Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The NYT has always been anti-Israel, and I toy with calling it “antisemitic” because it always downplays antisemitism. And it did it big time this week in an article called “A progressive and in a body made for the ‘manosphere.’ Read it by clicking below or find it archived here.
This handsome, manly, handsome, and much-followed podcaster on Twitch and YouTube (4.5 million total), Hasan Piker turns out to have some nasty views on Israel. But of course the NYT downplays those views greatly. Have a read; it’s short.
They add up, to me at least, to deem him an antisemite, as does NY Representative Ritchie Torres. Click to go to the thread.
The NYT article is mostly about how his wonderful physique, his diet, his workouts and his avid following, noting just this on his views about the war:
Mr. Piker is similarly unfiltered with his viewpoints. Some can be extreme.
A vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Mr. Piker has been labeled anti-American by people across the political spectrum for saying the country “deserved” the Sept. 11 attacks. His recent accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza and his diatribes against the Zionist movement have led many supporters of Israel, including liberals like Representative Ritchie Torres of New York, to call Mr. Piker antisemitic.
“I find antisemitism to be completely unacceptable,” Mr. Piker said on a call in April. “I find the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism to be very dangerous,” he added.
It’s not a very explicit explanation (what foreign policy does he oppose?), and the conflation of antisemitism and antiZionism have turned them nearly into the same thing: hatred of Jews because most of them think that Israel is okay as a Jewish homeland.
The Free Press, however, took a deeper dive (click if you subscribe0:
Here are a few quotes from the FP (bolding is mine):
Because Piker records for up to 10 hours a day, and has done so for five years, it is hard to paint a comprehensive picture of his views. But even a cursory look at his work reveals a person who dismisses violence against Israelis, celebrates Islamist terrorists, and advocates for treating pro-Israel Americans as neo-Nazis.
“It doesn’t matter if rapes happened on October 7th,” Piker said while livestreaming on May 22, 2024. “It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.” Apparently, not even the most brutal, inhumane crimes committed during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel could justify the Israeli military response—which he repeatedlyrefers to as an “ethnic cleansing campaign.”
Just this week, he claimed on Twitch that “in a totally just world, regardless of your background, any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fucking rabid neo-Nazi.” (The vast majority of Jews identify as Zionists.) He went on: “You shouldn’t even let someone be the fucking local dog catcher . . . if they have exhibited any sort of positive feelings about the state of Israel.”
At the same time, Piker implies that acts of violence committed by Islamists are justified. On November 29, 2023, he described the attacks of October 7 as “a retaliation for an ongoing apartheid.”
Piker doesn’t only justify terrorism. Sometimes, he glorifies it:
On December 20, 2023, Piker played a Hamas propaganda video on his livestream for an audience of 25,000. In it, dramatic music plays as members of the terrorist group forge and demo guns. The title card reads: “We will continue Killing your Soldiers by our locally manufactured Snipers.” Piker reads it aloud, then says: “Wow, there’s a little message for the Americans out there as well!”
In January 2024, Houthi pirates seized a commercial ship in the Red Sea, and took the crew hostage. Among the rebels was 19-year-old Rashid Al-Haddad, who went viral in the U.S. for posting videos of himself from the vessel. (Al-Haddad later denied affiliation with the Houthis.) Piker tracked down Al-Haddad via social media and interviewed him on his stream with the help of a translator. In the interview, Piker compared Al-Haddad to the pirate hero from a popular anime called One Piece.
In a later stream on October 14, 2024, Piker likened Al-Haddad, who grew up in Yemen, to a victim of the Holocaust: “For most of his life, he has withstood genocide,” Piker said, before saying that speaking to Al-Haddad was like “talking to fucking Anne Frank, basically.” (Later, in a now-deleted tweet, Al-Haddad posted this image of a man impaled on a stake with the caption: “The execution that we will carry out on all Zionists.”)
On September 28, 2024, Piker shared what he called a “music video,” which was actually a Houthi propaganda clip. In it, gun-toting Islamists sing a rallying cry to “defeat the masses of infidels.” They march over burning American and Israeli flags and wave banners emblazoned with the Houthi credo—which translates to “God is Great. Death to America! Death to Israel! Damn the Jews! Victory to Islam!”
“When the beat drops, it’s like jihad drops in your heart,” Piker said to an audience of nearly 30,000. Of the Houthis, he said: “They’re very musical people.”
Piker himself is aware of his influence on young people. In November, he posted a news article about that rise in pro-Hamas sentiment among Jewish-American teenagers to his Discord server—with the comment: “i did this.”
There’s more, but I’ll give just one more bit of NYT censorship to show how they downplay Piker’s antisemitism. There was no reason for the NYT do do this save to avoid tarnishing Piker’s reputation:
But amid all the descriptions of Piker’s attractiveness—and all the photos that back it up—the Times let something small yet grimly revealing slip into its profile of the streamer. One of the images shows Piker’s monitor, during one of his livestreams. If you zoom in, you can see a comment from a Twitch user referring to an Israeli Defense Force soldier: “I’d phuck this idf btch to death and make his mother shove missles up her ass.”
The Times has since updated the photo with the comment cropped out of the picture.
Piker did not respond to a request for comment.
Apparently the NYT cannot trust readers to make their up their own minds, so they slant the news to make Piker look better than he is. So it goes. Right now with what’s going on in the world, and with the huge influence that Piker has, it’s just like the NYT to concentrate on his manliness, muscles and handsomeness instead of his dislike of Jews anti-Zionism.
Ever since the City of Chicago dropped the charges against 26 pro-Palestinian students and two faculty arrested on our campus for trespassing, I’ve wondered whether mayor Brandon Johnson, elected in 2023, has some sympathies for Palestine contrasted with some opprobrium for Israel. (The city also refused to send Chicago cops to take down our encampment, so it had to be done by University police, who in the end did a great job.)
The Instagram post below was put up by CAIR Chicago (the Council for American-Islamic Relations), showing the mayor donning a keffiyeh to celebrate Arab Heritage Month (this month of April), Now keffiyehs of various types been used by Arabs for centuries, mostly as headdresses but sometimes as shawls. However, this particular black-and-white garment is Palestinian, and, as CAIR surely knows —and Brandon Johnson should have known—is associated with Palestinian resistance, beginning with Yasser Arafat’s frequent wearing of it, including while appearing in front of the United Nations (see the history of the garment and its symbolism at this Guardian article). As Wikipedia says:
The black and white keffiyeh’s prominence increased during the 1960s with the beginning of the Palestinian resistance movement and its adoption by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Johnson, who is not a popular mayor (see below) has been accused before of “disrespecting” Chicago’s Jewish community, though I didn’t know about that. But the actions of the City of Chicago with respect to illegal activities of Palestinian protestors, and the city’s refusal to act, combined with the photo above, makes me wonder about Johnson’s feelings about Israel. (One instance: when pro-Pals blocked Lake Shore Drive, our main artery along the Lake, the city did nothing.)
To be fair, I did find this picture of Johnson accepting a yarmulka from Jews before he was elected, but of course the article says that he was “courting the Jewish vote”. I don’t think he put it on, though!
I don’t think I need worry much longer about a possible anti-Semite being mayor, though, for, as I said, Johnson is not at all well liked by Chicagoans of all stripes. As Wikipedia notes:
Johnson is considered to be a political progressive. His term as mayor has been marked with low approval ratings, with only 6.6% of Chicago voters expressing favorable views of him in a February 2025 poll.
As for CAIR, well, it’s been accused of touting antisemitism many times before; I’ll give just three links: here, here, and here (h/t Malgorzata). A few quotes, one from each source (in order):
. . . . key CAIR leaders often traffic in openly antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric. Some of CAIR’s leaders, such as Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, were previously involved in a now-defunct organization that openly supported Hamas and, according to the U.S. government, functioned as its “propaganda apparatus.”
and
The White House strongly condemned recent comments from the leader of a top American-Islamic group who said he was “happy to see” Gazans invading Israel on October 7.
The comments came from Council on American-Islamic Relations Director Nihad Awad at a conference two weeks ago, when – according to a video posted on X, by DC-based Middle East Media Research Institute – he said, “I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”
“We condemn these shocking, Antisemitic statements in the strongest terms,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement shared with CNN.
Bates echoed President Joe Biden in calling the October 7 attacks “abhorrent” and “unadulterated evil,” noting that October 7 “was the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
and
Two years in the making, this new book is the product of extensive meticulous research into the most dangerous Islamist political group in the U.S. today—CAIR. It is dangerous because it was created as a front group for Hamas in 1993—in a secret meeting of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas leaders, including CAIR’s current leader Nihad Awad, held in a downtown Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia in 1993, a meeting the FBI wiretapped.
Since its corporate inception in 1994, CAIR has been the number one promoter of incendiary vile antisemitic tropes and conspiracies in the U.S. by any “mainstream” Islamist group. I use the word mainstream in quotations because CAIR has successfully duped virtually the entire media establishment—many of whom have willingly collaborated—into portraying this Hamas front group as a “Muslim civil rights organization.” CAIR is soaked with antisemitism, yet we hear NOT a word about this reality from the gatekeepers.
As far as I know, this week is some kind of pro-Palestine week, and it’s kicked off with a bang at the University of Chicago. The usual suspects, the Students for Justice in Palestine, have erected a tent accusing the administration (through President Paul Alivisatos) and the Board of Trustees of the University of guilt for “economic genocide”, failure to divest (it’s not clear from what), and complicity in the deaths of Palestinians. This is in the form of a painted tent erected in the Quad yesterday, covered with caricatures of Trustees and the President Alivisatos, many with blood running out of their eyes and mouths. Yep, it’s the old “blood libel,” and I have no compunction in calling this anti-Semitism. (See some photos below.)
Note the “red hands” drawings, which have always been a symbol of death to Jews, reflecting a Palestinian who, in 2000, held up his blood-covered hands after helping kill two Jews. They were two Israelis who lost their way and wound up by accident in Ramallah. The PA detained them, but the mob gathered and, storming the building, tore the pair to pieces:
What followed can only be described as a savage, barbaric lynching. The crazed mob beat and stabbed the Israelis, tore the men limb from limb and gouged out their eyes. During the attack, Mr Avrahami’s wife Hani called him on his mobile phone. Instead of being greeted as usual, an unfamiliar strange voice answered the phone : “I just killed your husband.”
As all this was happening, one man came to the window and, much to the delight of the delirious crowd below, triumphantly held up his blood-soaked hands for all to see.
The crowd stood below, waving fists and cheering. The body of one of the soldiers was then thrown out of the window. The baying crowd rushed to attack, beating and stamping the lifeless body in a frenzy. The body of the other soldier was set on fire. One of the soldiers was later seen upside down, dangling from a rope.
The horrendous episode was not over. Within minutes of murdering the Israelis, the mob dragged the two butchered bodies to nearby Al-Manara Square, and broke out into impromptu victory celebrations.
The famous photo:
As The Canary Mission notes, “The ‘red hand’ has a decades-old violent meaning for Jews in the Middle East. It signifies the bloody history of pogroms and the slaughter of Jews.”
That said, here are photos of the “installation” erected in the Quad, probably last night (I don’t remember it from yesterday afternoon):
Approval for the installation, showing who put it up:
Paul Alivisatos, our President, called a “genocide normalizer”:
Rachel Kohler, David Rubenstein (chair of the Board) and Antonio Gracias, characterized as “ecociders”, “CEOs of blood baths”, and so on. Note all the red hands, which to me means “kill the Jews”. (Of course you could interpret it as the trustees kill Palestinians, but the red hand has never symbolized that.) Note the blood coming out of their mouths and their satanic appearance. It’s the old blood libel, put onto the Trustees.
Tom Pritzker, also a Trustee with blood running out of his mouth. He’s called a “baby killing scum” and “Epstein Scum”. Note the red hands again:
More red hands and Satya Nadella, also on the Board of Trustees. He was born in India, and the caricature, with dark brown skin, could be seen as racist. More red hands.
Finally, trustee Michele Kang, also with blood coming from every orifice.
As I said, this was erected by the Students for Justice in Palestine, the major contributor to antisemitism on our campus. I have noted this in a 2024 letter to the Chicago Maroon and have called for a reassessment of their status as a Recognized Student Organization. From my letter:
Has the time come to ask whether the activism of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) belongs on our campus? It’s not the morally reprehensible things they say that brings this question to the fore, as their speech is protected, but how they behave: in a way that violates campus rules and disrupts the University’s mission.
. . . . The continual disruption of our campus and violation of University regulations raises the question of whether SJP as a campus group is involved in these actions. If so, we should ponder whether that group should be a recognized student organization. At the very least, student organizations should enrich the mission of the University: promoting discourse and enriching our intellectual life. SJP does none of this, for their mission seems to be purely ideological: to promote Hamas and whitewash its terrorism—as well as to erase the state of Israel—all through disrupting campus activity. If it is to remain, it should at least desist from violating University regulations.
In fact, SJP did not desist from violating University regulations, and was given a slap on the wrist: an “official warning” that further “discipline” (LOL) would be enacted should SJP violate university regulations. This tent, since it was approved, is not a violation, but if the past is any guide, there will be more violations. And the University, which has other problems, won’t do anything.
Note that the University has already affirmed that it’s not divesting from anything, so this is purely performative, and I see it as an act of hatred and antisemitism. That, of course, is within the purview of the First Amendment, and although this kind of thuggery makes me queasy, we Jews have been subject to this for millennia and we’re not going to be put off or scared by it now.
It’s going to be a rough spring. SJP knows that it’s lost the war, both in Gaza and on campus, and that will simply make them more active and more hateful. I trust that the Jewish students will respond with messages that aren’t hateful, but simply call for the return of the remaining hostages and embody the phrase “Am Yisrael chai” (“The people of Israel live.”)
UPDATE: We have high winds here today, and apparently the tent blew down. Here’s a photo of the remnants. I’m sure it will be put up again.
****************
Malgorzata, who lost many of her family in the Holocaust, has been arguing with me for several years about whether stuff like this constitutes free speech. I think it does since it doesn’t violate how our courts have construed the First Amendment, but she differs and thinks installations like this should be banned. I will reproduce with permission what she said to me when we discussed this installation this morning:
You see, Jerry, that’s why I’m definitely not a free speech absolutist. As somebody famous (I don’t remember who) said: the Holocaust didn’t start with Auschwitz, it started with words. OK, the ground was fertile, hatred of Jews was very popular for centuries, and smaller orgies of murders were done in many places. The words which are spoken now, the pictures which are shown (like this installation in your University), can very easily morph into violence (in some places it already has) and to greater and more organized violence. In Rwanda they needed the radio dehumanizing Tutsis for a few months before they went over to calling for the murder of Tutsis. The ground was prepared and people started the mass murder with joy. It’s always easier to give rise to hatred and violence than to love and tolerance. Good ideas always lose against murderous ideas.
It’s not a good time for Jews and not a good time for Western civilization. The monsters of barbarism are awake again and many people are embracing them.
Someone sent me this tweet a few days ago, and I was unsure about whether this was any kind of violation of University policy. As far as I gather, this was posted on the inside of a chemistry professor’s office, facing outwards.
University of Chicago – Outside a chemistry professor’s classroom, a sign filled with propaganda reads, “DEPORT ISRAELIS.”
This is blatant antisemitism and xenophobia which is completely unacceptable, @UChicago. An investigation is needed. pic.twitter.com/wGer8vjX9f
Here’s a photo from that tweet, but all I can make out in it is “Israel murdered 18,000 children” (Hamas’s figures, and probably grossly untrue) as well as “Israel must pay for the murders and destruction” and “DEPORT ISRAELIS.” If you can read more of it, please decipher in the comments.
Anyway, I sent the tweet around to our local free speech group and asked if this was a violation of University rules. This morning someone said that this kind of thing is indeed allowed, though you’re not allowed to display flags in your office (some wonky rule). A watermelon, though, does nicely as a substitute for the Palestinian flag. At any rate. I saw the tweet below this morning, indicating that the University of Chicago itself had apologized for the sign, which was “voluntarily” taken down, and said that it is being investigated as a possible violation of the “University’s non-discrimination policy.”
We sent a letter to the President of the University of Chicago. We’re working closely with students on the ground. This is the statement the University released today.
Let’s be clear: pressure works. Community matters. And transparency is everything.
— ChicagoJewishAlliance (@ChiJewishAllies) March 30, 2025
The statement:
If this is indeed allowed behavior, then putting a sign like this inside your office, facing out, is not a violation of free speech, which is part of the Chicago Principles. On the other hand, one could argue that such a sign creates a climate of harassment towards Jewish students, which is a Title VI violation. Now that Trump is threatening to withhold money from universities for condoning anti-semitic behavior, I can see where this kind of publicity could scare our university.
I don’t know if I’ll learn any more about this, but if I do I’ll impart it below. All I can say is that IF displaying this kind of sign is permitted by University regulations, then it’s not kosher to investigate the person who posted it (that’s chilling of speech) or to make a public statement about it. All of this hangs on the “time, place, and manner” restrictions of speech at the University here, and people aren’t sure what the policy is.
This article in The Atlantic by Frank Foer, former editor of The New Republic (and who attended Columbia) gives a thorough and excellent summary of the history of antisemitic protests at the school. You can probably access it for free by clicking on the headline below, or you can find the article archived here. It’s well worth reading.
You can read the whole thing for yourself, but I’ll give a few quotes. It begins with the recent anti-Semitism at Columbia when Avi Shilon’s class on the history of modern Israel was interrupted by four disruptive pro-Palestinian protestors, two of whom have been expelled and another under investigation. This, however, is only a small part of the anti-Israel and antisemitic atmosphere at that toxic school, which is cleaning up its act only since the Trump administration took away $400 million in federal funds. (Note, however, that this kind of threat could spread throughout U.S. colleges, and that Columbia also detained, probably unlawfully, ex-student Mahmoud Khalif, who may have only been exercising freedom of speech):
Over the many months of that [Israel/Hamas] war, Columbia was the site of some of America’s most vitriolic protests against Israel’s actions, and even its existence. For two weeks last spring, an encampment erected by anti-Israel demonstrators swallowed the fields in the center of the compact Manhattan campus. Nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans such as “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” At the end of April, students, joined by sympathizers from outside the university gates, stormed Hamilton Hall—which houses the undergraduate-college deans’ offices—and then battled police when they sought to clear the building. Because of the threat of spiraling chaos, the university canceled its main commencement ceremony in May.
. . .Over the past two years, Columbia’s institutional life has become more and more absurd. Confronted with a war on the other side of the world, the course of which the university has zero capacity to affect, a broad swath of the community acted as if the school’s trustees and administrators could determine the fate of innocent families in Gaza. To force the university into acceding to demands—ending study abroad in Israel, severing a partnership with Tel Aviv University, divesting from companies with holdings in Israel––protesters attempted to shut down campus activity. For the sake of entirely symbolic victories, they were willing to risk their academic careers and even arrest.
Because the protesters treated the war as a local issue, they trained their anger on Jewish and Israeli students and faculty, including Shilon, some of whom have been accused of complicity with genocide on the basis of their religious affiliation or national origin. More than any other American university, Columbia experienced a breakdown in the fabric of its community that demanded a firm response from administrators—but these administrators tended to choke on their own fears.
Many of the protesters followed university rules governing demonstrations and free expression. Many others did not. Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse.
Columbia’s invertebrate President (now ex-President) Minouche Shafik set up an antisemitism task force, which gathered tons of examples of antisemitic behavior. On top of that, four Columbia deans were photographed making fun of Jews on their phones as they watched a panel on Jewish life at Columbia (the deans are all gone now). The main promoter of all the student activity was Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the group to which Khalil belonged. It’s a big group—and a nasty one:
A month later, at the beginning of the academic year, the task force published a damning depiction of quotidian student life. An especially powerful section of the report described the influence of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the organizer of the anti-Israel protests. CUAD was a coalition of 116 tuition-supported, faculty-advised student groups, including the university mariachi band and the Barnard Garden Club.
CUAD doesn’t simply oppose war and occupation; it endorses violence as the pathway to its definition of liberation. A year ago, a Columbia student activist told an audience watching him on Instagram, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” At first, CUAD dissociated itself from the student. But then the group reconsidered and apologized for its momentary lapse of stridency. “Violence is the only path forward,” CUAD said in an official statement. That wasn’t a surprising admission; its public statements regularly celebrate martyrdom.
Foer notes the history of keeping Jews out of Columbia, a history that had largely waned when Foer attended the University but was later exacerbated by the work of Edward Said and his book Orientalism. I found this bit interesting:
The story of American Jewry can be told, in part, by the history of Columbia’s admissions policy. At the turn of the 20th century, when entry required merely passing an exam, the sons of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began rushing into the institution. By 1920, Columbia was likely 40 percent Jewish. This posed a marketing problem for the school, as the children of New York’s old Knickerbocker elite began searching out corners of the Ivy League with fewer Brooklyn accents.
To restore Anglo-Saxon Protestant demographic dominance, university president Nicholas Murray Butler invented the modern college-application process, in which concepts such as geographic diversity and a well-rounded student body became pretexts to weed out studious Jews from New York City. In 1921, Columbia became the first private college to impose a quota limiting the number of Jews. (In the ’30s, Columbia rejected Richard Feynman, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, and Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer.) Columbia, however, was intent on making money off the Jews it turned away, so to educate them, it created Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn, a second-rate version of the Manhattan institution.
Only after World War II, when America fought a war against Nazism, did this exclusionary system wither away.
Shafik’s task force found powerful evidence of a plague of antisemitism at Columbia, but when the task force handed its report to Columbia’s university senate, peopled by pro-Palestinian activists who wanted to be on the Senate, the report more or less died, for the faculty simply didn’t want the report given official approval. (It’s Columbia’s faculty that intensifies the atmosphere of Jew- and Israel hatred.) Almost no students were ever punished, even the ones who broke into Hamilton Hall, and this leniency towards rule-breaking, pro-Palestinian protestors seems widespread in American universities, even my own—a fact about which I’ve wailed loudly.
Foer accepts the antisemitism revealed by the task force, but also criticizes Trump’s heavy handed treatment of the university which, to be sure, may be the only thing that will cause Columbia to take action. (Remember, the University Senate tried to quash the task force’s findings.) And Foer has no truck with the treatment of Khalil.
But make no mistake about it: the atmosphere of antisemitism lingers, since it was largely promoted by Columbia’s (and Barnard’s) faculty, and it’s so bad that were I a Jewish parent, I would send my kids anywhere but Columbia—even to Harvard! The litany of antisemitic incidents is much longer than I’ve mentioned here, and that’s one reason Foer’s article is worth reading. Nevertheless, he ends on an upbeat note.
The indiscriminate, punitive nature of Trump’s meddling may unbalance Columbia even further. A dangerous new narrative has emerged there and on other campuses: that the new federal threats result from “fabricated charges of antisemitism,” as CUAD recently put it, casting victims of harassment as the cunning villains of the story. In this atmosphere, Columbia seems unlikely to reckon with the deeper causes of anti-Jewish abuse on its campus. But in its past—especially in its history of overcoming its discriminatory treatment of Jews—the institution has revealed itself capable of overcoming its biases, conscious and otherwise, against an excluded group. It has shown that it can stare hard at itself, channel its highest values, and find its way to a better course.
I cannot share his optimism.
CODA: If you want to see how bad things were at Columbia, have a look at this thread reader recounting the pro-Palestinian break-in into Hamilton Hall, where Columbia’s administration is housed (h/t Jez). It starts this way, and there are a lot of photos (the ones shown are from Getty images in the NY Post article).
🚨NEW: A shocking report from the @nypost announces a new federal investigation into @Columbia after janitors trapped in the Hamilton Hall occupation reported retaliatory harassment for reporting antisemitic conduct. Let’s break it down. 🧵
Lester Wilson and Mario Torres, two janitors who work @Columbia, started noticing an increase in racist and antisemitic graffiti in Nov. 2023. “No matter how many times Mr. Wilson removed the swastikas, individuals kept replacing them with more.”
Mr. Wilson lost track of how many swastikas he had to scrub, while Mr. Torres “pegged it in the dozens”. Despite reporting it to his superiors, @Columbia did nothing, so Mr. Torres started throwing away chalk left in classrooms so the vandals wouldn’t have anything to write with.
“…Torres and Wilson observed masked protesters storm through Hamilton Hall chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and scrawling swastikas as well as other obscene graffiti in the building.” Despite security cameras and ID scanners, @Columbia did nothing.
They’ve now expelled a few students who broke into the building. The thread is longer, but here are three picture of the break-in and then one of two janitors (both were held hostage by the protestors) defending himself with a fire extinguisher. Note that the cowards all wear masks so they can’t be identified. This is NOT civil disobedience, a form of protest against an unjust law in which those who are arrested are nonviolent and also willing to take the consequences:
Yep, the Law School at my Ph.D. alma mater is showing a bit of antisemitism (I no longer believe that this is completely about Israel’s actions, because the Law School never had any resolutions about Hamas or its actions). As it says above, “no other international issue has ever been voted on.” Why, then they’re singling out the world’s only Jewish state? No resolutions about Syria, where there was far more carnage? Not on your life.
Here’s the article about it from the Harvard Crimson (click headline to read).
An excerpt:
The Harvard Law School student body voted on Thursday to call on the University to divest from Israel — delivering a decisive endorsement of language that Law School administrators harshly criticized before it went up for a vote.
The resolution, which called on Harvard to “divest from weapons, surveillance technology, and other companies aiding violations of international humanitarian law, including Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine,” passed with 72.7 percent of votes in favor, with 842 students participating. Nearly 2,000 students attend HLS.
The results — announced late Thursday night — mark the second vote by a Harvard student body in favor of divestment. Students at the Harvard School of Public Health voted in June to urge Harvard to divest from Israel, and governments at the Law School, Harvard Divinity School, and the Graduate School of Design have all urged divestment. But its passage is unlikely to result in change from Harvard, whose leaders have rebuffed calls for divestment at every turn.
All those misguided students, uninformed about the war but bent on flaunting their virtue! Fortunately, the people who have the power to divest, the administration, aren’t having it. They’re institutionally neutral, like Chicago:
The Law School moved swiftly to distance itself from the referendum outcome.
HLS spokesperson Jeff Neal wrote in a statement that “although it has historically administered leadership elections for student government, and offered to do so again this year, the law school administration played no role in the referendum conducted by student government.”
“As explained in a message to students, the administration expressed deep disappointment with student government’s leadership’s decision to proceed with a needlessly divisive referendum which runs contrary to student government’s stated objectives of ‘fostering community’ and ‘enhancing inclusion,’” he added.
Sadly, Mr. Neal doesn’t know that Jews don’t fall under DEI protection. We are “white adjacent.”
The referendum was first proposed in a petition by Law Students for a Free Palestine, an unrecognized student group, which passed the 300-signature threshold to trigger a Student Government referendum Feb. 18.
More depressing news. My new academic home, The University of Chicago, is one of 45 schools being investigated for racial discrimination. Click below to see the Chicago Maroon article:
An excerpt:
The University of Chicago is one of 45 schools under investigation by the Department of Education for alleged violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race-based discrimination in programs receiving federal financial assistance.
The announcement alleges that the University has engaged in “race-exclusionary practices in [its] graduate programs” through its partnership with the PhD Project, an organization that works to expand diversity in business school Ph.D. programs. Booth School of Business’s Stevens Doctoral Program is included on the Project’s website as a university partner.
The PhD Project, the Department of Education’s announcement reads, “purports to provide doctoral students with insights into obtaining a Ph.D. and networking opportunities, but limits eligibility based on the race of participants.”
By “race-exclusionary,” of course, they mean “violation of DEI strictures”, and, indeed, some of that has been going on here. But since those violations are kept quite quiet, with phone calls used instead of emails (or so I hear), so it’s hard to know what’s going on. As far as I can see, DEI initiatives are still pervasive at Chicago, (here’s the main website), but I don’t know if they rise to the level that would cause the government to withhold federal money—as they did for Columbia University.
A bit more. The link at “has quietly removed” below tells you how DEI sites are being muted here. However, if we follow the model of other schools, they’re not being shelved but just put into a file cabinet with a different name.
The investigation follows a February 14 letter sent by Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor, which informed educational institutions and agencies that they had 14 days to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs or “face potential loss of federal funding.”
In the letter, Trainor wrote that universities’ “embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia.”
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, the University has quietly removed many mentions of DEI from its websites.
In a statement, the University informed the Maroon that it had received notice of the Department of Education’s investigation.
“The University has been notified that a complaint was filed with the Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR), and an investigation was opened. The University prohibits unlawful discrimination and will cooperate with OCR on its investigation,” the statement read.
I was quite surprised three days ago when I argued that Elon Musk’s “Hitler salute” at the post-Inaugural rally simply seemed to be a gesture of exuberance made by an overexcited and awkward man and was not a Hitler or Mussolini salute. He said, when he made the “Sieg Heil”, that “My heart goes out to you,” and, indeed, touched his heart three times while extending his arm twice. See the video below, noting also his awkward dance moves when he also pumps and extends his arms:
It amazed me that this caused a fracas not only in the media, but on my own website, with a lot of people asserting unequivocally that it was Musk’s tribute to Hitler/white supremacy or that he was trolling the Left by doing something that would anger them. Musk himself has denied the allegations. From the BBC:
Some on X, the social medial platform he owns, likened the gesture to a Nazi salute, though others disagreed.
In response, the SpaceX and Tesla chief posted on X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
But of course to enraged “progressives” on the Left (and do I need to explain again that when I put that word in quotes, it’s perjorative?), Musk’s denial means absolutely nothing. He was lauding Nazis!
My interpretation of the “Hitler salute” explanation is that it is made by people who feel they must demonize their political opponents in the worst way possible, even though there’s a more charitable explanation. And we have to be more charitable in the future, including admitting when our opponents do things that are actually good.
Further, as the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that combats anti-Semitism) explains, people are touchy after Trump’s inauguration, and this explains why some could mistakenly interpret an “awkward gesture” as a Hitler salute. One would think that the ADL’s take would give people pause, but not wokesters like AOC, who, in what some called “Jewsplaining”, tells the ADL that they were actually defending a Hitler salute:
Just to be clear, you are defending a Heil Hitler salute that was performed and repeated for emphasis and clarity.
People can officially stop listening to you as any sort of reputable source of information now. You work for them. Thank you for making that crystal clear to all. https://t.co/0gLdMCU3UV
This leads to the second issue with the Hitler take: it makes Leftists look loony, ready to demonize their opponents and lose their heads over something that at worst is dubious and at best (and most likely) is simply an “awkward gesture.” Even the ADL realizes that the Hitler take is not going to reduce antisemitism and, in my view, it simply reduces the credibility of the Left in general. Surely ludicrous interpretations of gestures as Hitleresque bespeaks a mindset that helped cost us the last election. So, like Helen Pluckrose in her website post below, I agree that people have to stop this nonsense. Even if you don’t like Musk, he was not giving fealty to Hitler. If Democrats don’t regroup and get sensible, we’ll keep on losing elections.
So I’ll quote Pluckrose in extenso, and if you don’t like what she says, take it up with her. I’m not arguing any more about this issue; I’ve pondered the Hitler argument, dismissed it as a misguided and kneejerk overreaction (Pluckrose calls it “deranged”) and I’ll move on. But click below to read.
Pluckrose is no fan of Musk, but calls for a thoughtful rather than a reactive rebuttal of his views. Quotes from her piece are indented.
This makes it especially important that those who are concerned about his influence over the policies of the most powerful country in the world and the largest forum for public political discourse, and the impact the combination of these factors can have on the rest of the world conduct themselves as serious and responsible adults in their critiques of him.
Admirers and supporters of Mr. Musk who believe these concerns to be unfounded range from thoughtful, well-informed politically engaged people who support his general views and overall aims and believe that the benefits his expertise, his stances and his influence bring outweigh any personal foibles to utter lunatics, wedded to ideological narratives divorced from reality and engaging in tactics common to both the woke left and the woke right. It is important that his thoughtful and serious critics engage in good faith with his thoughtful and serious supporters and address the reality of his influence in ways that focus on what is true, what is significant and what has real impact on the world.
It is already the case that Musk’s least thoughtful and serious supporters on the woke right typically shut down any criticism of him by claiming it to be a symptom of “Musk Derangement Syndrome” (MDS). This accusation, when made spuriously, functions in a very similar way to the woke left’s use of the DiAngelo style concept of ‘whiteness’ (an unconscious drive to uphold the systems of white supremacy for one’s own political benefit). That is, it functions as a Kafka Trap in which any attempts to deny that one’s motivations in criticising Musk’s or DiAngelo’s ideas are caused by either of these pathologies are evidence of the pathologies. By formulating concepts of MDS or whiteness which contain within them the premise that any denial of them are evidence of the derangement or unconscious bias skewing the speaker’s judgement, it preemptively shuts down the possibility of any critique being legitimate. This kind of circular reasoning is not persuasive to reasonable, ethical people who care about what is true and share the stated aims of Musk to oppose censorship and dismantle governmental corruption or of DiAngelo to oppose racism and dismantle racial prejudice (my readers are likely to support both) but think that doing so in an evidence-based and consistently principled way is essential
Nevertheless, if one wishes to counter claims that any criticism of Musk is a manifestation of Musk Derangement Syndrome, it is important not to be deranged.
She gives a number of social-media examples of this “derangement”, and then analyzes interpretations of the gesture, all three of which followed my post:
. . . . even if there is a possibility that [Musk] was deliberately making a Nazi salute, mindreading him as doing so and responding in a hyperbolic and overwrought way is not remotely helpful whatever the motivations were. Consider the reasonable responses people are likely to make to such interpretations in any scenario.
Musk was simply illustrating his heart going out to the people he was speaking to.
People will see the woke left doing its “Everybody who disagrees with me is a Nazi” thing again and the perception that it should not be taken seriously is strengthened.
Musk was trolling with the gesture and trying to provoke this response in order to illustrate how deranged ‘the left’ is.
Well done. You played right into that and consequently reduced the credibility of left-wing critiques of Musk including from those of us who are not deranged.
Musk really does have sympathies with Nazi ideology and intended to convey that he will influence the Trump administration in that direction.
This would be highly alarming and indicate a need to seriously and carefully scrutinise his policy recommendations and shore up your credibility so that you are taken seriously should you find indications of it. The worst thing to do is shriek “Nazi” spuriously and increase the tendency of reasonable people to assume that somebody being accused of being a Nazi has simply said something considered problematic using the tortuous reasoning of the Critical Social Justice Left and ignore it rather than have a look to see if they have, in fact, expressed views compatible with a genocidal antisemitic and/or ethnonational ideology.
Stop it.
There is never a good time for hyperbolic, overwrought and, yes, deranged accusations of Nazism, fascism or far-right beliefs and intentions based on little to no evidence, but of all the times when this is a terrible idea, this is probably the worst. The Trump administration is in power, Elon Musk has significant influence on it, the power and influence of X as a platform for news has never been higher and policies that impact not only Americans but the rest of the world are already underway. This is a time to be serious grown ups and carefully, thoughtfully and honestly scrutinise both policy decisions influenced by Elon Musk and the impact of his social media platform on the state of political discourse and what everyday people who vote and influence culture believe to be true and ethical. It is a time to be particularly conscientious when evaluating the views and actions of Musk, give him credit for anything positive and beneficial he achieves in an ethical way, and present any concerns that arise in a serious, well-evidenced and well-reasoned way.
If there is reason to be concerned about the power, influence and character of Elon Musk (and I suspect there is), the people who will need to be convinced of this will be serious, ethical, thoughtful, American conservatives who care about what is true and what is morally right, who are currently of the view that Musk is beneficial to their great nation (and hopefully the world) and are absolutely sick of the authoritarian irrationality and spurious name-calling of the Critical Social Justice left.
I beg you, please stop being deranged.
Helen Pluckrose knows whereof she speaks, as she’s been a critic of “Critical Social Justice” for a long time, including her book with Lindsay, Cynical Theories (yes, Lindsay has gone a bit off the rails after the publication). Her take on this whole kerfuffle is sensible and, I think, correct.
The best criticism is often satire, and here’s some: first a take from the Babylon Bee, and then a Musk interpretation of the often-used “Hitler goes nuts” scene from the 2004 movie Downfall:
