← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Ivy League Prof: ‘Black Lives Matter Was Created From a Fabrication’ | Victor Davis Hanson
00:51:16
In this episode of 'Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words', Jack Fowler interviews Bill Jacobson, founder of Legal Insurrection and professor of law at Cornell University. They unravel the shocking hostility Jewish students face post-October 7th and take apart the fabricated foundations of Black Lives Matter.
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- [00:00]
A
I kind of was shocked by just the openness of the hostility towards Jewish students at Cornell on the main campus. Were you kind of yourself? Were you stunned by what has happened in the last few years after October 7th?
- [00:14]
B
Not really stunned. I think it came to the surface very quickly. But I've been covering and dealing with these themes approaching two decades, the extreme anti Israel fervor of the faculty. So not only have they purged conservative faculty, they've purged pro Israel faculty. That's not to say there are none. It is a minority. If you take a more traditional pro Israel, or at least Israel friendly attitude, good luck being hired. In the humanities and social sciences, there have been very active anti Israel coalitions built over the years long before October 7th, and they were always built in a very racialized manner. So it was always students of color, people of color versus Israel.
- [01:10]
A
Well, hello ladies and hello, gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in His own Words. I'm Jack Fowler. I'm the host. I'm the substitute. I am doing this on Monday, January 12th. This episode will be up on the 20th. And as faithful listeners and viewers of this podcast know, Victor's recuperating from some pretty significant surgery. Even though this program will be up a week from when we're recording, I do want to let folks know personally. I spoke to Victor two days ago and it's a, it's a slog, but it's two steps ahead, one back. But he's progressing and he's very much looking forward to returning to the show. In the meanwhile, he's deputized me to keep it going. And he said, ask really important, interesting people to come on as guests and ask them important questions. I'm like, I'm all over it. And frankly, one of the most important people out there that I could think of is my friend Bill Jacobson, William A. Jacobson, who is the founder of Legal Insurrection and the Legal Insurrection Foundation. A truly important site punching. It's been punching over its weight since almost 20 years. Eighteen years, I think, Bill. So I have the way these programs are going to roll out. I'm going to ask five questions and that first question about to Bill will be asked right after these important messages. The new year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important step. Your info is in endless places that could expose you to identity theft leading to lost funds. Lifelock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health and wealth Part of your New year's goals with LifeLock, save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com podcast terms apply. Hey Bill, before I ask you these questions, legalinsurrection.com is the address, legalinsurrection.com is.
- [03:23]
B
THE main website.
- [03:26]
A
And Legal Insurrection foundation.
- [03:28]
B
Is legalinsurrectionfoundation.org but that's a lot for people to remember. So legalinsurrection.com or equal protect.org right.
- [03:40]
A
Well, we're going to talk a little about equal protect later on. And also critical race. Hey Bill, I'm very grateful you're here. Bill is a professor of law at Cornell University. And he was just a run of the mill, everyday securities lawyer and all of a sudden he ends up he's teaching law at this institution known for its advocacy of free speech, academic freedom. But Bill, sorry to be sarcastic now let me pose the first question here. And thanks so much, Bill for joining us. You are a non leftist, I think that's fair to say. Maybe we could even call you Bill a conservative. You're a professor at Cornell University, which is a prestigious Ivy League institution and like all colleges, it has a development department that seeks major funds from alumni. And these development officers tell conservative alumni something along the following line. Oh yes, indeed, free speech and academic freedom thrives here at Cornell. I rather think that you, Bill professor of Law, are in the belly of the beast instead of at some bastion of free speech. And your institution in the recent recent years much more publicly has shown itself to have real issues with the First Amendment, with academic freedom, and with Jews, American Jews. Would I be right to think this? And is the prevailing culture of Cornell something that can only be practically challenged by aggressive legal action?
- [05:16]
B
Well, let me step back because the question is what do we mean by freedom of speech and what do we mean by academic freedom? And I'd say for the most part the university is not going to punish you for your speech if you're a faculty member. But that really jumps over the initial issue, which is there's no diversity of viewpoint on campus. So yes, there is relatively free speech, but there's almost exclusively from the left faculty on campus who express their speech. So it's not really at Cornell and at many of these so called elite universities, the question is not will the university punish you? It's okay. Who is even here to speak? And at Cornell, based on the statistics from the Cornell sun student newspaper, they've reviewed donation histories, political affiliations, it is approaching 100% Democrat. And I can Tell you from my own experience, it is approaching 100% in the range from your standard liberal, American liberal, which is probably the biggest cohort to the extreme left. There really is no alternative viewpoint. So to me it's a little bit of a dodge if the university says, well, yes, we have free speech, we don't kick people out if we disagree with them. Well, of course you don't, because almost the only people on campus are people you all agree with. And so that's the more fundamental problem to me, which is that for 30 plus years there has been a purge of non liberals. And I like the way you put it, non leftist. I don't know what conservative means anymore, but I know that I'm not leftist, I'm not a collectivist, I'm not that sort of person. But the. So the people we would normally in pop culture refer to as conservatives are essentially non existent in the faculty at Cornell. And to the extent there are some, they are extremely quiet. And that's where I think the issues of free speech and academic freedom come in, is that knowing you won't be hired, knowing you won't be promoted, knowing you won't get tenure if you are quote unquote conservative, people hide their feelings. So it's not so much that the university punishes you, it's a culture on campus which is a monoculture and only allows one viewpoint to flourish. That doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. I am the exception. There might be some others, but the exceptions in a sense prove the rule, which is it's a monoculture on campus. And that's the most fundamental problem. And so if the development office is pitching people saying, well, we haven't terminated a professor because of their speech, or we haven't kicked students out purely because of their speech, they may be right, but they're not actually answering the problem. And it is a DEI diversity, equity and inclusion infused campus that dominates everything. So put it all together. Yes, technically there is free speech and academic freedom at Cornell. As a practical matter, there's only one group that benefits from that.
- [08:35]
A
Well, Bill, picking up on. I'm still only asking five questions, so this is a corollary of the first, and I mentioned it, about the treatment of Jewish students and maybe Jewish faculty on campus, which I'm in New York, you're in Cornell, which is also in New York, Rhode Island. And so maybe there's a little more coverage of this than there would be in the rest of the country. But I kind of was shocked by just the openness of the hostility towards Jewish students at Cornell on the main campus. Cornell's also has facilities in New York City. You've been there for over 20 years.
- [09:13]
B
Or so, or were you 15 plus years?
- [09:17]
A
Were you kind of yourself? Were you stunned by what has happened in the last few years after October 7th?
- [09:24]
B
You may not be not really stunned. I think it came to the surface very quickly. But I've been covering and dealing with these themes really for well over a decade, for approaching two decades. The extreme anti Israel fervor of the faculty. So not only have they purged conservative faculty, they've purged pro Israel faculty. Again, that's not to say there are none, but it is a minority. If you are your standard leftist academic hostile to Zionism, you know, believes Israel's a white supremacist state, if you're buying into that, you're going to have no problem getting hired and you're not going to be shy about expressing your viewpoint. On the other hand, if you take a more traditional pro Israel, or at least Israel friendly attitude, good luck being hired in the humanities and social sciences. It's going to be a problem everywhere, not just at Cornell. I mean, I've had people who have wanted to write for my website who were in PhD programs or young academics and they've told me they cannot use their name, they cannot put anything pro Israel on their CV or they won't get hired or they won't get promoted. They've got to hide it. So is it a hostile environment? Yes, it has been. It mostly revolves around the Israel issue. I don't think there's a lot of people on campus who walk around saying I hate Jews. But when the majority, the super majority of American Jews are supportive of Israel to varying degrees, but supportive of Israel, and you have a campus environment that's hostile to that. I think that is, you know, the dilemma we face in defining antisemitism in the modern times is where does anti Zionism become antisemitism? Well, when you're shouted down, when you're disrupted, when you can't bring speakers to campus, when you're demonized. There was just a case in both the New York Post and the Free Press about an anti Zionist professor who kicked an Israeli student out of the class. And to their credit, the university did commence disciplinary proceedings against him. The faculty rallied around him. Okay, that's a whole nother story. But so it is a hostile environment that there have been very active anti Israel coalitions built over the years long before October 7th, and they were always Built in a very racialized manner. So it was always students of color, people of color versus Israel. And you can go back to 2014, 17, 19. We covered this at the website. What they would do is before they would bring a boycott motion to the student assembly, they would create a coalition of non white student groups and that would be. And so it was a very toxic sort of environment, a very race infused hostility, and there was a lot of intimidation. That same hostility applied to conservative students on campus as well. I mean, because I'm essentially the only openly politically conservative professor on campus, I'm the faculty advisor to almost every right of center student group. So the pressure that pro Israel students came under on campus, conservative students came under. But it all came to the surface after October 7th. And when I say after October 7th, I mean like October 8th. I always say to people, if you want to understand how bad it was, don't look at October 7th, look at October 8th. There were marches on campus, calls for intifada, which was the violent suicide campaign against Israel, denunciations, graffiti, intimidation of students, intimidation of Jewish students. So it. All that I'd been seeing for a decade prior to October 7th came right up to the surface, heavy faculty involvement in those protests. The faculty in many ways instigated and managed them. And so yes, it created a very hostile environment. So hostile to the extent that an undergraduate student who's now serving four years in prison made open violent threats against, against the kosher dining hall and Jewish students on campus. We infamously had the professor who at a rally not that long after October 7, said he felt exhilarated when he heard about it. The fact. So it was a very toxic environment. I'd say it's calmed down in the past year because the administration finally started enforcing the rules. And what I've always said is you don't need new rules for these students, the anti Israel students. You just need to enforce the same rules everybody else lives by. I'm not seeking extra punishment for them, but we have rules. You can't march through the library with a bullhorn and disrupt everybody. But that when, when that's applied to them, they say, oh, you're violating our free speech. No, we're just applying the rules evenly. You can't blockade doors, you can't blockade buildings, you can't do all those things. And so that's what that was, the pattern of intimidation rallies on campus. We had our encamp. Well, like many other colleges did. And so that really is what it was. I think it was a very hostile, toxic Environment. The Trump administration took notice of it at Cornell. And I think in reaction to that, Cornell started to clamp down. And again, when I say clamp down, I don't mean treat the anti Israel students worse than anybody else, just apply the rules to them that you apply to everybody else.
- [15:05]
A
Well, Bill, that's fascinating. Thanks for the observations on what it's like at a typical, I think, elite college and what you've personally seen and endured. Now, I'm gonna. The main reason you're here is we want to hear about legal insurrection, why it came about, some of the things it's championing. And I'm gonna ask you a question about that. But you know, this is a show, we gotta pay our bills. And so I want folks to know that your body. I'd certainly. I don't know about you, Bill. I'm just gonna talk about me. Your body has endured a lot of damage over the last few weeks. Christmas season, Hanukkah season, lots of food. This is a gift I got for Christmas not that long ago. It's got, I think it's got 5 or 6 M&Ms. Left in it. I will admit some of my children helped me with, helped me demolish that. So anyway, our bodies, we've endured a lot these last few weeks. Most people have, anyway, So I want to make the point here. And if you look over my shoulder, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see I've got some device over what's my left shoulder. So I want to tell you why water is fundamental to getting healthy in the new year. Here's the thing. Everyone jumps into the new year, buying new supplements, trying a new diet, new workouts, but they completely ignore the most important basic thing, and that's water. Even mild dehydration impacts energy, focus, metabolism. When you think about all the garbage that's in our water, you're starting behind the curve before you even begin. So you need. I think you need. I've got Cove Pure. COVP Pure changes all that immediately. Their Clearwave technology is certified to remove up to 99.9% of contaminants. Pretty much anything that isn't water. PFAS, microplastics, pharmaceutical residue, fluoride, twigs, stones, leaves, everything, everything gets removed. It's the purest water you can get. And I want to tell you just two reasons why I love my Cove Pure. And it's in my office. It's not in the kitchen. It's here. Because it tastes so pure. Actually, it doesn't have a Taste, you know, that's the beauty of it. When you live in Connecticut, the water, you open the faucet, I'd like. What is this? This smells like it's brought to you by Clorox. But I take that water, I put it in my Cove Pure, and it's totally pure and delicious. Also, this Cove Pure sets the temperature at whatever you want. Normal, cold, hot. You can make tea with it. You want 6 ounces, you want 8 ounces, you want 16 ounces. It's very, very adaptable to your needs. So I want to very much encourage you to check it out. So Cove Pure makes it easy to get pure water with the push of a button. So this year, make a New Year's resolution that stix Improve youe Health With Clean Water. Right now, you can get $200 off for a limited time if you use the link covpure.comv d h that's covepure. C-O-V-E P-U-R-E.comvdH to get the new year started right. We thank the good people from COVID Pure for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Okay, now on to Legal Insurrection. Bill, I remember discovering Legal Insurrection well, well over a decade ago and thinking, who are these guys that speak so boldly without an iota of weakness? No hedging your bets, punching above your weight. You had spunk. You were actually even a little mysterious. Like, who are these people? It was no like, big pictures of. And so I want to know, Bill, what compelled you in all your spare time to launch this site? Did you really think you were going to make a difference and give us one or two of your favorite Legal Insurrection hits? And one of them has to be Legal Insurrections. I mean, just top notch coverage of the Oberlin College campaign against Gibson's Bakery?
- [19:13]
B
Well, the first post on the website was October 12, 2008. I had just started at Cornell a year earlier. They would never have hired me if I had the website. That's just the truth. I think they'd even admit that. So I started it after I joined. And then they realized, oh, what did we let in here? But it wasn't started with any plan. That's what, you know, most people think, oh, you've got a plan. It started because I had been in private law practice prior to that for 22 years. I had dinner with the former client. We got into an argument over the presidential 2008 election. He's for Obama. I was for McCain Palin. the end of it, he said, you know, I've never heard anybody explain your side as well as you have. You should start a blog. I had no idea what a blog was. Never heard of them. Wasn't really political at all prior to that, publicly, nobody would have known anything about me politically. And so I looked into it and I found Google Blogger, which was free. And I said, you know what? Why don't I do this? And I needed to come up with a name, so I did a word association. And I was so frustrated by the media bias in the 2008 election in favor of Obama. I said, what word comes to mind? Insurrection. That's how I'm feeling. I looked it up. By definition, that's illegal. Thought to myself, well, you know, probably not a great idea. You just started a job as a law professor to pick a name that means illegal. I said, why don't I call it Legal Insurrection? Which actually is a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as a Legal Insurrection. And that was it. That was the branding. That was, you know, no plan. My plan was, okay, I go on Google blog, it's cheap, it's, you know, easy to use. And I start posting about Obama. And my first post was how Obama was much more radical than he's letting on. And my stuff took off. And it got noticed with. That was October 12th. By the end of October, the law school's already getting emails that I should be fired. To their credit, they didn't fire me. And it took off from there. We, you know, our stuff just got picked up because we weren't shy. I didn't know enough to be shy. I didn't even know enough at that time to pick a pseudonym. A lot of law professors who blogged at that time in 2008 used pseudonyms. I didn't even know to do that. So I'm using my real name, which ended up being a bonus, a good thing, because people don't give you credibility unless you're willing to put yourself out there. And so it grew. We added a second blog or so. For two years it was just me. And we get millions of visits. It was crazy. Then I bring in a second one who was an undergrad student from the Republican club. Cause I was the faculty advisor. And she said, oh, can I write for you? I said, sure. Great. We meandered along for another year, two with two people again getting millions of visits. A lot of press and things like that. And we started to add more people. We were loosely affiliated with the Tea Party movement. I wouldn't say we were a Tea Party blog. We didn't affiliate with a particular group, but more with the general movement, what I call the Leave me alone movement, which is kind of my political philosophy. Just leave me alone if you can. And then we became more professionalized. It was all volunteer for many years. And so it took off. And that people liked our stuff. In terms of what put us on the map, I'd say that back in those days, we covered the Scott Brown, Martha Coakley race in Massachusetts. And I visited his headquarters because it wasn't that far from. We also had a house in Rhode island at that time. And so I drove up there. And this was December. He was behind 25 points in the poll I'd report from his headquarters. I actually made phone calls for him through their data bank and was getting these are cold calls, totally positive. And I was screaming to people, you know, this guy can actually win. Disregard what the media is saying. And by the time in January, the new polling came out and he was only down by seven or eight points, everybody started to panic. Well, we'd been following it all along. And on election night, January, I forget what year that would be. Probably 2010, something like that. We had 30,000 people online as we watched the returns roll in. And that's when we signed off. At one point, we had 70,000 people. And so it was just a phenomenon. It's what blogs did back then, and it's what we did. And that really put us on the map. We also pursued Elizabet Warren extremely aggressively. That would be Scott Brown versus Elizabeth Warren. We did not break her Cherokee story, Cherokee fraud story, but the Boston Herald did that. But once it broke, we ran with it. We drove that issue almost the entire campaign. We worked with Cherokee genealogists to track down her history back to the early 1800s. We researched the fact that she didn't have. Was not licensed to practice law in Massachusetts, even though she maintained her law office at Harvard in Massachusetts as her office for the practice of law. We investigated her legal background, showed that she wasn't representing the little guy. She was representing big corporate. We did all of this stuff. And that really put us a lot on the map. So much so that when it was over, and obviously she won. Cause it was Massachusetts, we said, we can't let all our research just dissipate. We created a new web website called Elizabeth warrenwiki.org which still exists. It hasn't been updated. And the Washington Times credited us for ruining her presidential chances because we maintained the website for seven years. And sure enough, when she ran for president, who fell in love with our website, Bernie Sanders supporters, because it detailed in exhaustive fact based, document based detail all her problems. So I'd say in the blog years, that was it. Once we became a foundation, which is 2019, we became a nonprofit, not for profit. We launched the Legal Insurrection Foundation. Our first project there was covering Gibson's Bakery versus Oberlin College. For those of you who don't remember, that was the little bakery, fifth generation, around 150 years, which had the temerity to stop a shoplifter who was a Oberlin College student and who happened to be black. And it was the day after Donald Trump won election in 2016. The campus was already on edge. And they exploded at this little bakery. The student was in fact shoplifting, okay, later pleaded guilty. So they correctly stopped a black student for shoplifting and the entire college community tried to ruin them, passed out defamatory flyers about. And so they sued. And because we always covered a lot of college events, we covered that case from November 2016 through the time they filed the lawsuit, through the time it went to trial. And it just so happens that soon after we launched the foundation, Legal Insurrection foundation, it was getting to trial. We hired a local reporter in Ohio to sit in on the trial because we recognized how strong a case it was, even though people were ignoring it. And we reported every night from the trial. We built an audience. And sure enough, when the $11 million compensatory verdict came down, everybody looked to us because we'd been there every day for six weeks covering the trial. And then a week later, the $30 million punitive damage came down. So I'd say that those three things really in the public's eye made us stand out. And, you know, it was just astounding how we did it with a skeleton staff.
- [27:22]
A
Yeah, well, you had great instincts, Bill. Well, we're going to talk about some of the other projects that you have taken on in an appointed way. And we'll start with that with blm. And we'll do that right after these important messages. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen, in his own words. I'm Jack Fowler. I am hosting while Victor is recuperating from his significant surgery. And we are doing this with my good friend Bill Jacobs, the head of Legal Insurrection, the founder of Legal insurrection. It's Monday, January 12th, and this episode will be up on Tuesday, January 20th. Bill, you and Legal Insurrection were early on after Black Lives Matter, blm. And what motivated that? Did you have an instinct about that? Going after Them. Them. And what is your take on the legal and societal consequences of, of that? I will call it nefarious organization.
- [28:24]
B
Well, we followed Black Lives Matter before it was even a formal organization. We followed the Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman case in Florida where George Zimmerman correctly and properly invoked self defense in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. And it was that case that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter hashtag that. We also then covered in 2014 the Michael Brown shooting, the so called hands up, don't shoot shooting. That case gave rise to the formal organization. So we were tracking Black Lives Matter really before it was even Black Lives Matter, that whole movement and the people involved and we covered very closely at the website the Michael Brown case. And for those of the listeners and viewers who don't know, hands up, don't shoot never happened, it's a fabrication. The Obama Justice Department, the Obama, not the Trump, the Obama Justice Department reviewed that, investigated it. Plus they wanted to try to get that policeman if they could and they said they couldn't because it was a legally justified shooting. He was not. There's no credible evidence. Michael Brown had his hands up saying don't shoot. All the credible evidence, including the forensics and the ballistics and the gunpowder on his hand showed that Michael Brown was shot because he sucker punched a policeman sitting in his patrol car, reached in and tried to grab his gun, was shot the first time and then there was a second shot. So Black Lives Matter was created from a fabrication. And I can't say this enough, the entire launch of Black Lives Matter was based on a fabrication about the Trayvon Martin case, that it was a racist case and a fabrication about the Michael Brown shooting. And so from its infancy, Black Lives Matter was based on a fabricated narrative of racism in our society. The people who organized the formal organization, we followed from beginning and they were self proclaimed Marxists. They used that organization to try to destroy our society. That doesn't mean everybody who's gone to a march is a Marxist, but it does mean that the people behind it, the people who organized it, did it for the purpose of destroying our country. And we saw that unfold post George Floyd so my big takeaway is the single most influential and impactful social movement of this century in the United States was birthed from fabricated claims of racism. And people need to understand that it was all wasn't a hoax in the sense that two people were shot and they were killed, but we're not racially motivated shootings and they were legally justifiable shootings. And so that's My big takeaway is that Black Lives Matter then literally destroyed our country after George Floyd. All of the plans they had to burn down our cities and tear up campuses and force out conservatives, et cetera came to fruition. And it came to fruition at Cornell also, because after the Michael Brown after the George Floyd death, I saw people marching, saying, hands up, don't shoot. And I wrote a post at my blog, which I'd written actually three or four times before, saying, hey, you know, that's a fabrication. That didn't. And people lost their minds. There was a concerted effort, Internet petitions, you know, student 15 student groups organized a boycott of my course. Every professor in my hallway signed a letter denouncing me. The dean denounced me. All this craziness all because I told the truth about this fraudulent movement. This movement founded based on fabrications. And so I'm very familiar with blm. I've been following it forever. I'm never going to stop speaking out and letting people know that it was based on a fabrication.
- [32:30]
A
Terrific work done by Legal Insurrection on that. Now I'm going to read an ad. Before I do that, I'm going to drink some CO pure water because it's delicious. And so listeners and viewers of the Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. If you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations. And policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the a historical truth. Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. And that's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history. I'm talking about physical gold, not as speculation, but as insulation. And our reputation matters to us here at Victor Davis Hansen, in his own words. And that's why we're partnering with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability, and an A rating with the Better Business Bureau. For years, they've guided Americans through transparent education and longstanding relationships built on trust. And right now, they're extending a special liberty offer to our listeners to help you get started with real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in a bank. So if you believe as we do, that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious. Call 8447-9091-9184-4790-9191 or visit protectwithviktor.com One more time folks. 8447-909191-84479, 09191 or visit@protectwithvictor.com History rewards those who take the long view, and we thank the good people from Allegiance Gold for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. One more question before we take our last break, and after that there'll be the fifth question. But here's the fourth question for Bill Jacobson, the founder of Legal Insurrection. Bill we take note that the site's title is Legal Insurrection. You've already noted that. And whatever its founding purpose, it has become more than just being a blog for commenting on events and trends. You decided to initiate, I'll call them activist programs to claim and hang scalps. Let's look at them separately. There are two that I'd like to focus on. The first is Critical Race. Tell us about Critical Race. Why did you launch it and what is its purpose?
- [35:27]
B
Criticalrace.org was launched in February 2021 as an outgrowth of what we saw on campuses and elsewhere. Post George Floyd the so called Summer of Love When Minneapolis and many other cities burned, we began to look into it and we began to understand this racialized view of the world. The racial politics in education had really exploded everywhere. And so we researched it and we found so much. We said we need a place where everything is in one place. And so criticalrace.org is a series of interactive databases. We have researchers who go through and document what is happening at various colleges. And we've now covered medical schools and other professional schools. We have over 700 schools in our database. We continually upgrade them. And so it became a resource for parents, students, legislators, the media. Media. We've been linked many times by other media and so we wanted to create a historical record. We wanted to let people be able to go to a place and find out. You hover over the map of the us you click on the state you're interested in, you'll get a dropdown menu. You click on the school you're interested in and you will just see. It's all data. It's just data. It's links. Every link is archived in case it changes or gets taken down. And it's a historical record that people can rely on. Although we are against Critical race theory. I mean, I think that's pretty clear. The database is just the data. The data is the data. What they're doing is what they're doing. And it's actually become even more important now because a lot of schools have taken things down and scrubbed their websites, but we have it all captured because we have archived links, and so it doesn't matter if they take down their website page. So that's it. It has tremendous usage. I can't remember the precise numbers, but over 600,000 visits since inception, over, I think, 8 million user interactions since then. And we're expanding it dramatically, really. We're staffing it up because we now want to document how the schools are masking what they're doing. They're taking things down. They're rebranding them. So at Cornell, diversity, equity, and inclusion, which permeates the entire university, is now called Belonging and Understanding. It's almost comical what they're doing. Okay. Or understanding and belonging. I can't remember which comes first. And so. So criticalrace.org is continuing to be a factual database, but it's expanding into unmasking what's going on. And that's our BIG project for 2026. We've added researchers is to unmask what these schools are doing.
- [38:23]
A
Terrific. Bill, you're a wrecking crew. I will call you an undersung hero. You are a hero of our movement. I'm gonna ask you about one more project that you have created at Legal Insurrection, and we'll do that after these final important messages. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Monday, January 12th. We're talking with the great Bill Jacobson, the founder of Legal Insurrection. This episode is up at the Daily Signal, the happy home, the very happy home of our podcast on Tuesday, January 20th. Final question of the five as I fill in for the great Victor Davis Hanson. Bill, the Equal Protection Project is another Legal Insurrection effort that takes on blatant racism. Tell us about it and about an action you've just launched just a few days ago from when we're talking against the University of Tennessee, which I think is an example of what you do through this project.
- [39:27]
B
The Equal Protection project, which is equalprotect.org was an outgrowth of our Critical Race website. We had so many people coming to us saying, there's a scholarship, but my child can't apply because the child's white. Things like that. That we said, we can no longer limit ourselves to just documenting what's happening. We need to start taking Legal action. And that's what equalprotect.org does. We have challenged in three years, we're coming up on our third anniversary, over 200 universities and colleges regarding over 700 discriminatory programs and scholarships. We've had a very good success rate. We've had dozens of federal investigations resulting from our work. Department of Justice, Department of Education. And so we've been extremely active. We have really ramped that up. I think of the 700 we've done, I think over 500 with this past calendar year. We've added attorneys. We're moving very aggressively. And so we bring challenges to discrimination done in the name of dei. We don't challenge programs merely because they're dei or because they want diversity. We only challenge programs that we believe violate the civil rights laws or the U.S. constitution for public universities. And it has been a phenomenal success. The media coverage. So a very important part of what we do is media coverage. When we roll out a complaint, we hit the local media market. Sometimes that publicity in and of itself compels a to change the program and correct their ways because what they're doing is indefensible. You cannot have a program that says, we're only open to certain races or certain ethnicities. Not if you're getting federal funding. You can't do that. And so we've done that over a hundred times for over 700 programs. And so, for example, you mentioned University of Tennessee. We just filed against them a week or two ago, maybe two weeks ago, because we found four scholarships there that were only open and three of them were only open to African American students, and the other was only open to minority students, and that's a commonly understood term to mean non white. So you had four scholarships to which whites could not apply and three of them to which Asians could not apply. And so we challenge those, particularly in a state that. That by legislation has passed anti DEI laws, we challenge those. And lo and behold, those are no longer on the website. We're looking into whether they've been discontinued or they just took down the evidence. But that's a perfect example. Just a little bit of publicity, a little bit of sunlight is sometimes enough to get these universities to change. But we have found discriminatory programs. University of Rhode island, we challenged 51 programs. The Department of Education opened an investigation as to, I think, 35 of them because the others were already under investigation, unbeknownst to us, and they've changed all of those. So we are having a real impact on the ground. And we don't let up. I mean, essentially every week we're filing something and we're getting results in terms of media coverage. We reach more people through the so called earned media from our Equal Protection project cases than we do from the website or from social media. You know, based on the stats we've seen, I've had almost 400 broadcast interviews, distinct broadcast interviews in three years. We have over 4,000 links to us in just three years. So we reach millions of people. And the important thing there is not just publicity for publicity's sake, but we're educating the public. Every time a local newspaper writes about our story, we're educating the public. And the interesting thing is the comments on these local papers, as opposed to the New York Times, are almost always favorable to us. People know this is wrong. Doesn't matter what color you are. You know, we should not be selecting people based on the color of their skin. And so we're educating millions of people. And if you go to our website, equalprotect.org, we talk about how education is one of our three primary focuses that we want to change the culture. And I think a lot of the things the federal government under Trump has been able to do is that for several years the culture surrounding critical race theory and DEI changed. And it was that change in culture which allowed political results to follow. And so that's what we're continuing to do. We're expanding. We've added two full time attorneys in the past year, we're adding more and we're going to just keep going forward because we have to. If you wanted to destroy our country, what would you do differently than the left has done with regard to education? What would you do differently than to teach children to view the world through a racial lens? What would you do differently than to teach children to hate each other based on group identity, to hate their parents, to hate their country based on group identity? And that's what we're fighting against. This is not. Lot of people mistake this as a fight to save education. It's not. It's a fight to save the country. And that's what we're fighting in the trenches every single day at Legal insurrection website, @criticalrace.org and equal protect.org and we're just doing it. We don't have a plan, we just do it. I think instinctively we knew we needed to do this.
- [45:16]
A
Yeah, Bill, as you know, I've, we've been friends for a while. I, I'm. Bill hit his head one day and he asked me to be an advisor on Legal Insurrection journalism. E kind of advice when I was publisher in National Review work at at anfil, where we of course help nonprofits with their fundraising and development and people ask me all the time about what groups punch above their wealth. Bill says we and from everything he said, you would think there's like 50 people involved. This is a skeleton crew if there ever was one, and the victories they notch are tremendous. So if you're interested in a conservative organization, I will call it Conservative American Loving Organization as really being consequential. Legal Insurrection foundation and Critical Race and Equal Protection Project are things you should check out even if you want to donate, but also check out to be inspired because they really are doing things in defense of our unalienable rights. So Bill, I want to thank you very much for taking on the five questions for joining me on this episode of Victor Davis Hansen In His Own Words. We pray, continue to pray that our good friend Victor, who's a big fan of Bill by the way, that he could he recuperates quickly so he could be sitting here and folks not being tormented by my Bronx accent. So Bill, thanks very much. Thanks to our friends at the Daily Signal which host this podcast and we will be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen In His Own Words. Bye bye. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.