SNL applied the media’s ‘Republicans pounce’ formula to last week’s campus antisemitism hearing.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the fallout from a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses, call out an “apology” from Deadspin’s attack on a 9-year-old, and cover more media misses.
‘Republicans Pounce’ Comes for Antisemitism on Campus
For sensible viewers of the recent congressional hearing on antisemitism on campus, the obvious takeaway was the failure of three Ivy League university presidents to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate university policy.
But not everyone is so sensible.
The New York Times and Saturday Night Live seemed to believe the issue was actually the Republican lawmakers who put the officials’ feet to the fire on the issue of antisemitism.
“Republicans Try to Put Harvard, M.I.T. and Penn on the Defensive About Antisemitism,” a Times headline read.
And Saturday Night Live aired a widely panned parody skit that took aim at Republican Representative Elise Stefanik’s line of questioning, rather than the presidents’ embarrassing responses.
“I am here today because hate speech has no place on college campuses. Hate speech belongs in Congress, on Elon Musk’s Twitter, in private dinners with my donors and in public speeches by my work husband Donald Trump,” the Stefanik character says in the skit.
Stefanik pressed Harvard president Claudine Gay over chants of “intifada” at student protests. Gay claimed the calls for violence do not violate the university’s code of conduct and claimed the university has a strong commitment to free speech and ideological diversity. (This despite the Harvard Crimson‘s 2024 faculty survey finding fewer than 3 percent of professors identify as “having conservative” or “very conservative” political leanings.)
Asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate university policy, all three university leaders offered lackluster responses.
MIT president Sally Kornbluth said the university would consider calls for Jewish genocide harassment only if they were “targeted at individuals, not making public statements” and if they were “pervasive and severe.”
UPenn’s Liz Magill said “it is a context-dependent decision.” Pressed to say “yes” or “no,” she replied, “If the speech becomes conduct. It can be harassment, yes.”
Harvard’s Claudine Gay similarly said “it depends on the context” of the situation.
MIT’s executive committee expressed “full and unreserved support” for Kornbluth two days after the hearing and praised “her outstanding academic leadership, her judgment, her integrity, her moral compass, and her ability to unite our community around MIT’s core values.”
More than 500 Harvard faculty members supported Gay in a letter to the school’s board on Sunday.
The faculty members urged university leaders “in the strongest possible terms to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay.”
Gay, for her part, apologized for her comments. “I am sorry. Words matter,” she told the Harvard Crimson. “When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret.”
The Harvard Corporation met on Sunday and is scheduled to meet again Monday and is reportedly considering whether it should make a public statement in support of Gay.
Backlash to her testimony led University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill to resign from her post over the weekend, after the board of Penn’s Wharton school of business called for her immediate resignation and a university donor pulled a $100 million donation.
But while SNL and the New York Times sought to downplay the testimony, a bipartisan group of 74 members of Congress called on the college’s governing boards to remove the leaders and to take action to protect Jewish and Israeli students, professors, and faculty.
Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, announced his resignation from Harvard’s antisemitism board in response to Gay’s testimony. “Without rehashing all of the obvious reasons that have been endlessly adumbrated online, and with great respect for the members of the committee, the short explanation is that both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.”
The presidents’ testimony comes as at least 1,481 antisemitic incidents have been documented by the Anti-Defamation League in recent weeks, including 292 involving college and university campus grounds.
Seventy-three percent of Jewish college students said they have experienced or witnessed antisemitism on campus since their fall semester began, according to an ADL-Hillel International study.
And a concerning new survey of college students by UC Berkeley political science professor Ron Hassner found just 47 percent of college students who embrace the “from the river to the sea” slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some students mistakenly believed the slogan refers to the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea, or the Atlantic.
This is the same generation that includes White House interns who brazenly sent President Biden a letter last week accusing him of having “ignored” the “pleas of the American people” by not calling for a ceasefire in the Israel–Hamas war.
“We, the undersigned Fall 2023 White House and Executive Office of the President interns, will no longer remain silent on the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people,” the interns wrote.
Headline Fail of the Week
Deadspin added an editor’s note to its viral piece accusing a 9-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan of wearing blackface. “The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native headdress,” the original story read. The story claimed the boy had “found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time.”
But the boy’s mother now says her son is of Native American heritage, as his grandfather is a business committee member of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians.
“This has nothing to do with the NFL,” Shannon Holden wrote on Facebook. “Also, CBS showed him multiple times and this is the photo people chose to blast to create division. He is Native American – just stop already.”
Under the threat of legal action, Deadspin issued a quasi-apology saying the article’s “intended focus was on the NFL and its checkered history on race, an issue which our writer has covered extensively for Deadspin.”
Media Misses
• Progressive activist and author Saira Rao thinks Taylor Swift is unworthy of being Time’s person of the year because she has not snapped her fingers and ended the Israel-Hamas war.
https://twitter.com/sairasameerarao/status/1732481722627899671?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The missive earned her a community note that pointed out the obvious: “Historically, conflicts and wars have not ended due to Instagram posts. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that an Instagram post made by Taylor Swift will end the war in Gaza.”
• Ryan Grim, the D.C. bureau chief for the Intercept, seems to think it’s time to move on from the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack.
Went on CNN this evening and was asked about Jayapal getting criticized for allegedly not sufficiently condemning rape.
I said: "This will be one of the key moments we look back on years from now and say, remember when Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the CPC, was made to… pic.twitter.com/VXGL2Zp4CF
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) December 6, 2023
• A video from the fourth GOP primary debate of Vivek Ramaswamy challenging Nikki Haley to name three provinces in eastern Ukraine has gone viral on X, with Ramaswamy and other users claiming the former South Carolina governor failed to meet the challenge. In the clip, Ramaswamy suggests Haley and other Republicans who want to send U.S. troops to Ukraine can’t name three provinces in eastern Ukraine.
And while Haley has not suggested sending American troops to Ukraine, the video was selectively edited to exclude her response, in which she does indeed name three provinces.
Vivek Ramaswamy: "One thing that Joe Biden and Nikki Haley have in common is that neither of them could even state for you three provinces in eastern Ukraine that they want to send our troops to actually fight for." pic.twitter.com/ENGL3H0j8T
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) December 7, 2023