Yet another group emerges that purports to have the power to identify not only “disinformation” online, but also what stories are being pushed by what it calls “pro-Russian accounts”. And it's not just another group, but another group funded almost entirely by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who along with George Soros (that’s, just a fact), seems to be single-handedly funding shady groups that feed corporate media an array of unverified claims designed to demean stories as either “disinformation” or emanating “from pro-Russian accounts.” In this case, Associated Press took a very vague report from what it calls, “Reset, a London-based nonprofit that studies social media's impact on democracy” in order to claim that concern about the train derailment and explosion in East Palestine, Ohio – and the Biden administration's lackluster response to it – was driven not by real Americans, but “pro-Russian accounts”. We’ll examine the ongoing fraud in this industry and this tactic.
Then, what are the limits of academic freedom? That question has more resonance than ever as the University of Pennsylvania Law School appears quite extraordinarily poised to fire one of its most accomplished scholars, despite her tenure, due to what the dean calls “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic actions and statements.” We’ll speak to that professor, the lawyer and physician, Amy Wax, and then we'll speak to Norman Finkelstein, who had his own academic freedom scandal back in 2007 when a campaign led by Alan Dershowitz succeeded in denying Finkelstein tenure due to his critical views of the state of Israel.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the main topics on which we have been reporting on this show as well as in our journalism is this scam industry called the anti-disinformation industry, in which all sorts of groups emerge with benign-sounding names, almost always funded by the same small set of liberal billionaires like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar, or by the U.S. Security State and Western security intelligence agencies that purport to be able to identify online what is and is not “disinformation,” claiming that they employ experts who are trained in that field. But it's a completely fraudulent field of discipline. There is no such thing as an “apolitical disinformation expert.” And yet every time one of these groups emerge, it feeds to the media whatever little report it has about who is spreading disinformation and who are “pro-Russian accounts,” and the media mindlessly spread it with no scrutiny or journalistic inquiry.
Remember, the Twitter files revealed one of the worst frauds of all, the Hamilton 68 dashboard, invented in 2016 by a group led by Bill Kristol with funding from Pierre Omidyar that purported to keep a secret list of “pro-Russian accounts” and constantly made claims about stories being emanating not from American citizens organically, but from “pro-Russian accounts.” The list of accounts was secret and Hamilton 68 refused to divulge it. Matt Taibbi and other reporters were able to show with the Twitter Files that it was essentially a list of just 600 people, mostly Americans, who simply had dissident views on foreign policy that they labeled “pro-Russian.”
Yet another group emerged to produce this extraordinary headline in AP just yesterday “pro-Moscow voices tried to steer Ohio train disaster debate”. And it's an article that just simply passed along uncritically, the claims of this brand-new group with almost no journalistic questioning,
Soon after a train derailed and spilled toxic chemicals in Ohio last month, anonymous pro-Russian accounts started spreading misleading claims and anti-American propaganda about it on Twitter, using Elon Musk's new verification system to expand their reach while creating the illusion of credibility.
The accounts, which parroted Kremlin talking points on myriad topics, claimed without evidence that authorities in Ohio were lying about the true impact of the chemical spill. The accounts spread fearmongering posts that preyed on legitimate concerns about pollution and health effects and compared the response to the derailment with America's support for Ukraine following its invasion by Russia (AP News. March 18, 2023).
Reset is this brand-new group no one has ever heard of that the AP just takes this report from and uncritically publishes.
The accounts identified by Reset’s researchers received an extra boost from Twitter itself in the form of a blue checkmark. Before Musk purchased Twitter last year, its checkmarks denoted accounts run by verified users, often public figures, celebrities, or journalists. It was seen as a mark of authenticity on a platform known for bots and spam accounts.
While researchers spotted clues suggesting some of the accounts are linked to coordinated efforts by Russian disinformation agencies, others were American, showing the Kremlin doesn't always have to pay to get its message out (AP News. March 18, 2023).
So if you are somebody reading about concerns about the train derailment and explosion in East Palestine and the botched response from the Biden administration Department of Transportation led by Pete Buttigieg, you were apparently joining in a “Kremlin disinformation campaign” and not, as you thought, criticizing your own government over what ought to be on the concerns of everybody, which were the health risks to the people of that community now suddenly were to believe that this came from “pro-Russian Twitter accounts”. And it wasn't just the AP that mindlessly and uncritically spread it. So too did all sorts of people with the title of journalist and corporate media.
Here, for example, we see the unsurprising tweet from the now-fired CNN host Brian Stelter. His tweet was very representative of how the corporate media constantly just repeats claims like parrots with no questioning of any kind.
Pro-Russian Twitter accounts hyped misleading claims “and anti-establishment propaganda” about the East Palestine derailment “using Elon Musk's new verification system to expand their reach while creating the illusion of credibility”. @David Klepper reports (March 19, 2023).
By “reports” he means he took this new report from the media-funded group. I just wrote up the press release and that was the end of the story. In response to Brian Stelter's tweet, I asked him a set of questions– that of course, he ignored – that to me was just very obvious. They are the questions that if somebody tried to give me a report like that, I would immediately ask. There you see my response.
Which are the “pro-Russian accounts”? Who determined who is “pro-Russia”? How was that determination made? Do any of these questions enter your head even for a second before you just uncritically pass along claims like these? (March 19, 2023).
Now, even just a small amount of research reveals who it is and who funds this group, and we'll get to that in a second. But we emailed this group, Reset, to ask exactly those questions. We asked:
- Where is the list of pro-Russian accounts?
In other words, if you're claiming that this came from pro-Russian accounts, who are these pro-Russian accounts?
- How was this determination made?
How do you decide who is pro-Russian or not? Is opposition to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine sufficient to become “pro-Russian”? Who knows? It's a secret list and a secret formula.
- Has anyone reviewed the list to verify its accuracy? and
- Please provide a few sample names of those who are on it.
You could tell by a couple of the quotes mentioned in the AP article that Anonymous – it's a pseudonym – accounts were included on the list, but it was very difficult to understand why those accounts were listed as “pro-Russian.” But how can you call yourself a journalist if all you do is take a list or a claim from a new group that just pops up without mentioning who their funding is and has a secret list of “pro-Russian groups” that refuses to divulge and then create headlines that stories that are actually coming from real Americans are instead being pushed by the Kremlin?
Right on their funding page, which we looked at, you can see that it's yet another group, like so many of these groups funded by the eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who also funded The Intercept when I was there. You see it. It says that this new group, Reset, is a nonprofit, and their founding funders are Luminate and the Sandler Foundation. Luminate is a global philanthropic organization that funds and supports nonprofit and for-profit organizations and advocates for the policies and actions that helps build stronger societies. It was founded by the Omidyar Group, a diverse collection of companies, organizations and initiatives established by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and his wife, Pam. Reset is a program of Luminate Projects Ltd. that is a UK Ltd company owned by Luminate, founded by the Omidyar Group, a U.S.-based philanthropic network.
Over and over and over this is exactly what we have, which is these shady groups that appear claiming to have secret lists like Joe McCarthy had of people they claim are promoting “pro-Russian propaganda.” No one can see those lists, no one has any idea how this determination was made or who is making these assessments and the media just creates uncritical headlines based on them. This story is now a Kremlin plot. This story is being pushed by pro-Russian accounts. This is what happened after 2016 when Democrats realized they lost the election and decided to blame not themselves, but among other things, a free Internet and decided to fund this whole scam industry that now calls any dissent from their orthodoxy “disinformation” and blames any stories they dislike – such as criticizing the Biden administration for its failure to respond to this train disaster in an appropriate way as coming from “pro-Russian accounts.” It's an incredibly transparent tactic. It's incredibly shady, and yet it's one that the corporate media, as always, falls for because they want to. There's zero journalistic questioning about any of this and that, of course, fails to provide the most basic answers to the most basic questions, ones that should have been asked by AP before publishing that story.
The Interview: Amy Wax
For our interview segment, we interviewed two very different professors, both of whom found themselves in intense controversies regarding the limits of academic freedom. In just a few minutes, we'll speak with Norman Finkelstein, whose academic career was destroyed in 2007, when a campaign led by Alan Dershowitz to deny him tenure at DePaul University largely over his years of harsh criticism of the state of Israel, proved successful when DePaul denied Finkelstein tenure. And Finkelstein, despite a Ph.D. from Princeton and a defense of his scholarship, even by many with whom he vehemently disagreed, has been unemployable in academia ever since.
But first, we'll speak with Amy Wax, who has one of the most impressive résumés in this country, regardless of what you think of her views. She's a lawyer, a physician, and an academic who is currently the Robert Mundy professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1975, she graduated near the top of her class at Yale University with a B.S. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. She then attended both Harvard Law School and Harvard Medical School, and, upon completing medical school, worked as a neurologist in Manhattan throughout the 1980s. Working part-time, she put herself through Columbia Law School, Clark, with one of the most prestigious appellate judges in the country, and then worked for the Solicitor General's office under both the Bush and Clinton administrations, arguing 15 cases before the United States Supreme Court.
Since 2001, when she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, her record of academic accomplishments and awards is far too long to even try to list. Suffice to say, she has been regarded as one of the most prestigious legal scholars in the United States. But now her career and her tenure are very much in jeopardy. She's the target of disciplinary action by her university, and the dean of the law school has expressed regret that she's still on the faculty and called for major sanctions with termination clearly on the table, meaning tenure apparently is no longer providing protection. A petition has been signed by tens of thousands of people, and local and state lawmakers have written to the university to pressure the university to remove her. There are groups like the Academic Freedom Alliance and FIRE group that have made public statements against any move to fire her on the grounds that it violates her right to free expression and would set a speech-chilling precedent, even for tenured academics. If Penn perceives the sanctions are terminations as expected, Professor Wax has vowed to sue the school. We're very excited to be able to speak with her. This is a crucial case testing the limits of academic freedom in modern-day America. And we're happy to invite her on this show and speak to her now.
G. Greenwald: Professor Wax, good evening. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Prof. Wax: Thank you for having me.
G. Greenwald: Absolutely. So let me just begin by asking you, there was a report in The New York Times last week purporting to report on your case. Where exactly does your case stand in terms of the university processes?
Prof. Wax: […]seeking to hear about his complaints to the people of the Senate, that's the University Wire Removal Act. And we're just like, […] hearings would be. And what the conditions of those hearings would be in Penn. Being in complete control of all of this is trying to establish procedures that are as damaging and prejudicial to me as possible. And I am trying to establish procedures that are basically fair so that I will get a fair shake in this whole thing. So that's basically where we are. We don't know when all of this will come down, but probably by the end of the summer, that would be my guess.
G. Greenwald: So, you feel confident that the dean of the law school is devoted to your termination?
Prof. Wax: No. The dean has been very cagey and very coy about what he's actually trying to do. There's been just a tremendous lack of candor throughout. And as you know, secrecy is the weapon of tyranny. So, we're not getting a commitment on that. He's seeking major sanctions. Major sanctions under our faculty handbook can be anything from a slap on the wrist to termination and stripping me of tenure or anything in between. So, it's really not clear what the outcome of all of this stuff will be. And he hasn't even really come out in a candid way. He did say to students a few years ago, he had a secret town hall meeting with students, in which he said, “It sucks that Amy Wax is a professor here” and promised them that he was doing his very best to essentially try and get rid of me. So that's pretty much the closest that he's come to showing his cards on this.
G. Greenwald: So, the University of Pennsylvania is a private institution. It's not a state school, it's not run by the government. A lot of people wonder, well, look, this is a private institution. If the people who run it feel that you are a poor representative of the institution, or in some ways are doing things prejudicial to its future success, why don't they have the right to simply fire you?
Prof. Wax: Well, the university is not an ordinary workplace. Okay? First of all, I have tenure. A tenure is a form of protection that has long traditions behind it. I also have an employment contract. And so, the real question is what does tenure protect? One thing that it does protect or one protection that it does extend traditionally is the freedom to speak, to express my opinion, to express my opinion outside the school freely as any citizen would and that is what my dean is attempting to punish me for. So that is a radical transformation of what is generally understood as the protection of tenure. And it isn't just a convention. There are statements that have come out of various universities, statements as the Chicago Principals, the Woodward Report, the American Association of University Professors – statements historically that reinforce that understanding of tenure and of the protections of people in the university. And Penn being a private university professes to honor those statements, those traditions. In fact, Penn has stated that it honors First Amendment principles – which it doesn't have to do, as the First Amendment of the Constitution only applies to the government – but that's a very high degree of protection of my free expression. So once again, the university is not like other workplaces. The one point I would add is that for the university to be true to its nature and do its job, which is to develop knowledge and preserve knowledge and seek truth, it really does need to allow its members and its professors to speak freely, to debate ideas. It can't censor them or restrict them to an orthodoxy. And that is what my dean is trying to do.
G. Greenwald: You know, I've been involved in free speech debates a lot, first as a lawyer and now as a journalist. Definitely put me on the more absolutist side of that spectrum and always emphasize that if there's any place in society, even if you have doubts about the extent of free speech, where we want essentially all ideas to be debatable, it's academia that's supposed to be one sector of society where all dissent is fair game, where you need at least one place where even the most sacred orthodoxies can be aggressively deconstructed and debated. I guess my question to you is, in terms of your view of tenure and academic freedom, are there limits to it? For example, if a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania was an outright and proud Holocaust denialist or even, say a political science professor argued that Nazism was a valid and persuasive ideology, that we ought to recreate concentration camps for Jews and other racial minorities. Is there a place where you draw the line, or is it an absolutist theory that any political or academic views, no matter how extreme and offensive, can never serve as the basis for the termination of a tenured faculty member?
Prof. Wax: Well, it's a little bit complicated, but I guess I'm going to simplify it by saying that I think that the right to debate and express views comes about as close to absolutism as any principle can. And the reason I say that is that when we start making judgments and imposing limits, then we hand the limiter or the judge to a very dangerous undue power that quickly slides into censorship. And I am willing – and I think we all should be willing – to bite the bullet and allow people to say things which are really – I guess you would call them extreme or unwarranted for with very little evidence behind them and not penalize them.
I want to add, though, that I have never said anything that's even close to that. Okay? I always get the Holocaust denial question. I wouldn't censor or fire a Holocaust denier, I would just ignore him because frankly, there's no evidence to back him up. It's not an issue worth discussing. There are some issues that are just not worthy of our attention. That is basically how I would present it. But, you know, I’m not any of the things that I discussed or anything like that.
So, when it comes to the sort of within your academic discipline, when you're doing work within your academic discipline, I think whether you can defend your views and there's evidence behind them, becomes an issue because that is required for quality control within systems. But certainly […] you say podcast or in the media or in your independent writing […] So, that's really and should be no business of the university. And, certainly, these claims we hear today that this traumatized, harmful and that people's offense is some kind of strange monster or harm, those sorts of tropes have absolutely no place in the university. They take a wrecking ball to academic freedom. Of course, that is by design. They want to destroy academic freedom with that rhetoric, I would absolutely avoid that rhetoric. So, you know, the Supreme Court has recognized some limits to speech, just immediate incitement, slander, libel. They're very limited. They're very, very well-defined and stylized. I honor those frauds. But anything else I say, why not, right? Either ignore it or refute it.
G. Greenwald: So one of the tactics that have been used to justify the attempt and I'm not talking here about the dean necessarily – but certainly a lot of people are very explicit about their desire to see you fired – is to try and claim that it isn't just about your public advocacy of ideas, but specific things you've said to students that make it essentially impossible for them to receive fair treatment in the workplace, many of which you've denied. And I want to get to those in a second. But before I do that, I do want to just give people a sense – who aren't necessarily familiar with your case and kind of lay the groundwork for the discussion. I wasn't implying at all that you said anything remotely like “let's recreate Auschwitz and put more Jews in the gas chamber”, but, certainly, I think I would expect that you would agree that a lot of your views are genuinely controversial, even kind of extreme for what society has decided is within the bounds of acceptable discourse.
I just want to use the New York Times article that purports to describe your publicly stated views. Just to get a sense from you about whether they've more or less done so accurately, for people to get a feel around, to kind of go over every quote. So, here's what The New York Times said in trying to summarize the views that have made you controversial.
Amy Wax, a law professor, has said publicly that, “on average, blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites, that the country is “better off with fewer Asians as long as they tend to vote for Democrats”. And that non-Western people feel a “tremendous amount of resentment and shame because of their lack of accomplishments”. At the University of Pennsylvania, where she has tenure, she invited a white nationalist to speak to her class. She has described some non-Western countries as “shitholes” and stated that “Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men”. Speaking with Mr. Carlson last year, she said, “American blacks and people from non-Western countries feel shame for the outsized achievements and contributions of Western people”. On a recent podcast, she said “I often chuckle at the ads on TV, which show a black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket fence house, adding, they never show blacks the way they really are – a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out, kids by different men (The New York Times).
I think you've been very assertive as well on your opposition to same-sex marriage, you have said things like nobody should be in a dorm room or forced to be in a dorm room with gay students. I'm sure you can quibble with some of that being that it's The New York Times. But in general, is that a fair representation of the opinions and views you've publicly advocated?
Prof. Wax: Most of them, yes. I mean, there are a couple that are just ripped out of context for the purpose of making me look as bad as possible. And that is a very common thing that the media does, a common practice among the media. They just leave out context. But yeah, I would basically say, first of all, a lot of those statements are, you know, discussed and bandied about in people's living rooms all over the country. They're not the people at the top of the food chain, the elites and people who control academia and the media and the like. They would like to shut down any back and forth and discussion on issues like this and any sort of candor or bluntness about it. But I can tell you that among ordinary people, a lot of this stuff is discussed very bluntly. That's the first thing. Secondly, the factual statements that I make that you read are backed up by very substantial evidence. In other words, they're true. So, take the statement that on average, blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites. I mean, ten years ago, the APA, the American Psychological Association, said just that. That is a factual statement that has been backed up by every measure of group intelligence that has ever been made. There isn't a single study that contradicts that descriptive statement. Men are more knowledgeable than women. Mona Sharon wrote a column that was critical of me in which she actually conceded that all the survey data out there backs that up. And she linked to it. She linked to a study that collated all survey data. Every survey that looks at how much men and women know about a range of subjects shows that men know more, pretty much about every single subject except fashion in survey after survey and study after study. So, what did I say that is untrue? I mean, I didn't really say anything that was untrue. I made some observations about chuckling at the way ads are made. I mean, that's just really an observation about how Madison Avenue is very much into fantasyland and they are about race just like everything else. And demographically, yeah, most black mothers are single mothers. I mean, that's just a fact. The last set of data I saw said that 77% of black children are born out of wedlock. So, you know, these are not facts that elites want bandied about, and they certainly want to keep them from our young people. Our young people are often just completely oblivious to this stuff. They've been miseducated. Educational malpractice is going on a routine basis, and that's part of the problem. We need to talk about this stuff in a realistic way and we don't. And the downside is that we have a progressive elite that is trying to impose policies on millions of people, turn our entire society upside down based on false premises. And then if you dare to point that out, puts a gun to your head and say you're fired.
G. Greenwald: So part of the case against you, as I mentioned earlier, is that there are a good number of students, not more than just one or two, who have claimed that in personal interactions with them, you have said things, for example, to African-American students that suggests that their presence in the school is a byproduct, not of their own achievement and merit, but because of affirmative action policies that enable people who aren't as deserving as others to nonetheless arrive at elite institutions. So when it comes to – and I realize you deny a lot of those interactions in terms of the personal conversation with students – but when it comes to the kind of statements you've just made about these statistical disparities, when it comes to the kind of, say there's a higher proportion of African Americans who commit a violent crime, that there is less of an ability on the part of women to excel in certain subjects messing with the intellectual capacity of African-Americans, always the claim is, is that because of structural inequalities that have disadvantaged particular groups or is it because there's some innate inferiority on the part of those groups that ensure that that will always happen no matter how equal the society is? So, in the case, for example, of the cognitive abilities of the various races, do you believe that African Americans, that black people are innately or inherently inferior cognitively, or that they are achieving less, are committing more crimes because of societal inequities?
Prof. Wax: Well, I mean, I'm not a biological anthropologist. I'm not a human geneticist. What would I be doing opining on those issues? I'm just making factual observations about measurements. And a lot of the statements you have attributed to me, you know, put words in my mouth all over the place. And frankly, the statements that the students say I've made to them, well, you know, they're fabricated. Look at them carefully. They're 12 years old, they're isolated. No context is provided, no date is provided, and no information is provided about why I said it when I said it. You know, the reason I said it, what we were talking about, I mean, this has all the whole hallmarks of made-up stuff. And, you know, I just deny that I make personal remarks to students. And there are only less than a handful. They are desperate at Penn to try and find things, awful things I've said to students. And of course, they only have less than a handful of isolated statements because they know that the principles of academic freedom, well-established traditional principles, mean that they can't discipline me for my statements and opinions outside the classroom and, you know, on a podcast or in writing. That's not proper and has nothing to do with my ability as a teacher or my quality as a teacher. They know that. Now they may be seeking to just take a wrecking ball to those principles, but do you know something? They haven't made up their mind about whether they're going to do that or not. They're really ashamed of doing it because they won't just come out and say, no, we're going to demolish tenure as it existed in the past. We are going to impose conformity. We are not going to let people like Amy Wax depart from the orthodoxy. We've made a decision. It's a new day. They don't even have, you know, the sort of guts to come out and say those things. So, who knows what the heck they're doing? I don't know. But I can tell you that people are putting words in my mouth all over the place.
(Voices overlap)
G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, just to be clear. I tried very hard to go out of my way not to put words into your mouth, to ask you about statements that have been attributed to you, and let you say whether or not those are representative of your views. But I guess I'm nonetheless still interested because, you know, I went to law school. I understand the scope of knowledge that you study and the kind of specialized knowledge you obtain. And I don't remember learning in law school or in my work as a lawyer or in my reading on constitutional law, anything about, say, different capacities between men and women when it comes to their ability to master certain subjects or even about the cognitive abilities of different races. So, clearly, you're opening on subjects outside of your specialty, I don't think. I mean, you're a very candid person. I don't think, you know, you can run away from the fact that you have strong opinions, not just on issues of constitutional law that you're teaching, but also on other issues that society debates. As you said, these are things people debate around the table. And I guess what I'm wondering is, do you have an opinion on whether or not the differences in races that you're describing is attributable to a neat superiority and inferiority? And if you do, is there a valid argument that that is likely to affect how you assess individual students?
Prof. Wax: Well, let me just start with whether it will affect the way I assess individual students. Of course not. Right? Because people are individuals and they run a range and it is completely disingenuous and frankly, kind of stupid for people to say that your perceptions about patterns of group differences will contaminate your ability to evaluate individual students. That is just a sort of made-up argument designed to get at somebody whose opinions you don't like. But let me go back and say that the issue of group differences is very, very pertinent to a lot of legal questions. Right? And the reason I say that is that the people in charge, the sort of woke leaft, they are obsessed with group differences and group disparities and group disadvantage and with race. Those issues are everywhere. They are discussed every single day and they are advocating for policies that are woke policy saying, number one, no group disparities will be tolerated; number two, if there are group disparities there due to racism and discrimination; number three, we have to take action legally and otherwise against racism and discrimination. We have to control the decisions that people make. We have to demolish the meritocracy. We have to get rid of standards. We have to establish double standards. I mean, these are topics that people in law schools are obsessed with and discuss every single day to say that they're not relevant to law. It just does not create a true picture.
G. Greenwald: So, I mean I find a lot of those precepts of woke ideology offensive precisely because they deny the opportunity to assess individuals as individuals and instead demand we view people as part of groups. Just today, for example, someone posted online a statement by Robin D'Angelo, one of the most racist people in America, essentially demanding or urging – I don't know why she believes she has the right to lecture to people of color what they should and shouldn't do, but she evidently does – telling them that they ought to segregate themselves from white people, that they ought to stay away from white people, have places where they can go where there are no white people. And it's offensive and repulsive precisely because it denies the individuality of the person.
Why is it that your countervailing argument that there are radical or notable or provable differences in the cognitive abilities or the cognitive outcomes of different racial groups is any better? What policy questions do those serve to know about those?
Prof. Wax: Well, first of all, I'm not trying to cancel Robin D'Angelo. I just think she's, you know, stupid and misguided, that's all. But I did try to explain why those are important observations. If people come to you and say there's a problem in, let's say, medicine or in law or among law partners, there's a paucity of blacks or Hispanics. Why are only 2% of elite medical school professors black or 1% or less, actually? That's a terrible situation. We need to take action against that. We need to change the way that doctors are selected and the way that they're tested. We need to change the standards. We need to change everything about medicine. We need to just completely revolutionize the way we do things because that requires a solution. It's due to racism. That's the only explanation. That's the only answer. If you deny that, you yourself are a racist. I mean, we have people saying this stuff every day. All right. And what's the answer to that? No, I'm sorry. There are reasons why there are so few blacks.
G. Greenwald: What are those reasons? What are those reasons?
Prof. Wax: They have the lower cognitive ability, on average, and there are fewer blacks who have the skills and capacity to do those jobs at the present time. There are fewer blacks. You know, John McWhorter in his Substack – after he read Charles Murray's book about race, cognitive differences, “Facing reality”, a book that I reviewed at Claremont – who said, you know, I just don't like the idea that I'm going to encounter very few blacks in positions requiring serious smarts. I can't justify that. Just like scientifically, I can't justify it psychologically or psychometrically, but I just don't like it. And you cannot like it, but it's one thing to be upset by that, it's another to say, “and now we have to revolutionize the way society does everything so that my desires to see blacks in top positions can be fulfilled.” Well, you know, it's going to affect a lot more people than just him.
G. Greenwald: But the argument of the people who want to look at those disparities and want to change society to address them are arguing that the reason for the disparities is because of things that are wrong in how society organizes itself and therefore changes, organizationally, are necessary. In order to refute that, you have to have some alternative argument about why those disparities are occurring, other than it's because society is unjust, or it denies equal opportunities to people of different races. And we get back to the question that I asked you before, but you said you didn't have an opinion on it. But it sounds to me like you definitely do. You have to basically be prepared to say: no, the reason isn't that society is racist or unjust is because these groups are innately inferior in terms of their ability to master these topics.
Prof. Wax: But that's not the only alternative.
G. Greenwald: What else is?
Prof. Wax: There is a complex explanation there. There is a whole other type of explanation, which I would call culturalism, which is that different groups in society, different ethnicities, different nationalities – I mean, this should be obvious – have different habits, different ways of thinking, different cultural practices, different modes of conduct. I mean, across the board that's what cultural differences mean. The whole diversity industry is premised on the idea that different groups bring different things to the table and have different cultures. If all groups were cookie-cutter images of every other group, why would we care about diversity, right? So, you know, blacks have some untoward habits and practices that are holding them back and keeping them from getting ahead. They have higher crime rates. Charles Murray and others, many others have documented this. They have less stable families and much more single parenthood. And we know that that is associated with all sorts of social pathologies, unfortunate social pathologies, and they have lower academic skills. There's an academic skill gap that's been there for decades and decades, and we can explore the causes of it are of the ins and outs of it. We can talk about it, and we ought to debate how that works. It can be anything from studying English to having different attitudes toward intellectual endeavors. I mean, there are all sorts of possibilities for that. But we do have cultural differences in the way people behave, so we don't have to go to innate differences as an explanation.
Now, having said that you know, there is a developing science of genomics that is starting to shed light on potential sources for genetic sources, and innate sources for group differences. It's a very abstruse, very complex, sophisticated science. And I personally do not think that we should eliminate or cut off or rule out exploring that science. And if you delve into that literature and I have read it, I have delved into it because I am interested, you see that there is a body of evidence that is starting to develop that suggests that it's possible, right? And is it definitive? Has it been proven beyond a doubt? No. But it's out there. It's out there as a possibility. And at this point, it's inconclusive.
G. Greenwald: Okay. I just have one last question. And it's solely because we have time constraints and you have to run. I want to be respectful of your time, which is 30 seconds over. So just if you indulge me with one last question. Before your case, there have been other instances and controversies involving academic freedom. Some of the time the targets are people perceived to be on the right as you are. Other times, though, there are people perceived to be on the left, a common group of professors who have suffered tenure, denial or being fired or other forms of recrimination are people who are outspoken critics of the state of Israel or who join the boycott campaign against Israel. They're accused as a result of being anti-Semitic. All the same, arguments marshaled against you are marshaled against them. They created unsafe workspaces or learning space for Jewish students and the like. Is that something that you, A, have observed and B, also find as troublesome as what's happening in your case?
Prof. Wax: Yeah, I've observed it. I don't endorse it in any way, shape, or form. I see it as completely parallel to what's happening to me. No, I mean, I'm just not in the business of, you know, seeking out anti-Semitism, sort of hunting down anti-Semitism and saying, Oh, we have to punish these people because they're expressing views about Israel that are critical or that we don't like. I mean, that doesn't mean I think that these views are cogent or that they're convincing. I have my own reasons for supporting Israel and for endorsing Israel. It's a bastion of Western civ in the middle of the Middle East. That's sort of the main reason. But I would not advocate anyway, shape or form censuring or punishing or firing these people. They have a right to their opinion, and it does not, quote/unquote, “harm me” that people say these things about Israel. So, I feel very, very strongly about that. And frankly, I think it's completely parallel to my situation. You know, you can't have it both ways.
G. Greenwald: Absolutely. First of all, I would love to have you back on. I have so much more to talk to you about, but I found this really enlightening. I'm especially happy that you're a principal defender of the values you're invoking in your own case for people who disagree with you as well. Thanks for being on and I hope you have a great evening.
Prof. Wax: Thank you for having me.
G. Greenwald: Absolutely. Talk to you soon.
That was our interview with Professor Wax, you will now see next our discussion that we taped just a little bit ago with Norman Finkelstein, whom I mentioned earlier was embroiled in his own academic freedom controversy back in 2007 when he was denied tenure from DePaul University, largely as a result of a campaign led by Alan Dershowitz, who claimed that Professor Finkelstein was anti-Semitic due to books that he wrote and scholarship that he endorsed regarding Israel, regarding antisemitism, despite the fact that Norman Finkelstein is the child of two Holocaust survivors who walked out of Nazi camps and emigrated to the United States.
So, we'll have that interview with him next.
The Interview: Norman Finkelstein
G. Greenwald: Last question on this particular topic. On the question of academic freedom, as I referenced earlier, there is kind of a new debate about academic freedom because there is a debate about free speech and free inquiry in general. One of the cases I mentioned to you in preparation for asking you to come on was the case of the University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who is, by all accounts, a pretty brilliant person. She has a remarkable résumé of first having studied medicine and becoming a doctor and a scholar of medicine and then switching to law. And yet, she's also now most known for making some extraordinarily provocative, I don't mind saying, in my view, racist comments as part of her ideology. There are also claims that she has made not just statements that are ideologically offensive as part of her advocacy, but also has had incidents involving inappropriate behavior with students, meaning she's been abusive to students based on this ideology. She denies a lot of those claims.
After I ask you about this, you published an article with your views on the Amy Wax case that we're going to encourage our audience to read. But if we could bracket out the issue of whether she actually behaved inappropriately with her students in terms of abusing them because of this ideology – something she denies, that's under investigation – if instead, the only controversy about Amy Wax was that she espouses what most people now regard as an overtly racist ideology, What would that, in your view, make her outside of the limits of what academic freedom protects? And I guess just more generally, what is your view of what academic freedom should and should not protect?
Prof. Finkelstein: Academic freedom has many aspects to it. I'm going to try to limit myself to the ones which I think are most pertinent. Number one, what you should be allowed to say or what you should be allowed to teach. And here I think there are two poles. Anything that possesses what might be called ideational content. There is an idea there. If there's an idea there it's susceptible to rational inquiry, then that idea should be openly debated and there should be no taboos. That's one pole. The other pole is speech, which in my opinion, is devoid of any ideational context. So should a student be subject to being called a k**e or a n*****r? That’s speech. But so far as I could tell, it's speech devoid of any ideational content. And, therefore, in the university - I'm not saying in the public, but in the university - I think that kind of speech should be banned. Now, the ACLU disagrees with me on that. I disagree with the ACLU on that.
Then there's a second consideration. The second consideration is what you can say on campus versus what you can say off campus. What's often said to be the distinction between the professor in his or her professional life versus off campus? Well, a professor is allowed to do in his or her personal life as a citizen, protected by the First Amendment. There, I think – Not always. Not always – but quite often that distinction is artificial. So, for example, if a professor in the privacy of his or her home or off campus, on his or her own personal blog writes “I like to fantasize about my female students’ breast size”. Should he be –assuming it's he – should he be allowed to say that on his personal blog, as it were, off-campus and so on and so forth? My answer is no because it's impossible – even though it’s speech exercised off campus, in a personal blog – it's impossible for that sort of language not to seep into his interactions with his female students. So, I think this distinction is kind of – not in all instances, but in many instances – it's artificial.
The third consideration is civility. Namely, a university is a community. For some, it's a temporary community, namely students for four years. For others, it's a very long-term committed community. You know, professors don't leave until they're taken out in the box. So, it's 30 years that you have to live with somebody. And there is a standard. The American Association of University Professors called the standard of civility. Without going into the fine points, there is some sort of mutual tolerance that has to exist, both broadly on the campus but also within departments. You know, a large part of department life is taken up with administrative concerns, faculty committees, and so forth. So there has to be some modus vivendi among faculty, but also with students. Okay. So those are what you might call the three. They have to be taken into account. Now, let me be clear about this. For me, the supreme responsibility of any professor is the students.
G. Greenwald: […] or case of impact and yourself, using that framework you just laid out the argument be made, I think, in fact, the argument was made that as a professor who wrote a book in which you argued that the Nazi extermination of Jews as part of the Holocaust is now exploited by an industry largely of Jewish advocates, as a way of shielding Israel from criticism that that kind of advocacy is so false, so extremely on the ears of many, perhaps most Jewish students, that it automatically, even within the realm of the distinctions, you do create a kind of hostile or uncomfortable environment in which a civil affinity between yourself and your students becomes impossible. In other words, doesn't that framework, once you leave the ACLU, this position has the potential very quickly, both in your case and in Amy Wax’s – and in lots of other professors’ who have suffered because their views kind of unravel very quickly into the idea that your views are so offensive, so deeply and viscerally offensive to so many students that it prevents what you describe as the highest purpose of a professor from being fulfilled.
Prof. Finkelstein: I don't want to repeat myself, but I think I'll just have to at this point, if an idea has ideational content, it has to be open to rational inquiry. And in the case of Amy Waxman. Amy Wyoming. What? Amy Wax. Excuse me. I forget. Yeah. In the case of Amy Wax, I overwhelmingly said she had the right to teach or to state many of the statements that the dean of the law school found so offensive as to what into taking some sort of administrative action against her. I've said no. These statements have ideational content. They should be allowed. I do have some questions on whether her fellow faculty have an obligation to respect her. Now, that has been an issue, whether in the name of civility – you have to respect your fellow faculty or at least respect their academic undertakings. That case came up with Angela Davis and Arthur Jensen at Harvard.
G. Greenwald: About whom, by the way, I just have to mention my favorite lines you've ever written about Angela Davis, that she went from being on the top ten most wanted FBI list to be among the top five most coveted invites on Martha's Vineyard.
Prof. Finkelstein: Oh. And the question was Arthur Jensen said that black people had basically the intelligence of their bones and that Angela Davis – who attended the Sorbonne, well, studied under Adorno at the Free University in West Germany, who was teaching Kant at the age of 22, at the UCLA Philosophy Department – why does she have the obligation to respect his research? And in my book, even though I am squarely on the side of academic freedom, that to me was a bridge too far. She had no obligation to respect it.
When it comes to Amy Wax, I said most of what she said, in my opinion, was defensible. However, when she said things like – and now I'm quoting her – “If you go into medical schools, you'll see the Indians, South Asians are now rising stars. These diverse diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment now” – well, saying that about students. Sorry, you lose me. Bridge too far. Get your behind out of academia. You lost me. That is a Nazi statement. It's as obscene as any professor in Nazi Germany benefiting from the protections of the state, saying in a class with Jews that you see all the Jews in the medical profession – and there were a lot of Jews in the medical profession in Germany – they are poisoning the establishment. No, you don't have a right to say that. Not because I am amending my commitment to academic freedom, but because that statement has no ideational content. It's simply a club to break the skull of students in the class. That's unacceptable. Personally, and I'm being dense, that serious with you – If a student told me that story, I'd make a beeline for Ms. Wax’s office and if she confirmed that she said that I'd spit in her face.
There is no gray area with statements like that. There is none. And I will say one other thing. We're dealing with a law school. The dean is certainly sensitive to the prospect of lawsuits. It's a law school. And Amy Wax is evidently a force to reckon with. I do not believe that he made up statements like that. I do not believe it. He would have been ultra careful, checked it with a dozen university lawyers and checked it with the president before on university stationery. He put in print statements like that, and that was one of several which to my thinking went way over the line.
G. Greenwald: All right. So, you are part of the show in which, at least for that academic freedom part, we’re going to include herself before we are able to hear from her. I do want to note at least some of those statements she denies making. Obviously, a lot of the ones that are in controversy she admits making, there's an investigation underway. So more than having you arbitrate those disputes, I was very interested in hearing your principles about how we think about academic freedom, and you certainly lay that out, as you always do, with great candor and kind of unflinching honesty. And that's why I wanted to have you on.
