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Good evening. It's January 3, 2024. Happy New Year to everyone. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Ramble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight: less than a month after the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its university president, Liz McGill, Harvard yesterday fired its president, Claudine Gay. Exactly like McGill, Gay became the target of intense public pressure campaigns after both of them, along with MIT President Sally Kornbluth, were hauled before Congress to be interrogated about allegations of rising bigotry on their campuses. Not just any bigotry, but anti-Semitism in particular. In the wake of that congressional testimony, which was condemned not only by pro-Israel conservatives but also by Democratic Party elected officials and even the Biden White House, they all agreed, apparently, in Washington, that these university presidents had done an extremely poor and even disgraceful job in answering questions about Israel and anti-Semitism. A campaign was lodged demanding the firing of all three of them.
Gay's resignation yesterday came after conservative journalists and activists proved persuasively that Gay had committed serious plagiarism. But one has to be extremely naive to believe that that was the reason Gay was forced to resign, and even more naive to believe that this concern about integrity in academic writing was what motivated the campaign against her. Indeed, McGill, the Penn president, was forced out by the very same faction, despite no plagiarism allegations of any kind. Now, the leader of this campaign, the real leader, the billionaire hedge fund manager and fanatical Israel supporter Bill Ackman, is already targeting Kornbluth who, like McGill at Penn, also does not have a plagiarism scandal, but she does have an Israel and anti-Semitism scandal.
American elites occupying prestigious positions are known for many things. Accountability is not one of them. It is extremely rare that someone who occupies such a lofty height in American institutions of authority is brought down this way, let alone two in less than a month. And it is rarer still for that to happen due to some kind of ethical transgression. Anyone paying even minimal attention to events in the United States over the past couple of decades would tackle with laughter the suggestion that the people at the helm of the country's most powerful institutions get fired or ousted because they are guilty of ethical misconduct.
What elites do lose their job over, however, are two things: offending those with even greater power than they have, such as the billionaire Bill Ackman and his friends, or crossing or appearing to cross ideological red lines that are the real taboos in American society. Many people on the right are celebrating because they seem to have convinced themselves that they scored some grand victory for their side by taking out the presidents of these two universities. But is this really a victory for the American right or is this simply yet another victory for the sectors of American political and financial establishment power? His views on Israel happened to fully align with the majority of American conservatives in this case who have succeeded in imposing even more robust limits on the range of views that may and may not be expressed on college campuses in the United States. We'll look at all the relevant events and the facts to answer that question.
Then: from the start of Israel's war in Gaza, the weapons and bombs that Israel has been using have been not just paid for by the United States and therefore by American citizens but have been furnished directly from the Pentagon stockpiles—a stockpile already heavily depleted due to the U.S. spending 18 months financing and arming the war in Ukraine. Remember that war? Regardless of one's views on having the U.S. fund Israel's wars or not, there are laws barring presidents from transferring lethal arms of this kind without congressional approval. There are also laws requiring congressional approval for a president to deploy military force in a region like the Middle East, as the Biden administration has been doing in the Red Sea while it threatens Yemen as retaliation for attacks on commercial ships.
I know from experience that when it comes to war, some people get very excited whenever it comes time for the U.S. to bomb things and blow things up. Questions of legality and constitutionality seem boring and beside the point. But there are reasons, important ones, why the Constitution vests these war powers in Congress, and we should not tolerate a president simply ignoring constitutional limits in the law, especially when it comes to war—even if doing so in one case may be beneficial to Israel.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
