nature of the shooting lead one to believe and a tweet that he did one of those, yeah, great guy, yeah, go Luigi Mangione in his bizarre Twitter feed. You know, so how broad are we going to focus only on this one guy are we going to say he is the tip of a spear and we need to use what methods and measures we can to shut down the globalized intifada from going into action inside the United States?

Unnamed Speaker (10:23)

Look, John, first I just want to reinforce something and I think you nailed, nailed it. When you think about what Rodriguez did and the way that he murdered in cold blood, it really does. I mean, it almost was like a copycat of Hamas. And I think that was kind of the big takeaway for me was that this was premeditated and it was in cold blood with no remorse. Deeply ideological, indoctrinated. Right. Over time. And let me just say this, you know, we're 595 days into this thing, guys like Rodriguez, and I'm gonna put him in a big bucket of people that have been just hoovering up all of this radical ideology, right? These chants, these memes, the tweets, the manifestos that are being produced by all these different groups that we now heard about over the last 48 hours. All of this has had consequences here. And our country has been asleep at the switch. Now look, you know, you asked about what the plan is. There is something called Task Force 10 7. It was stood up shortly after the Trump administration took back the White House. And the idea was that we were going to be letting the DOJ and FBI loose on these overtly anti Semitic and, you know, hate filled organizations that were inciting violence and try to, you know, get a grip on what's been happening in the United States. I think that coupled with the crackdown on the schools has had something of a chilling effect. But it also may have had, certainly with what's been happening with the universities and that's been very public, I think it may have actually had the reverse effect with some. Right. That they've been radicalized further, feeling like the, you know, The America spelled KKK is cracking down on their free speech or etc. That's something that I think we need to explore. But I want to just for a second talk about this. Task Force 107 because I think that's the answer to the problem. My concern right now is that it's not getting the resources, it's not getting the money, it's not getting the personnel that it needs. I don't know how big this is. I've heard some names thrown around about an assistant U.S. attorney based in Washington. I've heard about the team that's been set up in New York. But I don't have a full sense of how mobilized these people are and how motivated these people are. And to me, I get the sense that right now we ought to get full transparency about, you know, who is in. I, I don't need names, of course, but I want to know numbers. I want to know what the personnel looks like. How big is task force? 10, 7. And then I think on top of that, is Congress going to oversee this thing? Because I think there needs to be a fire that is lit beneath everyone here. They all need to realize, Department of Justice, FBI, that now the United States government is watching. And I don't know if that kind of oversight that, that pressure has been brought to bear. I think this is now the moment everybody needs to know this is a top priority. And I haven't quite seen that yet out of the US Government.

John Podhoretz (13:44)

So the Trump administration is moving on all fronts on the anti Semitism matter. Right. It's the trigger of what's going on with Harvard. It is the trigger of what's going on with Columbia. The denial of Title 6 rights to Jewish students, that is the, that is the motivating. That is the sort of the legal motivating factor that underlies the punishments or the harsh measures that are being taken against these institutions to, as justification for the taking of those measures. My, my interest goes to, if we're in the late 60s, if this is an analog to the late 60s, we have signs and portents of domestic terrorism with an international ideological route going on. There are various ways this can go. In the 1960s, worried about communist infiltration and various other things, of course, the FBI started this now notorious investigative, secret investigative arm which was called cointelpro, where they wiretap people and they, you know, they. Now, was there a domestic terrorism problem in the United States? Oh, yeah, there were 1200 bombings in the United States in 1971. People. This is a, this is an actual number bombings by radical American terrorist groups and loose affiliations and all of that. And the question was, what do you do to investigate this or penetrate it to stop it? Because you start running afoul of First Amendment Protections the government is not allowed to, you know, can't punish you for your speech. It can, in theory, break up a conspiracy before it happens. But so we get to Harvard and we get to Columbia. That I think is the genius. And we can get to this too, the actual kind of political genius in going at the international student question. First of all, it harmonizes with the Trump administration's general approach on immigration, which is if you're in this country and we didn't affirmatively say, come on in, we like you and you're allowed to be here. If you don't treat your presence in the United States, even if you're legal, as a privilege rather than a right, we're going to kick you out of here. So that helps them politically in the sense that it jives with their message about illegal immigration in general. But what's happening is they need to formalize this and then say, okay, well, is the problem international influence and the international as being spread not only by money that is being distributed to universities and other institutions by foreign actors, largely Qatar or Gutter or however you want to pronounce it, or is the party of socialism and liberation, is it getting money from weird places that are getting money from weird places which we saw 25 years ago with the breakup. Or 20 years ago with the breakup of the Holy Land foundation in Richardson, Texas, which was a non profit 501c3 that it turned out was being funded by foreign entities and that is against the law. And they lied about it when they were deposed. And one of the leaders of Holy Land Fetish was deported. Samuel Aryan was deported to whatever hellhole he's from. Can't even remember.

Unnamed Speaker (17:23)

He went back to Turkey, actually.

John Podhoretz (17:24)

Samuel, though I don't think he's from Turkey. Right. But his. Yes. Okay. I mean there's.

Unnamed Speaker (17:30)

So by the way, his.

John Podhoretz (17:32)

And we saw his wife at the encampments at the. Columbia.

Unnamed Speaker (17:36)

Columbia. Right.

John Podhoretz (17:37)

Yeah.

Unnamed Speaker (17:37)

By the way, Samuel Aryan and Holy land were not 100% connected.

John Podhoretz (17:42)

No, no, he was. I'm sorry. He was another.

Unnamed Speaker (17:44)

Yeah, he was University of South Florida. And then there was the Holy Land 5 that actually went to jail.

John Podhoretz (17:50)

I'm sorry. But he was, he was deported from the country because of his connection to another funding mechanism. But it wasn't the whole.

Unnamed Speaker (17:59)

He funded Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And then.

John Podhoretz (18:02)

Right. P. Right. Okay. So that was my, that's, that's my. I'm like a corrections page this week. I'm getting everything wrong. I apologize. So again, this goes to how wide the aperture is going to be. Is there going to be an idea that there is a continuum from American citizen Elias Gonzalez to Hamas? How explicit is that connection? Is he just a homegrown guy being affected by online craziness, or is there more? And it would be, of course, derelict not to find out or make sure that he is not somebody who was activated by a larger organization. Could be American, could be inside the United States. Are those organizations being funded through various modalities by people who are not allowed to fund people in the United States?

Unnamed Speaker (19:05)

So, yeah, I mean, a couple of things to unpack here. And again, I think you're asking all the right questions. There's a whole Alphabet soup of organizations that we started to learn about over the last couple of days. Right. The Answer Coalition, apparently, you know, Rodriguez had some connection with them. The Party for Socialism and Liberation, psl, we heard about that one. There's another group called Dream Defenders, which is kind of a Black Lives Matter mashup with pflp connected people. So there's all of these groups that we need to sort of wade through. And I think, you know, you talked about the late 60s and early 70s, John. I mean, the question is, are we watching the formation of some kind of Weather Underground? And I don't know if we know the answer to that right now. Certainly this guy seemed to have embraced all the radical ideology and embraced the violence. I think right now the FBI is almost certainly scrambling to figure out who else was he connected with. Were there other people that were also acquiring weapons and thinking about attacks along these lines? But I've got to imagine there's more where this comes from because again, these people have been fed a steady diet now for 595 days where they're talking about, you know, river to the sea and Free Palestine and death to the Jews and death to Israel and death to the Zionists. How many times do you have to hear this before you start to take it seriously and literally? And I think that's exactly what happened to this guy. Now then I think there comes, you know, I think we need to unpack a little bit more of this. There's what we're watching within the university system. And I got to say, I think that targeting the students, this is more about disdain for the schools than it is about what happened yesterday or what's been happening for the last 600 days. When you start, you know, making it more difficult or making it illegal for that matter, for international students to come in, I mean, is that really part of the problem? Is that really the gist of it. From my perspective, it's about the adult organizers that have been on campus that have the Hamas connections, that have the connections back to, you know, Iran or China or Russia. We need to be looking at those, if you ask me, not barring 20 year olds or 18 year olds from coming into the country, if they got into these programs with good grades. I mean, I do feel like, I mean, I understand the disdain for the universities and I understand that that's going to happen no matter what. But I don't think that that is a reaction to the antisemitism that we've seen. I think the Trump administration is pursuing a totally different policy here, and I really think we need to disaggregate the two.

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Seth Mandel (25:53)

But doesn't depriving the universities of these students that they so desperately want put pressure on them to do the other things that we're talking about to rid their campuses of the adult organizers with, with the connections and and so on.

Unnamed Speaker (26:11)

Maybe, I mean, it also could be that, you know, maybe these people were taking up spots that the Trump administration would rather have Americans take.

John Podhoretz (26:19)

Well, we can talk about that. I think, Abe, you bring up an important point which is are they doing this to be coercive? And that is where, you know, if the, this is where people do the whataboutism. Like if the shoe were on the other foot and they were doing this toward churches, they're doing this toward other things and saying, you know, we're going to deny you this or we're Going to take away that or take away the other thing. Certainly the general Republican or conservative commitment to laissez faire at the very least, if not the First Amendment would say you're not allowed to use government power as a truncheon against an institution you don't like. I mean, if you obviously can. But it's inappropriate and wrong. However, John, you're right that in Jonathan's right, you're right in theory that, you know, going after 20 year old students is a weird thing to. But how many of them are 20, how many of them are 30? How many of them are Mahmoud Khalil, who is 31, how many of them are here on visas to study, who are not studying but are rather organizing politics as political actors involving themselves in the internal politics of a country to which of which they are not a citizen and on whose territory they are here as a guest who if they, you know, trash the hotel room that they rent, you know, that they, that they take for a couple of nights, the manager of the hotel is permitted by to throw them out. Right? That's essential.

Jonathan Schanzer (27:59)

They're here. Like I see it, it definitely punishes the students themselves who can't come or it certainly punishes the students who now have to leave. Right, That I definitely understand. But it's really just follow the money, right? The reason Harvard brings in students from abroad is because it brings Harvard lots and lots of, lots of money. And Harvard likes money and it, and it, and it like that the Adam Sandler scene. You know, I like money. I keep a little bit of it in a jar on my nightstand. I would like to add some more to that. Right? That's Harvard. And so Trump is just basically saying like you, you know, these colleges, they use foreign students to get around every possible, you know, civil rights rule and every possible, like they, instead of when, when, when we talk about them, you know, trying to have a more diverse student body, right, Instead of taking an African American kid from the inner city who really needs, you know, the ride to get an education, they're going to take some, you know, foreign prince's, you know, nephew, some oil sheik's nephew or whatever. And they're going to say, well, they, they check the same racial boxes as the American kid who's not getting that opportunity and somebody who can pay a full ride and whatever. So I think Trump is saying to them, like, you're just using this as a cash cow and it's creating a problem. And so, you know, we're cutting funding to this. We're Cutting funding to that. And we're cutting funding to you in the form of stopping you from using your foreign student piggy bank as well. It's all part of like just, we're just cutting your funding.

Unnamed Speaker (29:50)

But this is actually my question. I mean, that does not sound like a response to anti Semitism. This sounds like we harbor disdain for higher education in the United States and we see the grift. And by the way, we can speak very openly about the grip the billions of dollars these guys have that they've collected and they've put aside and you know, no one touches that. And yet we keep raising the cost of tuition for, you know, for the middle class here in the United States. I mean, this is what I think we're talking about here. And then there is the anti Semitism part of this. And I'm just not sure I see a, it seems like more of a dotted line. And I'm curious where you guys shake out on this.

Jonathan Schanzer (30:31)

It is, it is. But I think he's basically saying I can't get you to change any other way. Well, that at the center of this is you're violating the civil rights of Jews on campus. And we all know it and we all see it and I can't get you to fix the problem. No matter what I do, you still have this problem.

John Podhoretz (30:53)

And so he's right. So let's. So Johanna Berkman in the Free Press yesterday did a, a long investigation of the case of the Israeli business school student who was harassed, harassed and physically assaulted. I mean not, not much of an assault, but he was, hands were put on him as he walked through a protest in Harvard Yard in either October or November of 2023. And the two students who did this, who are, who were well known, one at the business school and one at the law school and one somewhere else. Not only over the course of the 18 months did Harvard impede the investigation into their criminal activity by the Cambridge Police Department, which is kind of enjoined from doing independent investigations on Harvard's property, oddly enough, as part of a long standing town gown divide in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But they, so they actively impeded it. And what happened two weeks ago was that the Harvard Law School student graduated with honors and garlands and got a special financial award to do something or other after graduation. So not only aren't they doing something about acts of antisemitism on their campus, they are. And Princeton did this as well with the case of Daniel Pugaro, I believe is his name, the veteran Jewish student who was Pushed downstairs by a Princeton cop, was then prosecuted by Princeton for supposedly being the instigator of the event. He was found not guilty in a court. He is now pursuing legal action against, you know, tort action against Princeton. And the day that he was found not guilty, Princeton decorated the cop decorated the cop who had, who had basically pushed him downstairs. In the sight of people. There's video of it, all of that. So not only are these institutions not doing anything about anti Semitism, they are sending very strong signals that should you say there are anti Semites on campus doing anti Semitic things against Jewish students, that that might rise to the level of criminality. We're going to privilege them. We're not only going to not expel them or fire the cop or whatever, we're going to give them a prize. So that's the mindset here. And I bring this up only because I want to quote something that Alan Garber said, the president of Harvard, or interim president, whatever, said in his filing of the lawsuit against the administration for saying they can't have international students anymore. And he said, let me find the quote because I just sent it to you guys. He said, with the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard student body, international students who contribute significantly to the university and its mission. Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard. Now that's really wonderful and congratulations to Harvard for having such a wonderful international student body. That's not the legal argument. The legal argument is get your hands off my school. We're a private institution. We have first Amendment rights. You don't have the right to tell us who we can and cannot bring in as our students. That statement is about the mindset of Harvard, which is we need these international students to be Harvard. And you know, let us all sing grand old Ivy and weep bit tears of joy at how wonderfully diverse our campus is. No, I'm sorry, I'm not going to do that. First of all, I looked this up and the number of international students at Harvard has gone up 33% in the last 20 years. In other words, in 2006 there were fewer than 4,000 international students. In 2025, there were almost 7,000 international students. The international percentage of total enrollment was about 20% in 2006. It's about 28% right now. So what does that tell you? That tells you that that number is going up. Was Harvard, Not Harvard in 2006. Columbia is majority international students. Majority. 55% of the students at Columbia University are not American born. Now Does Columbia have free speech rights? Is it a private institution? Is it permitted to do whatever it wants to in this way? Yes, in theory it is. And so the question is, is there another way at which the administration can go at these institutions which are. If the international students, some of them are playing a role here in the degradation of the campus and its treatment of Jews, then it does have some rights. It's using a bludgeon rather than a scalpel, but it has some legal authority to do this. And what they did in the Harvard case was trigger a. It's like one of these things where there are forms they have to fill out in order to get all the money that they want or something like that, or to get these students in so that they are accounted for and all of that. And basically the administration said, you don't get these forms anymore. You can't fill them out. We're not going to let you do it. So you can't. No one can come in.

Unnamed Speaker (37:16)

You know, just hearing you talk about this, I mean, I do think there are some questions that I still have. I mean, one is, I mean, you know, should there be a limit on foreign students in an American school? In other words, in order to be an American school, it needs to be majority American. Is that, Is that something that we're talking about here? Because that's. That would be new. That's not something that I, That I'm familiar with. And I do think that, you know, we've. We've raised some questions that people aren't going to like talking about, but I think the dialogue's already started. But I do think that at the end of the day, the answer is not to just ban students outright. This is my personal opinion. I think it's problematic. I think that ICE should be looking at people that are involved in anti Semitic acts on campus, and they should be held to account when they've done something that's violated the law. That makes total sense. Task Force 10.7 needs to be looking at the people that are organizing this and the people that are taking part in some of these violent or anti Semitic or other kinds of protests involving hate speech. But I have to say I don't see. And I really think it's important that we understand that what's happening here as it relates to foreign students, this is not a response to anti Semitism. This is going way beyond what's going on on campus. I mean, I think we have to see it for what it is.

Jonathan Schanzer (38:35)

Okay, can I ask. So can I ask a question? Of something you just mentioned though, about the importance of who's involved in these protests. I'm, I'm really curious. Why isn't it a bigger deal that the PFLP is everywhere you look here on these campuses? Because you, you, you just mentioned, you just mentioned like the people involved in these things have to be looked at. Right. So the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is oldest.

Unnamed Speaker (39:10)

Yeah.

John Podhoretz (39:11)

Which is the oldest Palestinian activist terrorist group, older than the Palestine Liberation Organization, founded by someone named George Abash in Lebanon And I think 1962. And it is, it carried out its predecessor, you know, like back in the mists of time, carried out hijackings, killed Israel, you know, terrorists, killed Israeli citizens and all of that.

Unnamed Speaker (39:40)

And today is funded by Iran.

John Podhoretz (39:43)

Right.

Unnamed Speaker (39:44)

Just to be clear.

John Podhoretz (39:45)

So what, Seth, what you're referring to is that literally in the United States on college campuses, people say they are, they are either members of or affiliated with or something like that, getting materials from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Jonathan Schanzer (40:02)

Not one of the organizations.

John Podhoretz (40:04)

Not.

Abe Greenwald (40:05)

Right.

Jonathan Schanzer (40:05)

One of the organizations that has been at all these places is Sami Doon, which we've talked about on the podcast before. And it was started by a, a high level official in the PFLP and it has since been taken over essentially day to day by his wife.

Unnamed Speaker (40:21)

Yeah.

Jonathan Schanzer (40:22)

So, but in other words, this organization, Samidoon, right. It's been all over the campuses and all that stuff. It claims to be a, an advocate for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, whatever. It was only proscribed, it was only put on the list of essentially terrorist organization front groups. Was it last year or the year in the last.

Unnamed Speaker (40:41)

Yeah, but, but let me explain, let me explain how that happened. And I think what the complexities are here that we're trying to navigate. The reason why Sammy Doone was, we were able to get that on our terrorism list was because it was not based in the United States, the headquarters was in Canada. And that made it a foreign terrorist organization. And therefore the FBI didn't need to get involved and there didn't need to be a case built up against Americans who were engaged here. What we did is we went right to the Canadians and said, you've got a problem. It's a PFLP front. Right. And this is why we're going to go after Sammy Doon and Canada said, got it. We're the 51st state. Yes, sir. And they went ahead and they made the designation. But what we're talking about now because I think we've got, you know, Sammy Dunes taken care of, and there may be a couple of others that we talk about, but when we talk about domestic entities, it becomes so much more complicated, or at least it historically has been, for the FBI to get warrants and to be up on the phones of these people and to track them. And I think this is what we're navigating right now. And this brings us back to this task force again, that if we're serious about this, and we need to be after this senseless murder the other night, we need to have more pressure brought to be bear. And not because I want to make the lives of FBI agents more difficult, but because if we are serious about stopping more people like Elias Rodriguez, then we need to be up on these phones. And I don't want to say that it needs to be a blanket FISA order or whatever, but something more needs to be done, clearly in the environment that we're currently in. And this is what I'm struggling with here. How much more do we need? I mean, we have. And John, you mentioned it, right? You have this kind of push and pull within American society going back 50 plus years of @ what point do we get more involved and how much more should the federal. I mean, nothing is more scary than when you hear the words, we're with the federal government and we're here to help. Right. Like that frightens me. But yet I understand where we are in this moment of history. I don't want to see more senseless murders. So where do we go from here?

John Podhoretz (42:52)

Two things here. I'm mostly playing devil's advocate. I do not have developed opinions on this. And I do think that there has been a sentimentalism about the internationalization of American education that I kind of agree with in theory, but in practice I really don't. Which is to say the notion of this is fantastic. People come here, they get educated in the United States, then they go home and they bring American values where they come. Or we get the best and the brightest from these. They stay here, they contribute to our economic growth, they help our high tech sector, whatever. This is an unalloyed benefit to the United States and the furtherance of the American mission. And I would accept that and believe that were it not for the garbage sewer ideological monstrosity that American campuses have become which do not transmit the message and that the United States is the great beacon of freedom to the world. People may come to campus and say, boy, America's fantastic. This is great. I could do whatever I want pretty much. And you know, it's freer And I not, you know, living in a dumpy country where my prospects aren't so great, but that is not what they're taught. So they're not taught civics and the, and the Constitution and the glories of the American system so they can go back and become political activists in their own country to bring democracy to their lands. Chinese students are not here in the United States on, you know, I think they make up the majority of the international students in the United States. They're not going home and becoming, you know, trying to get Jimmy Lau out of jail. They're going home and, you know, helping to build the Chinese economic infrastructure that is challenging the United States dominance in the 21st century.

Unnamed Speaker (44:42)

So, okay, so, John, is the problem the students, or is the problem the professors and the programs and the garbage?

John Podhoretz (44:50)

Exactly. Okay. That's what I wanted to bring up secondarily. I'm sorry if I'm like filibustering here, but two other. So I mentioned that thing that Alan Garber said. So two things. One that happened at Columbia and then an op ed about Harvard. One thing that happened at Columbia, again, just like the privileging I mentioned of the Harvard law student who assaulted the Israeli business school student, was that Claire Shipman, interim president of Columbia, from the stage during the commencement, spoke of her regret that currently detained, you know, polled student visa guy, Mahmoud Khalil was not there to accept his diploma along with everybody else. In a sane world, in a just world, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil would have been something welcomed by the administration of Colombia because they were harboring somebody who was promoting disorder, criminality, and the abrogation of the rights of Jewish students on their campus. And his removal should be a net positive for Colombia. They could have done it themselves. They could have expelled him themselves. That they cannot do that and not only not do it, but make him, but join in. The idea that he's a martyr is a sign of the rot going all the way down to the root. You know, the sort of the Beaverwood root of Colombia. The other is, you know, Steven Pinker, the sociologist, a very serious person, deserving of respect, has an op ed in the New York Times today about how Trump has gone too far and, and, and the administration is going too far and the right's going too far. It's called Harvard Derangement Syndrome. And he says, I'm a critic of Harvard. I, I'm at Harvard for 20 years. I've been talking about the, the wrongness, Harvard's bad, the things that Harvard do that are bad. No, conservatives not hiring conservatives having political correctness re education seminars and things like that. It's terrible. Honest scholarly inquiry, he writes, is difficult if researchers constantly have to watch their backs lest a professional remark expose them to character assassination or if a conservative opinion is treated as a crime. Right. So he's like, I am, I'm with you on how bad things are at Harvard. But this is wrong because he then says, and I'm sorry, I don't know where the hell. He says, though Harvard indisputably would profit from more political and intellectual diversity, it is still far from a radical left institution. A sizable majority of faculty across Harvard locate themselves to the right a very liberal. And they include dozens of prominent conservatives like Adrian Vermeule and Greg Mankiw. Oh, dozens. How many faculty are there at Harvard? Dozens out of thousands. That's great. Fantastic. And then he says, I'm trying to find this. I'm sorry.

Unnamed Speaker (48:01)

Sounds like someone's really worried about their meal ticket, but okay.

John Podhoretz (48:05)

He says he's experienced no anti Semitism, but that. Look, the point about universities, which is why they exist and why the rules of tenure and other things exist, is they're there to protect unpopular viewpoints. That's why tenure exists, so that you can pursue your research without fear of being fired for looking into things that make authorities and even the people who run these institutions that are your bosses, theoretically uncomfortable. That's the existence of tenure. It dates back, right, seven centuries to Harvard, to Oxford and Cambridge. Self policing, lifetime employment in order to protect the, you know, the sacred nature of research. It's there to protect unpopular viewpoints, says Pinker. And that's why the government can't go at it. And you may be right that the government, because of the First Amendment can't go at it. But if you are here to tell me that unpopular opinions are given weight at these universities and institutions which the campus which the professoriate is 3% conservative, you can go to hell. You're lying, Steve. That is, you are either willfully blind and a fool, or you're just lying. Country is 44% conservative and 22% liberal according to the, you know, this, these sort of estimations in these polling, right? So the major universities in the United States are 89% liberal and 3% conservative. So where what unpopular opinions? Who, what counts as an unpopular opinion on a campus that is being suppressed and you know what opinion that is aside from liberal and conservative? Zionism. Go to a class. A teacher says if you're a Zionist, you shouldn't take this class. Is that teacher disciplined? Is that teacher brought up? And having their tenure revoked, which is something you can do literally the minute that sentence comes out of their mouth. No. Probably gets a Teacher of the Year award. So I don't know that I don't think, think the Trump administration will prevail in this matter. Exactly. But it is, and this is, I think, to Abe's point, putting the screws on these places. And I want the screws to be put on these places. I would prefer it if it were being done with the most elegant and complex and, you know, defensible means. But I got to confess, at a moment of crisis, when Jews are being shot in the streets of D.C. and when, you know, we're all here sitting here as Jew, like, how's anybody feeling going to synagogue this weekend? Or how is anybody feeling going to, as I mentioned the other day, going to a tikkunl on the night of Shavuot, which is a week and a half away, when Jews generally kind of gather in large gatherings to study together all night, making themselves a target.

Unnamed Speaker (51:23)

So, John, I mean, let me just ask you, historically and again, we're playing devil's advocate across the board today, but how's it worked out when there's been movements in history that are inherently anti intellectual, while there is also a movement of antisemitism in those same places? How does that usually work? This is where my concern comes in. Right. I don't want to say that I love every Chinese student that's brought in. I don't like the environment that we're seeing at these schools. But when you start to open up this spigot of hatred toward the academy, which I harbor in many ways, but in very discrete places, right. When you start broadening that out and it's just vilification of these institutions, while there is also a clear anti Semitic vibe that is happening amidst all of this, where does it end? How does it work? That's the question that I ask myself right now.

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F (54:26)

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John Podhoretz (55:26)

Well, you know, I would be willing to say for example, that it's horrible if you try to apply this to medical schools or to scientific research. Right? I would say that in theory, right? You can't. Med students, we need doctors. Harvard leave Harvard Medical School alone. Bring as many doctors as you can from foreign. If they fulfill all the requirements to be doctors, maybe. And we would like them to stay here to be our doctors. That would be great. Except do you know what's been going on at medical schools in the last five to 10 years?

Unnamed Speaker (55:58)

Yeah, there are new organizations that have actually been created to combat anti Semitism in medical school.

John Podhoretz (56:05)

Yeah. Particularly at nyu. Right. And Cornell Weill various institutions. Medicine is being politicized not only in an anti Semitic direction, but in a racialist direction. So that it is literally the case that we are not necessarily getting the best people admitted to medical schools. We are getting who is getting admitted to medical schools the same way they get admitted to whatever in order to satisfy quotas. The one place in the world that there should be no quotas is at medical schools because we are, we are basically training people and then licensing them with the power of life and death over other people. Prescribe the wrong medication, somebody dies. Have an incompetent surgeon, somebody dies. This is not, you know, theoretically like getting a medieval scholasticism, you know, studying Sanskrit, getting a PhD in Sanskrit. Like no one's dying if somebody has a wrong interpretation of an ancient Sanskrit document, but somebody's dying from an incompetent doctor who should never been allowed in medical school in the first place. That politicization is a very serious matter. And a lot of that goes hand in hand as DEI does and as all of this wokeness does with anti Semitism and the idea that people are literally going to get treated in some places and having nurses and doctors say I'm not going to treat you because you're a Jew. These are.

Seth Mandel (57:30)

Can I say something to Jonathan's point? Because I think it's interesting this, the idea that there's historically thinking we should be cautious about the strain of anti intellectualism intermingling with atmosphere of anti Semitism. Where does that end up? But I've got to say we're in an ending now. This is where the, the preview, the prevailing dispensation has ended up. And it's bad, it's, it's, it's the emergency now. So I'm a little kind of focused on, well, we'll deal with what could or could not happen as a result of these moves when they do or do not happen. But this is where decades of a previous system have led and that has to be handled.

Jonathan Schanzer (58:33)

And I would just add to that that it is the system that led us here. Right. I would classify that as anti intellectual.

John Podhoretz (58:42)

Right.

Jonathan Schanzer (58:42)

I mean like I'm not, I'm not, I'm not as worried about a Movement of anti intellectualism because I see it as we're trying to fix the status quo of anti intellectuals. The system that got us here is no, you can't research that. No, you can't look into that. You know, you can't really descend on this or that. The other thing, what I would like to see is a more intellectual atmosphere on campus.

Unnamed Speaker (59:07)

I will agree with all of that. However, when you start to see isolationists embracing this anti intellectualism. Right. You want to talk about how you want to fight the radical leftists who are anti intellectual. I'm on board. Right. I get that we need to, we need to put up, you know, we need to put a stop to all of that. But when you start to see isolationists kind of garden variety white nationalists embracing the idea of anti intellectualism and the need to shut down universities, there's an issue that we needed. We unpack this here. Right. We're taking a like. John, you mentioned it's like a bludgeon to this rather than a scalpel. I'm just saying here I fully support the need to purge the anti Semites from campus, the foreign agents from campus, the foreign money from campus, all of those things I am on board with. But this blanket anti intellectualism is what is starting to worry me in the political atmosphere that we're in.

Jonathan Schanzer (60:12)

Well, that's a good point because we don't, we don't want, I mean that's a very good point which is we want the universities to feel the pressure to change. But I think part of what you're saying is we don't want, want a sort of right wing movement to take over the universities, to crush them under heel and have the government control. Right. The answer is not to have the government control, no matter which party is in government at the time is not to have the right. The Orban situation in Hungary is what a lot of people worry about is that if, you know, bringing universities to heels under the thumb of the government is not where we want them to be.

Unnamed Speaker (60:49)

Bumper sticker is make academia normal again. Right. I mean this is sort of what we're trying to get at. And I mean, I think the question that we're all grappling with is how to do that because you need the federal government now to shake things up because the schools were not going to do it on their own. You thought that maybe hearings of these presidents and a bunch of firings early on when they're uttering these idiocies about context and things like that, that was like the thing that began to shake it up, but nothing happened as a result. And now we're further down the line. Nothing. And by the way, I will blame Biden for a lot of this. He let the rot continue for a full year before the Trump administration came in. Outrageous that that would even occur. And so now we're at an even worse crisis point. The federal government needs to get more involved, I guess. But again, to what, to what end and what cost?

John Podhoretz (61:42)

Okay, so we have, here's the thing. If we want to disaggregate this because we've moved away from this question of law enforcement, what is the role of law enforcement in impeding the possible outbreak of anti Semitic, open anti Semitic radical violence? Right. I mean, with their bits and pieces, stopping bridges, you know, people getting sucker punched on streets and stuff like that. Those are all local issues. The question, question is, is there something going on pretty much at a federal level, at a national level, with organizations, training people or encouraging people or doing something? That's what we don't know about Elias Rodriguez or Elias Rodriguez. We don't know whether he was part of something larger. We need to find out whether he was or he was not. We probably will. But that, you know, so there's, that, that's the law enforcement stuff. The campus stuff is, is different. And there are two, there are two or three different strains that are different. So the more focused they can be, in some sense, the better in terms of what we're talking about. Right. So the focus would be title specific cases of Title 6 offenses which are toward individual students. Right. Harvard has failed at that. Harvard, as I say, decorated the kid at Harvard Law School who. And impeded the investigation into his potential criminality. So that's a, That's a Title 6 violence. If, if, if people want to go at Harvard On Title 6 violations, there have already been settlement. Harvard has settled major cases on this just last week with Shabbos Kestenbaum settlement. Reason there was a settlement was that it's not clear that, that he would have, after years of litigation, that he would have even prevailed in court. And so the settlement functions as a kind of punishment, but not an open punishment. But so there are individual prosecutions and individual matters to, you know, force the administration these, to reckon with their failure or refusal to police themselves and to do the right thing there. Then you have the question of the foreign policy or role of the Secretary of State in student visas. Does Secretary of State have the right to pull a student visa? If. And the answer is absolutely. And with almost no review, the Law says the Secretary of State has the right to remove anyone from the United States here on a visa if their behavior is inimical to the foreign policy of the United States.

Unnamed Speaker (64:39)

Okay, but now it can do any one. The question is, should it be everyone?

John Podhoretz (64:44)

Right? And then the third is right, that you, you can say we don't like you and we're not going to let you have foreign students on your campus. Right. So here's the thing. We're talking about what would be best in both, in terms of defensibility, long term argumentation, actually able to sort of influence policies in long term. And then there's the political interest of the Trump administration, which likes the bludgeon. Not only because Trump likes the bludgeon, but because I believe they believe, and I think they're right, even though the polling doesn't quite say this, that this is very popular, that this is the anti intellectualism point. Who cares about Harvard? Does a Trump voter care whether Harvard is or is not? Also, they may say, well, screw them. Why are they getting any money from the federal government? And what's more, what, 30% of the kids in Harvard or 55% of the kids at Columbia are foreign born, why are they getting any, any money? You know, when I'm, my taxes are going up or gas is too expensive. Now that's anti intellectual and it is pop. It's sort of populist ignorance or something like that. But politically I think it's pretty good, actually. And that's where the temptation comes in for the Trump administration. I think Rubio's behavior before the House and Senate this week in defending himself and defending himself against the judiciary, efforts to stop him in the judiciary are, he said, no judge has the right to tell me, the Secretary of State, that I cannot decide that this person, this person is here in a manner inimical to our foreign policy goals. The law does not give the right of review in this case. Now, there's always a right of review, but the law does not say pending this or pending that, this is a separation of powers issue, that this power is invested in the executive, not in the judiciary. The judiciary is not the final say and he gets to do it. So I think on the visa front, in at least in individual cases, they have no leg to stand on whether they can en masse, say, you don't get any, you know, you cannot let any foreign student in. That does go to the question of whether or not this is administration interference with the speech rights or the self management of a private institution. And you know, be great for Harvard. Stop taking federal money. Then they really have no reach into you. Yeah, here's my advice. You got a $50 billion endowment. Use it on your goddamn school. And then don't take money from the federal government. And Donald Trump is beyond your reach. Stop. Stop being a hedge fund and pooling your money. What are you gonna do with it? What the hell is going on there?

Unnamed Speaker (67:39)

Yeah, no, I think the hedge fund thing is a huge problem, right? I mean, you're talking about billions and billions of dollars that they collected.

John Podhoretz (67:46)

$2 billion. That's right. Harvard.

Unnamed Speaker (67:48)

And then they continue to gouge the parents, they continue to gouge the kids, and people hate them. I mean, justifiably, they hate them for this alone. But again, I've got to just say that really, from my perspective. And, look, I want to see the law enforcement kick in. I want to see deeper investigations, wider investigations. But more importantly, I want to see these schools begin to correct the problem. And that should come from, you know, individual arrests. I think it should come from maybe more lawsuits against administrators. I don't know exactly how this thing works, but I'm. Look, as a former government employee, I get really nervous when you start looking at kind of broad policies that don't look like they're particularly well thought out. I do think that these institutions still have a role to play in the United States. I want them to be here five or ten years from now, and I want them teaching our kids the best that they're able to get. Right. I still want the competition for our kids to get into these schools. I think all of that is these are important institutions. I think the problem is right now, there is so much rot in these institutions. We're trying to figure out how to, you know, not throw out the baby with the bathwater. And this is tough stuff, right? This is not easy.

Jonathan Schanzer (69:08)

Yeah, we. I mean, we come. You know, these are good faith discussions, because this is not. This is not a group of people who hate education. This is like. This is a group of East Coast Ashkenazi Jews. Like, it's in our DNA to, like, think, go to college, right? Go to a good college, get an education, become a doctor. Like, this is. This is not. This is not the rally space for, like, you know, burn down the schools. But we get to the end of these discussions, and it's like, maybe it's not. I don't know, maybe it's not fixable. Maybe if, like, a group of people who really want to fix it and. And have, like. Like, you know, good faith, intention to do so. There doesn't seem to be anything that does it. And I think that fuels the frustration where it's like, I'm just gonna take away everything. I'm gonna say, you can't have foreign students, you can't have jelly beans anymore on campus. I'm gonna take away your jelly beans. You can't have, you know, this. We're not gonna let you have a lacrosse team. You know, it's like, I, I don't. It's like a. It's like a teacher not knowing how to control and out of control. So it's like I'm trying not to expel you. I don't know how to do that. The other thing is that, you know, what's funny about this is the, is the sort of intergenerational way of this, right? We, you know, when I was at Rutgers, we. There was a pro Palestinian demonstration conference that was coming to Rutgers and there were these flyers that were like very inciting and against Yushins and all this other stuff. And you know, led by local. The Rutgers Hillel and others organized a sort of counter rally. And the counter rally was a massive success. Like the pro Israel counter rally was a massive success. But the program that got into that caused all this trouble to begin with was organized by Charlotte Cates. She was my fellow student at Rutgers.

John Podhoretz (70:57)

And Charlotte. Sami Doom and Sami Dune.

Jonathan Schanzer (71:01)

Right. And I remember because my father was on some like, New Jersey Israel commission thing. He was part of the organizing of, you know, the, the pro Israel counteract. So now it's like, you know, next generation. Like if you had looked at us then and you'd said, where are Seth Mandel and Charlotte Cates going to end up? It's like, well, it makes sense that Seth ended up at Commentary magazine and Charlotte Cates ended up marrying into the PFLP and run running zombie. Do you know, it's like, but, but at the same time, it's also like we were there at the same time as students going through this and now you see her all grown up and doing this in a second generation and organizing a new generation. And there is a sense of frustration where it's like 20 years ago we all knew this is where this was heading. And in that 20 years it went exactly where we thought it was going to go with the same people it was going with.

John Podhoretz (71:56)

I want to finish on this interesting point because we have a full circle moment in the post October 7th atmosphere relating to what happened, the monstrous event on. On Wednesday night and that involves one of Seth's favorite people, a real lion of literature, Susan Abulawa. So why do I bring up Susan Abalawa? Well, Susan Abulawa was the proximate cause of the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to Penn because she was hired, or whatever you want to call it, to organize the. This writing conference at Penn. That was the final trigger, I think, for Mark Rowan or a couple of other people to say no money for Penn. This was a sort of pro Palestinian, I don't know what you would call it. I had it here and I lost it. Huh.

Unnamed Speaker (73:02)

It's like a writers festival.

John Podhoretz (73:03)

It was a writers festival that. Okay, so she does this writer's festival. It's very radical. And people pull their money from Penn by the hundreds of millions and the PEN president is. Is gone and all of that. She's really sort of one of the causes of this. The UPenn Palestine rights literature Festival. Okay. That's what. That's. Fall of 2000 to 2023. Here is Susan Abalawa responding to Elias Rodriguez's crime. Natural Logic. When governments fail to hold Israel accountable for an actual Holocaust being committed before our very eyes, no genocidal Zionist should be safe anywhere in the world. Meaning Susan Milgram and jerome lif. What Mr. Rodriguez did, Mr. Rodriguez, should come as no surprise. In fact, I'm surprised it has not happened sooner than human beings with a conscience literally cannot bear to witness such evil, day in and day out being inflicted upon the bodies, minds and futures of an utterly defenseless people by such a hateful, racist, colonial state. This is the person who was given the right at Penn to organize a writing festival that the administration refused to cancel in the wake of October 7. Given the sensitivities of a campus that is more than ordinarily Jewish and aside from. Aside from simply good taste and not support for barbarity, totalitarian evil and a terrorist organization killing and wounding 5,000 people on October 7th. And here she is, Thursday, May 22nd, celebrating and excusing away Elias Rodriguez's act. So campus to Elias Rodriguez, not a. Not a. That's not a direct connection. She didn't fund him. She. I think, you know, she's not responsible. But when Marco Rubio says that people like this. Not that she's here on a student visa, but people who share these views are here on visas and they're. And what they are doing and expressing is inimical to the foreign policy interests of the United States, he is absolutely correct. His right to expel them or pull their visas is absolute and should be. And. And anybody who argues that this power is unjustifiable is not dealing with the fact that there are people in this country who are calling for the assassination of Jews openly.

Unnamed Speaker (76:02)

Yeah. You know, by the way, I just. I need to add one more thing here today. I don't know if anybody's seen in the New York Times today. I know you guys read it voraciously, but have you seen, seen this piece written by Sharon Otterman? It, the headline is, pro Palestinian Movement Faces an Uncertain Path After DC Attack. And it is this sympathetic portrait toward this movement that has been calling for death to Israel, death to the Jews, river to the sea, the whole. The whole thing. Right? And like, when we talk about what's been going on in the schools and the students, they're getting air cover right now from our mainstream media, and it's just. I mean, the whole thing just feels broken and disgusting. So I don't. I don't find any of this shocking, what you've just shared, John, but it is. I mean, it is getting normalized from our, you know, our most respected. This. I mean, obviously this opens up a whole different discussion. Discussion. All of our institutions right now feel rotten. All of them do.

John Podhoretz (77:11)

I don't want to end by quoting myself, but I can help myself, because an hour after we found out about the shooting, I wrote a post on commentary.org which is called Terrorist Attack on Jews in Washington. And it concluded with this paragraph that predicted what you just said. I just didn't think it would happen this fast. What we're going to see over the next couple of days is predictable. I wrote Jewish institutions are going to scramble to increase security as Jews huddle together for comfort. And as the hours and days pass, the shooting will be analyzed by the mainstream with an eye toward explaining the root causes of the crime and the criminal's motivations, which is to say a search for a way to excuse. And we'll hear that the real danger in the wake of this monstrous event will be a rise in Islamophobia. So I'm not saying that this piece specifically says Islamophobia, but that is. Oh, now, now, what are the poor Palestinians who want to see Israel destroyed? Pro Palestinian movement that wants to see the state in which 9, you know, the state in which 7 million Jews are congregated destroyed. Now what are they going to do? This is so bad. This is just. It's just going to be really. It's mean. It's hard on them. While another university decorates another terrorist on another campus at another commencement. You know, there are some more commencements coming up. It's not all done yet, commencement season. So let's see, let's see who next gets a teaching award. Let's see who next gets a student participation trophy or a blue ribbon. So, you know, and that is something has to be done. And maybe the Trump administration is wildly overcorrecting, but as you said, the Biden administration refused to act and the problem metastasized to the point that someone pulled out a gun and shot two young Jews for the crime of being at a Jewish event in the nation's capital outside a Jewish site. Jonathan Schanzer, thank you so much for being with us. I'm sorry to have Abe to Abe and Seth that I was soapboxing today, but special episode Monday, Memorial Day, we're pulling way out, pulling way out of our comfort zone and way out of the politics. And it's Matt Continetti and I and me camera. I can't I don't know where we are in the subject object thing in this sentence, but depends what comes Nettie and John Pot Horace having a conversation about the best television show of the last couple of years andor and trying to recommend it to you and explaining why. So that will be in your podcast feeds and on, on YouTube on, on Monday Memorial Day, if you are, you know, caught in a seven hour traffic jam, that might be fun for you on your way home. So for Jonathan Chanzer, thank you again. And for Abe and Seth, I'm John Pavlortz. Keep the candle burning.