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Dear Reader (especially those still simmering over the London coffee-disposal incident),
On December 5, 2023, the presidents of three elite universities appeared before Congress and had their hats handed to them. Rep. Elise Stefanik became a star in the GOP firmament for grilling the presidents, particularly Harvard’s Claudine Gay, for their handling—mishandling—of anti-Israel protests on their campuses. You can read some extended highlights in context here.
For brevity’s sake, I’ll trim it down even more. Stefanik repeatedly, and correctly, quoted various chants from the protesters—and some harassers of specific Jews—and asked if statements like “There is only one solution—intifada, revolution!” and “Globalize the intifada” amount to endorsements of genocide against Jews in Israel (put aside what “globalizing” the intifada would mean for Jews outside of Israel). Gay condemned the statements, saying at various times that they amounted to “hateful, reckless, offensive speech.” They were “abhorrent” to Gay personally, and “at odds with the values of Harvard.”
So far, so good. But when pressed, she refused to commit to the idea they violated campus speech policies or warranted taking any concrete action against the protesters because of Harvard’s deep “commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.”
One objection to Gay’s response was that it was a lie. Harvard’s policies did allow for the punishment of what it considers “discriminatory harassment.”
The bigger objection was that Harvard simply didn’t consider vile and violent speech aimed at Israel, or Jews on campus (Israeli or otherwise), to meet that test. Harvard informed students that using the wrong pronoun can run afoul of the above policy, but calls for making Israel judenfrei is just the stuff of robust free speech.
As one vivid legal complaint against Harvard put it, “Harvard permits students and faculty to advocate, without consequence, the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world. Meanwhile, Harvard requires students to take a training class that warns that they will be disciplined if they engage in sizeism, fatphobia, racism, transphobia, or other disfavored behavior.”
In other words, Harvard—and the other universities in the dock—considered some speech unacceptable, just not anti-Jewish speech. At MIT, the campus Hillel chapter warned Jewish students that parts of the campus were in effect no-go zones because it wasn’t safe for them, given MIT’s failures to guarantee a safe environment.
This is the First Amendment version of the phrase “for my friends everything, for my enemies, the law.”
The right had a field day denouncing the hypocrisy and institutionalized antisemitism of it all (and rightfully so).
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The Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez ripped the bark off Gay and her counterparts at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania in an excellent piece titled “College Presidents Expose the Moral Rot Within Their Institutions.”
The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT appeared before a House committee on Wednesday to answer for their shameful inaction in the face of antisemitic rhetoric and attacks on their campuses. Their craven responses were as non-committal as their handlers obviously wanted, which served only to indict their institutions.
Fast-forward to another president, this one being of the very same Heritage Foundation.
We should all have someone in our life who loves us as much as Kevin Roberts loves Tucker Carlson. When Carlson was still on Fox News, the Heritage Foundation president displayed a level of Carlsonphilia that was hard to comprehend. At times it seemed like Heritage had become a massive booking bureau just to get Roberts on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
When Roberts announced that Carlson would be headlining Heritage’s 50th anniversary gala in 2023, he proclaimed that, “Tucker Carlson is a fearless American who is unafraid to challenge the Washington regime, ask tough questions, and hold the ruling elite accountable. His nightly show is must-see TV for anyone who realizes we have a limited window of time to save this country.”
Indeed, one of the things Roberts admires most about Carlson is his “fearlessness” in pursuit of asking “tough questions.” Carlson, who amplified batty conspiracy theories about January 6—and so much more—is in Roberts’ eyes the very essence of the last honest man in America. More on that in a moment.
First, we need to muster some retroactive empathy for Roberts. It must have been a crushing blow when he heard that Fox fired Carlson. But Roberts shook off the melancholy and rallied to his friend. Heritage issued a statement: “Heritage President: America Needs More Courageous Leaders Like Tucker Carlson.” It really is worth reading in full for its lurid praise of Carlson as a heroic, morally courageous truth-teller, but here’s how it begins:
[block]Over the past several years, no one in America has demonstrated more courage in speaking truth to power than Tucker. Every night, Tucker challenged the Washington establishment, asked the tough questions no one else dared to ask, and held the ruling elite accountable for their actions. His popularity was a testament to the hunger in America for people willing to stand up and tell the truth.[block]
But something funny happened to Carlson after he struck out on his own in “independent media.” To whatever extent he asked fearless, tough questions and told necessary but unpopular truths before (a very debatable proposition), he pretty much gave up even the pretense of any of that once he struck out on his own with his personal media platform. He didn’t ask particularly tough questions of the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani. He didn’t speak truth to power when speaking to Vladimir Putin, he lobbed softballs at him—when he wasn’t walking around Moscow like a pitchman for the Kremlin Grocers Association. He did show a little grit interviewing Sen. Ted Cruz about his support of Israel and strikes on Iran but was fairly servile when talking to the actual president of Iran.
More recently, Carlson has invited a slew of Jew haters, anti-American cranks, and crackpots on his show, and Roberts has stood with him. When Carlson invited Darryl Cooper, a loopy Holocaust and World War II revisionist on his show in September 2024, he didn’t ask him any meaningfully tough questions, unless variants of “tell me more” are tough questions. Roberts did tweet a defense of Winston Churchill after Cooper and Tucker had floated the batty claim that Churchill was the real villain of World War II. But Roberts was careful not to mention Carlson. Roberts didn’t noticeably dissent from Cooper’s claims that Jews just ended up dead because the Germans failed to plan for all of their POWs. And then, just to make it clear he didn’t hold the Cooper interview against him, Roberts appeared at a Tucker Carlson Live event days later. He then recruited Carlson to write a “Dear Fellow Patriot” fundraising letter for Heritage 10 days after Carlson called Cooper “the most important historian in the United States.”
All of this past context is prologue for the events of the last week. Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes, a Hitler- and Stalin-loving rabid antisemite and racist, on his show. Carlson asked no meaningfully tough questions of the Jew-hating gargoyle. They just had a nice chat about how much they hate Zionism, Zionists, especially Christian ones (like George W. Bush, Mike Huckabee, and Ted Cruz who suffer from what Carlson calls the “brain virus” of Zionism), and agreed in word and deed to form a kind of de facto mutual admiration society.
The conversation earned precisely the backlash Carlson and Fuentes wanted. Amid the criticisms, Kevin Roberts wanted everyone to know one thing: He wasn’t going to break with Tucker. “There has been speculation that @Heritage is distancing itself from @TuckerCarlson over the past 24 hours. I want to put that to rest right now—here are my thoughts.”
His thoughts came in the form of a video, in which Roberts did say that “antisemitism should be condemned.” He doesn’t actually condemn it, though, he just says it should be condemned. But we can give him the benefit of the doubt on that, I guess. He had more important things on his mind. Indeed, the text of the tweet reveals where his real priorities and passion are: sticking with Carlson and his fans.
In the video, Roberts repeatedly trots out a lot of familiar language about how much he and the Heritage Foundation value “robust debate” and “free speech.” He opposes canceling people. He vows that Heritage will always “defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson.” After promising that Carlson “will always be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation,” Roberts says that “the venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division.” And, “Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.” Then he says he abhors some of the things Nick Fuentes says, but “canceling him is not the answer either. When we disagree with someone’s thoughts and opinions we challenge those ideas and debate.” He finished with some sucking up to J.D. Vance and America First boilerplate.
As Roberts might say in response to the question, “Why do you love Tucker so much?”—where shall I begin?
First of all, what slander is he talking about? How is criticizing Carlson for an obvious softball, Nazi-whitewashing interview a slander? Just to emphasize the point, Carlson did not challenge Fuentes’ ideas. He did not engage in “robust debate.” Is it slanderous to infer that Carlson doesn’t meaningfully disagree with Fuentes if he can’t think of anything to challenge or debate him about?
Then there’s this “venomous coalition,” which presumably includes numerous Republican officials, conservatives, and I guess Jews, and their “sowing of division.” Fuentes is a guy who thinks women want to be raped and that Jews aren’t Americans and should be gotten rid of. How is giving him a platform not “sowing division” but criticizing all of that is?
Moreover, who are these bad actors “serving someone else’s agenda”? It’s hard for me not to hear this as a dog whistle to the people who nodded along as Fuentes and Carlson nodded along at their demonization of “organized Jewry.” Carlson can recycle Qatari talking points and be seen as simply engaging in healthy, America First discourse. But taking offense at it sows division?
Oh, and let’s not glide past that bizarre bit about what the “American people” expect from the Heritage Foundation. I love the hilarious arrogance underpinning the idea that the Heritage Foundation has some kind of mandate from the American people to attack the left. Does Roberts actually believe that the American people would collectively sigh with disappointment if Heritage relented in its attacks on the left for a moment in pursuit of some common ground? Kevin Roberts hates sowing division over Tucker Carlson because it might get in the way of the Heritage Foundation’s mission to sow division at scale. That’s some weird stuff.
Or to be blunt: This is one of the most intellectually fatuous and morally blinkered arguments I have heard from any self-styled intellectual of the right in my four decades in Washington. It is shamefully stupid and ethically deviant.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, Roberts is borrowing the playbook of Claudine Gay and the other university presidents who tried to hide behind the ideals of free speech to make room for people who hate and harass Jews. The constituencies are different, but lord knows there’s overlap in the Venn diagrams between the Jew-haters of the left and the Jew-haters of the right.
But Roberts is worse than Gay and the other elite university administrators. First of all, as much as I loathe the pro-Hamas crowd, most of them at least have the courtesy to couch their genocidal rhetoric in euphemisms they can hide behind. That also gives the university administrators some cover: Intifada can mean different things to different people, blah, blah, blah. But Fuentes eschews any such rhetorical camouflage. Sure, he winks with his jokes about Jews and ovens and cookies, but the whole point of his Nazi schtick is to be obvious about his white supremacist racism and antisemitism. Roberts knows what Carlson and Fuentes are up to, he just doesn’t care enough to draw any lines that would exclude them from the right.
But that’s not the only reason Roberts is worse. Harvard, MIT, Columbia, et al., should be ashamed of their records of policing speech and providing cover for people who incite hatred. But you know what Harvard doesn’t have that Heritage does? A “one voice” policy.
Unlike other think tanks, scholars at Heritage are not permitted to publicly deviate from the party line. It shouldn’t surprise us that Roberts thinks the whole of the right should have a one-voice policy too. His statement is a call for a popular front on the right. He doesn’t think conservatives should actually argue among themselves because that “sows division” and serves the interests of those “bad actors” serving “someone else’s agenda.” For Roberts, Tucker Carlson is the right made flesh, so if his policy is to bring neo-Nazis inside the tent, we should all honor the “one voice” policy and stay focused on attacking the left. “Speaking with one voice is a distinguishing piece of the Heritage Foundation’s strategic advantage. While other organizations may have experts advocating contradictory points of view, Heritage employees are always rowing in the same direction.”
I have real sympathy for the scholars, staffers, and board members of the Heritage Foundation, because I know many of them have problems with this. Some obviously don’t. But some must. And because the Heritage Foundation has a “one voice” policy that rejects the robust debate Roberts claims to cherish, they are left with a dilemma. I am free to disagree with my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. I’m expected—rightly—to be professional and respectful in my disagreements, but disagreement—public or private—is actually valued and protected.
Not so at Heritage, which is why so many people left when Heritage changed many of its traditional stances to better align with Donald Trump and MAGA small donors. Now the people still at Heritage are left in a similar bind. Do you stick around as the president of your institution labors to carve out a safe space inside the tent for bigots and anti-American cranks? If you stay, you can’t complain too loudly—literally and figuratively—when outside observers assume you, too, speak with that same, single voice. That is, again literally, the whole point of the “one voice” policy. And Kevin Roberts has put everyone who works for him in a moral and intellectual trap. All because he loves Tucker Carlson so much.
Author’s Note: After I filed this newsletter, Roberts came out and criticized Fuentes and denounced his rhetoric. But there still was no criticism of Carlson.
Various & Sundry
Canine Update
I had to leave town for a few days and TFJ was stuck with obstreperous canines and no dog car. The lack of the dog car was already exacerbating existing schisms in the canine realm. But we got the car back, and everything is now back to normal (including the shameful practice of appeasement). Although Zoë this morning for some reason (initially) declined treats. I honestly think she was pouting at me offering Pippa gratuitous belly rubs. The girls love the fall weather and frankly look marvelous against the leaves. BTW, people often complain that I play favorites with Pippa because she gets so much more coverage. But the truth is I spend more quality time with Zoë. The difference is that Pippa is an excellent poser, while Zoë has the tendency to avoid the camera. But when I get a good pic, I think she’s a beauty. Gracie is a beauty too (and a top-flight sleeper).
Canine Update goes here.
The Dispawtch
Why I’m a Dispatch Member: Heard Jonah on an EconTalk broadcast with Russ Roberts a long time ago. A good friend gave me a gift subscription to The Dispatch, and I am now a faithful follower.
Personal Details: I’m a family physician, and 25 years ago I bought 70 acres of woods and prairie behind our log home and created walking trails for my patients. They never came, but it became an off-leash dog-walking paradise. It’s the top-rated tourist attraction in Kansas, by Google Maps ratings.
Pet’s Age: 60 (deceased)
Gotcha Story: My brother had been pestering our parents to get a dog. At a tense moment of summer baseball, our mom shouted, “If you get a hit, we’ll get a dog.” He hit a double.
Pet’s Likes: Chasing bottle rockets up 72nd Terrace in Prairie Village, Kansas. Just down the street from George Brett’s (current) considerably larger home.
Pet’s Dislikes: Being left behind for any activity, any time.
Pet’s Proudest Moment: I took her to live with me in my fraternity at the University of Kansas. She would follow me onto campus, wait outside the lecture hall as thousands of students streamed by, and immediately find me when I emerged. Every time. Smartest animal I’ve ever known.
A Moment Someone (Wrongly) Accused Pet of Being Bad: Double would never defecate on our lawn. She always went across the street to do her business with the neighbor, who objected vociferously at the volunteer fertilizer. My father called him the DSM, for Dog Sh-t Man.
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