Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post thinks New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik was “on target” in her grilling of three university presidents (Harvard, Penn, MIT) this week. But I found the first three sentences of Rubin’s piece the most telling:
That their interrogator was herself a MAGA provocateur who has propounded the “great replacement theory” did not matter. Indeed, the ability of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) to sustain a rational argument about antisemitism at elite universities makes her MAGA rhetoric that much worse. She knows better.
And now onto a taste of the piece:
But the congresswoman was on target when she grilled three university presidents — of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania — in a Tuesday hearing for the House’s Education and Workforce Committee. This trio could not, even when given multiple chances, explicitly state that calls for genocide against Jews violated their school policies. By insisting that “it depends on the context” or “if the speech turns into conduct,” they revealed their moral vacuity.
In a matter of minutes at the hearing, the jig was up. Claudine Gay (Harvard), Sally Kornbluth (MIT) and Liz Magill (Penn) are either too cowardly or too intellectually feeble to lead great institutions of higher learning.
The White House condemned their answers. “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, who has previously condemned antisemitic rhetoric from Elon Musk and antisemitic displays on college campuses. “Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting — and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans.”
Read the rest here.