Ivy-League Anti-Semitism with Bari Weiss, Regarding Henry, and Santa Hats 

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>> Elise Stefanik: You understand that this call for Intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?

>> Claudine Gay: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.

>> Elise Stefanik: Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard's code of conduct, or is it allowed at Harvard?

 

>> Claudine Gay: It is at odds with the values of Harvard.

>> Elise Stefanik: Can you not say here that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard?

>> Claudine Gay: We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It's when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment.

 

>> Elise Stefanik: Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?

>> Bill Whalen: It's Monday, December 11, 2023, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow, I'll be your moderator today.

And I'm joined by our full complement of good fellows, as we jokingly refer to them. That would include the historian Neil Ferguson, the economist John Cochran, former presidential national security advisor, lieutenant general HR McMaster, the our Hoover Institution senior fellows all. Gentlemen, it's our last show for 2023, and I think we're gonna go out in style with two very good segments today.

First, we're gonna turn our attention to America's universities, America's elite universities, and the question of antisemitism DEI and how exactly universities are being run. We stemmed this off at appearance last week on Capitol Hill by three presidents of prominent American colleges. That would be the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania.

If there's such a thing as a seminal moment. In its testimony, it was when Liz McGill, at the time the president of Penn, was asked point blank, yes or no, if calling for the genocide of Jews violated Penn's rules of conduct.

>> Elise Stefanik: At Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct, yes or no?

 

>> Liz Magill: If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment, yes.

>> Elise Stefanik: I am asking specifically calling for the genocide of Jews. Does that constitute bullying or harassment?

>> Liz Magill: If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.

>> Elise Stefanik: So the answer is yes.

>> Liz Magill: It is a context dependent decision, Congress woman.

 

>> Elise Stefanik: It's a context dependent decision, that's your testimony today. Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context, yes or no?

>> Liz Magill: If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment, yes.

>> Bill Whalen: It is a context dependent decision. Well, four days later, Liz Magill was out at Penn's president.

We're recording this on Monday the 11th. As I mentioned, the Harvard Corporation, as we record, is, which exercises fiduciary responsibility over the university, its meeting to decide the fate of Harvard's president, Claudine Gay. This leads to a lot of questions to exactly what's going on in America's schools.

And I think we had the perfect guest to join us today to talk about anti-Semitism and DEI run amok. Making her third appearance on Goodfellows is the incomparable Barry Weiss. Barry is the founder and editor of the Free Press and host of the podcast honestly. She's formerly an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, an Op-Ed and book review editor at the Wall Street Journal, and a senior editor at Tablet magazine.

Barry Weiss is also a member of the board of trustees of the University of Austin, alongside some guy named Naill Ferguson. Barry, welcome back to Goodfellows and a belated happy Hanukkah.

>> Barry Weiss: Thank you, I'm so happy to be here.

>> Bill Whalen: So I want to get into a rather remarkable piece written by Neil Ferguson that is appearing right now in the Free Press.

But first, I'd like to ask you this question, Barry, it's not just the president Penn, who's out of a job over the weekend, Scott Bok, who was formerly the chair of the university's board of trustees, he also quit. He penned a letter of resignation Barry, in which he wrote the following about Liz McGill's departure.

Let me read a passage to you. "Worn down by months of relentless external attacks, she was not herself. Over prepared and over lawyered given the hostile form and high stakes, she provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that was wrong. It made for a dreadful 30-second soundbite in what was more than 5 hours of testimony." Barry, here's the question.

Is this much ado about relatively little, a dreadful 30-second soundbite, or are we perhaps looking at a what we might say watershed moment when it comes to how we examine how America's elite universities are run, what are your thoughts?

>> Barry Weiss: The question of whether or not it will prove to be a watershed moment depends on donors, parents, students and the administrations that are in charge of all of these schools, to say nothing of those people, for example, those at UATX, who are trying to build things anew.

In other words, I think what happened the other day in Congress, was a sort of shattering moment in terms of seeing the depth of the rot which we can get into, how that rot came to pass, who is responsible for it, how we might get out of it.

But I don't think you could have walked away from that three minute clip that went viral in which Elise Stefanik was grilling these three presidents and not think something terribly wrong has happened here. And the terrible thing that happened here isn't merely that Liz McGill, Claudine Gay, and the president of MIT followed the advice of the white shoe law firm Wilmer Hale in giving hyper legalistic answers to moral questions.

It's revealed that they are not good stewards of institutions that are meant to be sort of at the forefront of, I don't know what else to call it, but western civilization. If they had been asked the question just as a thought experiment, let's imagine for the past two months, students had been marching through the campus of Penn saying, black people should go back to Africa, and those that don't should be submitted to some kind of genocidal program.

And Liz Magill was asked that exact same question in front of Congress. We all know what the answer would have been. So how did we get to a place where there is such glaring double standards and hypocrisy? How did we get to a place in which MIT cancels a public lecture by the scientist Dorian Abbott?

Why? Because he had the audacity to claim that people should be hired in academia based on their merit and not based on their identity. That somehow was beyond the pale at MIT. But students chanting, long live the Intifada, which can only be understood as a violent uprising against the Jewish people that was somehow acceptable.

And I think it was that sort of glaring hypocrisy and those double standards that were on display. Now the question is, can this moment of sort of exposing the brokenness be used as a true opportunity to build anew, to be used as an opportunity to leave the bad ideas that have allowed for the flourishing of these double standards, the flourishing of these hypocrisies?

Can it actually be that moment? Or are we just gonna sort of watch as the bad ideas that have gotten us to this place are retrenched? And I think, the biggest question on that is, are the questions of, are we gonna hire academics at these universities with an eye toward their immutable characteristics or an eye toward excellence, merit in their field, and diversity of viewpoint?

Are we gonna double down on the DEI bureaucracy that has allowed for the flourishing of illiberalism and anti-Semitism, or are we gonna fundamentally change course? And I think that is the real question that we're facing. Because Liz Magill can resign, Claudine Gay can resign, a number of these people can resign.

But if the bureaucracies that have allowed for all of this continue to remain in place and the sort of soil doesn't change, then we're gonna be exactly where we were last week two, three years from now.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I, of course, agree with every word that Barry says, and it's very important that she pointed out the hypocrisy that was in view in the testimony of the three college presidents.

What they said technically about free speech was not untrue, there is an elaborate body of law that defines what speech is protected under the First Amendment. And there is a great deal that you can say that's very ugly in this country, that you cant be stopped from saying as long as you don't threaten people and as long as you don't harass them.

But the idea that that's the norm at Harvard, MIT, or Penn, that what these people have been upholding over the last few years is completely irritable. Harvard in particular, now ranked last in the rankings for free speech in American academia, according to the foundation for Individual Rights of Expression, run by our friend Greg Lukianoff.

Claudine Gay, as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, issued a manifesto in 2020 calling for Harvard faculty to be actively engaged in a political program to pursue what's sometimes called anti racism. As Barry says, if anybody stepped out of line on the issue of Black Lives Matter back in those days, even if they were tenured professors, as our friend Roland Fryer discovered.

It was game over, or at least suspension without pay for two years, that was one of Claudine Gay's shining achievements as dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences. So for her to start claiming that the First Amendment is honored on the Harvard campus and that any ugly speech can be allowed as long as it doesn't lead to aggressive conduct, was one of the most spectacular displays of hypocrisy I think the US Congress has ever witnessed.

I couldn't believe my ears, so I can only hope that barriers, words are heeded and that university trustees and donors and indeed the professors understand that root and branch change has to happen, all these institutions are going to die. And my skepticism about that root and branch changed my belief that ultimately Harvard can't reform itself is precisely why.

Along with Barry Panakanelos, Joe Lonsdale, I've been working very hard over the last two years to create a new university in Austin, a university that will model freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, because I think that's the only way forward in America today. I'm very dubious that these institutions are capable of reforming themselves now.

 

>> John Cochrane: Let me jump in, I think the free speech angle is a distraction. In fact, yes, the presidents gave a lovely sort of 1960s era ACLU defense of freedom of speech. Yes, it was horrendously hypocritical, given the speech that is currently on campus routinely sanctioned people are fired for saying little things.

But the hypocrisy and the freedom of speech isn't really what's going on. What strikes me is, first, what's going on on campus is conduct, conduct that is being ignored. It's not just peaceful protests saying from the river to the sea, there is active harassment going on, shouting down, and encouraged by university administrators.

So the conduct which is going completely unpunished is already the issue, not the speech. But the bigger question is, suppose we do have free speech on campus, why is it that allowed to speak on campus? So many people are speaking such horrendous things, why is campus selected to admit, hire, and promote a political monoculture that chooses to use it's free speech on this sort of thing?

I think I can do one even better than Barry's example, suppose the people calling for the murder of Jews on campus were white nationalists. They would have shut it down immediately So, yes, this is about politics, it's not just about free speech. And about what has happened to universities that they've become such a monoculture of self hating, of western civilization hating politics.

So what we'll take to fix it, it's nice to see the mechanisms of our country that has restorative mechanisms, the trustees, the alumni going after it. I've noticed there were some polls out recently, faith in elite universities is plummeting on the part of students, on the part of parents, on the part of donors, on the part of employees.

Now, perhaps the faith in University of Austin will rise, but that they are certainly shooting themselves in the foot. The wider society is shooting ourselves in the foot, do we trust in, do we believe in what we have enough to defend ourselves and to send it on to our children?

And last comment, what I really notice here is the moral emptiness, how is it that universities are supposed to be forming young minds. So the young minds on our campus do not even know which river and which sea they're talking about. They're willing, when their friends go on about from the river to the sea, let's murder all the Jews.

They'll just sign up for it with essentially no knowledge of what they're talking about. Where is the moral compass of, before I talk about murdering people and defending gang rapes and beheading of babies, maybe I ought to learn a little bit of something about this. That basic moral compass is missing in how we have educated a generation of young people.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, I just saw cowardice, I think they're all afraid of the apparatus that they allowed to be established at these universities. An apparatus that adheres to this orthodoxy to which everyone has to adhere, and it's sort of an orthodoxy of self loathing. And this tendency to embrace post modernist, postcolonial various critical theories and to do so in a way that I think generates a degree of self loathing.

I mean, these are people who I think now actually lack the self respect necessary to take a stand on these issues. Barry, I'd love your thoughts on this, but what I saw was anti leadership. I mean, everybody knew what the right answer was, but they were afraid of the apparatus that would be mobilized against them if they gave that obvious answer.

Yes, genocide, calling for genocide is intimidation and is behavior that cannot be tolerated in any organization, let alone universities.

>> John Cochrane: Quick follow up on HR leadership. I thought Liz McGill's retraction statement was very revealing, because in the end, what she said was, well, what we're gonna do about this is we're gonna convene a process to talk about reforming our procedures.

And I thought, well, there's Roosevelt, December 8, yeah, we'll convene a process to talk about reforming our Procedures. That's the rule of HR, is not your HR, the other HR, human resources the lawyers, is really standing out there.

>> Barry Weiss: Yeah, I mean, I don't, think, it's a very low bar if the job of a university president at some of our nation's most esteemed institutions is merely to point out basic constitutional rights, which is what they did, right.

The job of a leader of Harvard or MIT or Penn, is to lead a community of professors and students, the future leaders of this country, toward a noble means. Right, which is the pursuit of truth, not the pursuit of avoiding a lawsuit, which is what it seemed like their vision was that day seated in front of Congress.

And, I think that any person that sort of can stand up and articulate that vision right now, whether it's at UATX or another school that has less prestige than Harvard, but has been overlooked and can stand up and say, HR to your point, can lead and say, you know what my job is?

My job is not to live in fear of a DEI bureaucracy, my job is to reject DEI bureaucracy, it's to reject zero sum identity politics. It is to pick up the mantle that all of these other schools, with their huge endowments, have put down and stand up for the pursuit of truth, for the pursuit of the defense of our civilization.

And to help build, to help shape young minds that are prepared for what's obviously gonna be a very turbulent time in this country and the world. The people that can do that, that can sort of make themselves allergic to the cowardice that so permeates our elite intellectual class.

That person, I think, can really, or a group of people can really make a huge, huge difference right now.

>> Bill Whalen: I'd like to turn our conversation to Niall's column in the free press, the title is the treason of the intellectuals, if you wanna look it up, Niall, why don't you explain the column to our audience?

Long story short, you're explaining how the lesson of German history for academia should now be very clear.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, once upon a time, the greatest universities in the world were not in the United States. They were, in fact, in Germany, and the point of the piece is to explain their downfall.

The downfall of the great universities of Heidelberg, of Marburg, of Konigsberg was political. Max Weber, German sociologist, said in famous lecture in 1917 that there should be a clear separation of politics and science or scholarship. He used the German word Wissenschaft. But that separation broke down in the 1920s as professors and students alike increasingly embraced the radical nationalism that ultimately propelled Adolf Hitler to power.

And what I was trying to show in the piece was how that process occurred, how politicization led with incredible speed from the publication of articles arguing for the annihilation of life, unworthy of life, to quote the title of 1920s academic publication to its execution, to the Holocaust, the greatest crime of all of history.

Now, when you tell that story and say that the same thing is underway at the elite universities of the United States, there's incredulity in the intellectual class because their response is, but wait. Those terrible German professors were right wing, but we're left wing, we're sort of different. We're morally superior, we could never lead America down such a path.

And my response in the piece is to say, actually, as it came, as came to be clear, in the mid 20th century, there isn't a great deal of difference between the totalitarianism of the right and the totalitarianism of the left. It ultimately makes the same arguments against individual freedom and in favor of collective identity, and ultimately pursues, the logic of its arguments all the way to the death camps, to the concentration camps.

Now, the critical point here is that American universities, including Harvard, where I taught for twelve years, but not only Harvard, have been politicized. A generation of professors and academic administrators came to the conclusion that their mission was not to educate the young how to think, but was rather to pursue a political agenda.

And they defined it in terms that sounded, for us, innocuous, diversity, equity, inclusion, who could be against those things? Except that on close inspection, what those things amounted to was the imposition of an ideology of hierarchy. A hierarchy that bizarrely descended downwards from the ultimate victims, African Americans, ideally transgender African Americans, down through the hierarchy to dead white males, like the three Goodfellows.

But not only.

>> Niall Ferguson: Dead white males. It turned out that there were other people near the bottom of the hierarchy, and those people included Jews.

>> Barry Weiss: I'm right there in the gutter with the old white men of the GoodFellows.

>> Niall Ferguson: According to this right, Barry?

>> Barry Weiss: Yeah, right there with.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: In the hierarchy of intersectionality, Jews, and this also, interestingly, turned out to apply to East Asians who were too good at math, way too good at math. And all of these groups had to be subjected to systematic discrimination, which is what anti racism really is. Anti racism, in true George Orwellian fashion, is, in fact, racism.

So this ideology, once it was embraced by academics like Claudine Gay, became, in my view, as dangerous as the national socialism that was embraced by Heidegger, supposedly the greatest German philosopher of his generation. We need to get a generation of academics and academic administrators to look in the mirror and understand that they are engaged in precisely the same processes that led the great German universities down the path to hell, to complicity in the Holocaust.

Now, it's really hard because they're in such deep denial about this that you're really gonna have to shout it loud and you're gonna have to shout it daily. But I'm determined to try to make at least some people realize that there is no longer a profound difference between Harvard in the 2020s and Marburg in the 1920s.

The path is very similar, and it begins with, in my view, the ultimate sin, which is the politicization of higher education.

>> Barry Weiss: One thing that I think is disconcerting that's coming out of this current moment is that certain Jewish advocacy groups, but also certain universities, who are looking with horror at the activities on their campus since October 7, are stepping back and saying, we know the problem.

The problem is that the Jews didn't get enough victim points in the new DEI bureaucracy. The best solution is to throw more money into that bureaucratic regime and get Jews at a slightly higher place inside of it, to put antisemitism in the various anti racism trainings. Niall, can you please demolish that argument for us, which I think it's very crucial to do right now?

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, this was a really depressing feature of the recent debate, that the response on some sides was to prescribe more of the toxins that produced the pathology. And I find myself still being misunderstood, an eminent broadcaster, much praised for his recent commentary on this issue sent me a text today saying, but it sounds like you're in favor of.

Restricting free speech even further. And I'm like, no, you completely failed to understand the point. The point is that there has to be a meaningful and consistent standard of academic freedom. There cannot be discrimination. There needs to be a true, a meaningful equity and not the hypocritical, nonsensical equity of DEI.

If the German universities had not allowed themselves to be politicized as they were, if they had continued to pursue truth as had been their original mandate in the time of, say, Immanuel Kant, then the outcomes might have been different. So I was really cringing when I realized that some people were gonna say, well, we just need to make sure that Jews are properly ranked in the hierarchy of victimhood.

The truth is, and here I wanna quote our friend Andrew Sullivan, the whole DEI bureaucracy has to be torn down. It has to be recognized that DEI is like something out of 1984. It is newspeak. It is a newspeak designed to achieve precisely the opposite of what those words appear to mean.

Not diversity, but homogeneity of thought, not equity, but actually profound inequity and absence of due process for anybody who transgresses from the woke ideology. And as for inclusion, the whole process is one of exclusion of anybody who is unwilling to conform. So I think Andrew's got it right.

Unless these universities systematically dismantle this pernicious ideology and the bureaucracy that enforces it, they will never, ever recover. They will be like the German universities, which are still like extinct volcanoes. Who pays any attention to them today? And it's decades, decades, close to a century after they were complicit in the Holocaust.

This will be the fate of the great American universities. If there isn't a radical reform, I don't care if the president's resigned. I don't care if the trustees resign. There needs to be something much more profound in the way of reform or not. As Barry said at the beginning, we'll be in exactly the same place three years from now.

 

>> Bill Whalen: John and HR, where would you go on this? What are your profoundest?

>> H.R. McMaster: I just want to vehemently agree with Niall and the excellent essay that you published in the free press. And just to make a couple of additional points, you're right. I mean, this is orwellian reversal of the truth, right?

To be anti racist, you have to be racist. What the hell does that mean? Or that it's not virtuous and it's actually oppressive to say that you don't judge people by their identity category. But by the content of their soul or what's in their heart or if they're empathetic or if they're talented or if they're courageous or if they have a sense of honor, that shouldn't make any sense to anybody.

And I think what we're seeing is also the valorization of victimhood. And what is so damaging about that is that it robs people of agency. We're teaching our young people, right? Everything's against them. The system's against them. They have no agency. We leave them with this toxic combination of anger and resignation.

And you see that anger expressed in these sort of self loathing demonstrations. I mean, I'm thinking of what Richard Worthy said about nations. He said that pride is to nations what self respect is to individuals, a necessary ingredient for self improvement. And I think this orthodoxy has robbed our youth of their self respect.

 

>> John Cochrane: So I would add, it was significant here that they didn't just say, add to the current DEI office or put the Jews in this category. They recognize that the current DEI office is so anti semitic, it's hopeless. And they wanted to set up new DEI offices, especially for the Jews.

I hope Barry will like a special for the Jews, a special for the Jews, anything is always a disaster happening, but it's worse than that. I think what we need to recognize, the danger I see here is that we just sand off some of the superficial anti Semitism and go back to work, to business as usual.

And I think that's what a lot of this movement on the left will try to do. We have to recognize how part and parcel of the whole business it is. You cannot just sand off the Jew business. I think a lot of people after World War II, there were some Germans who said, well, the Nazis had a pretty right.

We just overdid the Jew business. No, it's part and parcel of the whole business. And the whole business has to go. And I think it's worse. We're farther down Niall's direction. Recognize this is not just universities. This is now part of government entrenched in government support of the sciences is the whole DEI business, including you have to now research on native ways of knowing.

It's entrenched in scientific societies. It's entrenched in journals. It's entrenched in corporations. It's entrenched in philanthropy. It's a little bit entrenched in the military, sorry, HR. It is now, as it was in the 1930s, not just just part of universities, but part of the society. And government is especially dangerous cuz they have that little monopoly on force.

I loved Niall's thing in part, what it taught me was that question I couldn't answer. Where's the moral compass? Well, look back at the 1930s. How were people able to go along with such heinous things? Well, everyone around them was doing it, and this was a way to get a good job and a nice tenured position.

And people are willing to do that, to lose their moral compass in that question. But where we are going, where science has gone in the US, is to eviscerate meritocracy and to eviscerate the whole idea of we're here for excellence, for search for the truth, and the Chinese aren't doing that.

So we really are killing the system of knowledge. But the good news here is it's wide out in the open. We've known about this, we've been complaining about this for years, and no one's particularly noticing. But the fact that it's in Congress now that finally the donors are noticing, finally the public at large is noticing this horrendous rot is the one thing.

I have to have a little bit of HR hope here. Finally some attention is coming on this.

>> Barry Weiss: But I think ordinary Americans see the depravity very, very clearly. I think the problem is that I don't know if you guys have had this experience. I've had this very strange, repeated experience since October 7th of people who thought I was sort of overstating things or I was histrionic texting me and saying, you were right.

I say, thank you, you don't need to say anything about me being right ever, ever, ever in public. But I would ask that you consider promoting the kind, like how many people who tell me privately you were right will say something publicly about ending DEI and say it clearly?

A very, very, very vanishingly small number. So there's still a very long way to go from the kind of private recognition that at least I'm hearing from people in positions that could really make a difference. Niall, I don't know if you've had a similar experience and their willingness to sort of put their neck out on the line, which is what this moment requires.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: A lot more people wrote privately to the presidents of these universities than spoke out publicly. So someone like Bill Ackman, who's, I think, done a great deal of good by articulating publicly his dissatisfaction as a Harvard alum and donor, is in a minority, that the great majority of people would still rather keep their heads below the parapet.

Why is that, Barry? Well, I'll tell you why? Because it's dangerous. And you should say a little word, Barry, about the threats that you're currently having to deal with. This is important for people to understand. Is not an easy thing to stand up against a totalitarian ideology. It's not an easy thing to say no to antisemitism, because funnily enough, the anti Semites come after you, right, Barry?

 

>> Barry Weiss: Yeah Yeah, I don't know how much I should say about it, but what I'll say is that there is a cost, as Niall is sort of intimating. And as his wife, one of the great heroes of our time, Ayaan Hirsi Ali knows better than just about anyone else for standing up for liberalism.

For standing up for liberty, for standing up for freedom, and for standing against totalitarianism in all of its forms. There's a cost to that. But the question every single person listening to this needs to ask themselves is, what will the cost be a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now?

If I continue to stay quiet, the cost is only going to get worse. And so I really want to appeal to anyone thinking, anyone watching what's going on and saying, this is terrible, but sort of quietly bemoaning it, not really doing anything about it in public, is how are we possibly gonna change it?

Read Niall's piece today, The Treason of the Intellectuals, and ask yourself, like, who would you have been in the years that he describes in that piece? Would you have wanted to be remembered as someone who went along with evil, so that you could get tenure at one of these fancy universities that are now basically in the dustbin of history?

Or would you rather be remembered as someone that stood up against evil and actually had the chance to stop it? That is the decision point that good people have to make right now. And to me, and I think it's almost, it's funny because people talk about it as being sort of like selfless to stand up against.

I think it's the most selfish thing in the world. In other words, when I look at my daughter and when any of us look at our kids and our grandchildren, we think, what kind of world do I wanna build for that child? I think of myself as like, why did we go and try and start a new university?

The craziest thing, people thought we were out of our minds. For me, it was very simple, I looked at my kid and thought, I can't send her to any of these schools. I have 18 years to build a place where she's going to be excited to go. And I think that don't just do it for the sake of some abstract idea, like standing up for western civilization, although that's great.

Do it for the sake of the safety and flourishing of your family, because that's ultimately what's really on the line here. And I don't know if the events of the past two months don't make that clear to people, I'm really not sure what will.

>> John Cochrane: But there is a cost, Barry.

Even now, I mean, in Germany and in the communist regime, there was a cost. Ruined lives, ruined career, if you even survived. And even now, if you stand up and say these sorts of things, you're not gonna get tenure at that big university, probably. You're not gonna get to be an academic.

You're gonna have to go off and lose all of that investment that you made. Fortunately, we're a country where you can go earn a real, get a real job and earn money and live in Japan. But there is a cost, and it's hard.

>> Barry Weiss: There is a cost but you have, like, again, for me, it's pretty.

You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, what's the point of my life? And if the answer is getting into the right country club, being invited to the right cocktail parties, or getting promotion inside your university, that's a choice. That is just simply not the point, I don't think of a meaningful life and a life well lived.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Can I just add one thing? As somebody who spent much of his career trying to teach modern history, and in particular German history, I'm confronted with a terrible sense of failure. The messages that I try to convey in a book like War of the World just don't seem to have stuck.

And maybe I agreed a little too readily to stop teaching when I moved from Harvard to Stanford. Maybe I accepted a little too readily, a kind of quiet cancellation, strikes me as kind of troubling that if one in five young Americans now think the Holocaust is a myth.

Somehow or other, all our efforts to teach the history of Germany, explain the rise of Hitler, show the path that led to Auschwitz, these seem to have left almost no mark. We kind of lost a fight with the people who wanted to tell a different story, which was the story of the wickedness of western civilization and why the United States was just white supremacy.

That narrative has become so dominant in the academy that I think one begins to understand why young people don't see the wickedness of anti Semitism. Let me tell you a little story. A friend of mine has a son who's currently studying as a postgraduate in one of the major American universities.

He's Jewish, and just the other day, he went to his assigned desk in one of the libraries, the desk that he has a computer at, and under the keyboard, he found the note and it said in capital letters, ZIONIST KAIK. And the words were in red and green.

When people tell me, no, no, no, there's no anti Semitism, we're just critical of Israeli policy. I'm like, really? You understand how much antisemitism there now is in these elite university campuses? You know what it's like to be a Jew on these campuses right now? Friend's son has to ask himself, do I stay here or do I just get the hell out?

That's the reality that has been created, and it's been created by academic leaders like the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay. She is the one who created the structure, the culture, the institutions, the incentives, the bureaucracy that have led to this. And it just seems to me fundamentally not different from what happened at the German universities.

If I can get that idea into just a few heads this week, it might compensate for seven years in the pedagogical wilderness. Thanks for that, Stanford.

>> John Cochrane: Though it's not just colleges and universities. One thing you didn't mention about the Nazis in the 1930s, was the first thing they did was they grabbed k through twelve education and they indoctrinated generation of students and the far lefties of our society.

The first thing they did was they grabbed the teacher education programs and the public schools, which is a part of why children come out with such complete lack of knowledge. There's a wonderful free press piece a while ago. I'm gonna advertise your free press, Barry. He went on a jaywalking tour of the UCLA campus.

 

>> Ben Kawaller: When did your awareness awaken?

>> Speaker 1: October 7th. The Palestinian genocide that they started on the 7th.

>> Ben Kawaller: So the genocide that started on the 7th, to be clear?

>> Speaker 1: Yes.

>> Ben Kawaller: Was which one?

>> Speaker 1: The Israelis they were committing to against the Palestinians.

>> Ben Kawaller: On the 7th?

 

>> Speaker 1: Yes.

>> John Cochrane: The breadth of ignorance, but that doesn't come from a lack of Niall Ferguson writing beautiful books about Germany, the First World War and everything else. It comes from the evisceration of K12 education.

>> Barry Weiss: We're working on a Francesca block. One of our young reporters here is working on a big story about what is going on and what has been going on, but especially since October 7th inside our public schools.

It will blow people's mind when this piece comes out. It is so much deeper than just what's happening on elite university campuses. It is happening not just in our elite prep schools, it is happening inside of our public schools. Our tax dollars are going to support this. And I think I'm looking to the GoodFellows, but maybe especially Niall, who, who's so steeped in this subject to give me hope.

What do we do with the fact that according to this economist poll, one in five young Americans now believes the Holocaust is a myth? The long march through the institutions was not a punchline, it was a reality. And so now we're looking at a reality where it's not just a few elite college campuses we have to fix or rebuild or build anew.

It's like all of the sense making institutions in American life. And so I'm trying in my small way to build anew in the realm of the media. But it seems to me that that same project needs to be happening in so many different spaces immediately yesterday. And, I look at a statistic like that and it's like I wanna Crawl under the covers and not get out because I'm not sure.

I'm just not sure how you reverse that so readily.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I'll tell you, just to go back to the fact that it is in K through 12 as well. When you look at the, for example, what Erdogan did to take over exclusive power for the AKP in Turkey, that's the same thing that he did as well.

Let's go to K-12. So you have to look at obviously, the education departments and universities who produce our teachers as well as the curricula that exists at the local levels across the country. Because they, first of all, have eradicated, really, history out of much of that curriculum. And replaced it with soft headed social studies that are consistent with these reified philosophies of the new left interpretation of history and various post modernist and post colonial and critical theories.

And they're teaching our children an orthodoxy. They're not teaching them history. And I think the effect that this has is obviously ignorance, right? And ignorance is, I think, one of the necessary conditions to foment hatred and to justify violence against innocence. But also it, again, robs them of any sense of pride of, in their nation.

And I really am concerned about this, about that. If young Americans learn that they shouldn't be proud of their country, who's gonna defend it when the time comes? Who's gonna stand up to defend the nation?

>> Niall Ferguson: Good point because one solution to the problem in Germany was complete defeat.

Is that what the United States wants? Is that how we're gonna roll? There has to be a better way. Barry, you wanted some good news to get out from under the covers. Good news is that this is still a constitutional system with a federal structure and there are states that are already taking the right measures.

DEI is no longer legal in Texas. That's a reality. I'm glad to say that there is, therefore, a way forward. Not only is there a way forward for state legislatures to take back control over education, there's also a way forward for us as citizens. Barry, you and I are doing it.

Create new institutions, creating a new university that will model academic freedom. But we need new schools. We need multiple new educational institutions that are outside this entirely contaminated system. And I believe that's the American way forward. And it's not the first time in American history that the public response to dissatisfaction with established institutions is, let's create some new ones.

I think that's still very possible in America. It's not possible elsewhere. I can't imagine being able to begin starting a new university in England. I think that would be more or less impossible. But it is possible in America, and that gives me hope.

>> John Cochrane: It is the wonderful thing of our largely private system.

It's much easier to start a K-12 school, even to start a university here, than else. We have charter schools, we have private schools, we have homeschooling, we have pods. We have the ability to move. So when parents wake up to what's happening, I think they will be able to move away from this, whereas in a completely state run system, that's much harder to do.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, but we do need to form new institutions, but we can't give up on all the old institutions, right? So I'm thinking about leaders who have had a big impact. Mitch Daniels, who we had on here, for example, I'm thinking about Michael Crowe at Arizona State University.

And the school of civil and economic thought and leadership there, who brings in speakers and exposes them to that vast student body at Arizona State University. So I think there are glimmers of hope, right? And I hope, Barry, as you alluded to at the beginning, this is a crystallizing moment, right, for everybody.

A galvanizing moment to really expand those kind of centers of light, to kinda push back the darkness of this, of this DEI orthodoxy.

>> Bill Whalen: Let me end the segment with this exit question if we're reconvening a year from now. Barry, John, Niall, and HR, give me one thing you'd like to see, one change you hope can be made.

And let's don't go too pie in the sky and talk about eliminating DEI altogether. But just one practical change that you'd like to see happen. HR, why don't you go first?

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, how about job descriptions for jobs that are advertised from history departments, Universities. Because when you look at them, you're like, does anybody teach diplomatic history, military history, political history anymore?

And that would be a small change that maybe might indicate that we're heading in a different direction.

>> Bill Whalen: John.

>> John Cochrane: I hope that the direction is that the forces, the restorative forces start advancing and the forces of evil start going back. That means donors, that means parents, that means governments, that means politics.

There's a lot of rot coming from the federal government right now. And you know a wise new administration could do a lot to clean out how much of this stuff is being forced from the government as well. So I'll just give you a general society keeps on its track of recognizing it's not just a couple of things.

We really need to clean out the rot throughout our institutions.

>> Bill Whalen: Niall one change.

>> Niall Ferguson: The universities around the country adopt the Austen principles and the Austen system of government and recognize that only radical changes in governance will salvage higher education in America.

>> Bill Whalen: And Barry Weiss, you get the last word.

One change other than obviously making the free press required reading in classes.

>> Barry Weiss: Well, I give two that Israel has won the war that it's currently engaged in and that more people come out. And by that, if you look back to the history of the gay rights movement, a movement very relevant to my own life.

The way that it changed, the way that people's perception of gay people changed, was understanding that it was their brother or their sister or their niece or their nephew or their friends. And looking and saying, wow, it's all of those people. That's what helped normalize it. Right now, we can kind of name.

We could do it in probably under five minutes. All of the people who are standing up loudly against this authoritarian tide. I think if we had a year from now, double that number, five times that number, we would be in a much, much better place as a country.

So come out. If you're watching this and you're wondering, should I speak out? Should I wait? Do not wait, do not wait. Come out, I promise you, you're gonna lose some friends, but then you're gonna make ones who are so much better. Relationships that are so much more meaningful, and you're going to live, ultimately, a life that is you're just gonna live a much more meaningful life.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Thank you Barry, and keep on fighting the good fight. Onto our second segment. And this would be Henry Kissinger. It's been nearly two weeks since the death of the great man, fabled statesman, Nobel Peace Prize winner Niall Ferguson. Currently working on the second installment of the authorized biography of Henry Kissinger.

I wanna talk today about how he has been treated in the aftermath of his passing. And Niall, I wanna go particularly to Rolling Stone magazine, which did the following. First of all, they ran a header that said good riddance. Underneath the good riddance header was the following headline.

Henry Kissinger, war criminal, beloved by America's ruling class, finally dies. And below that, a subhead, the infamy of Nixon's foreign policy architect sits eternally beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him. Niall, I'm kind of confused by this. I think most Rolling Stone staffers were not on this planet 50 years ago when we were at what we call Pete Kissinger.

I'm not sure how many of them lived the Kissinger experience or nothing. Why such vitriol directed toward Henry Kissinger and is this something uniquely suited to Kissinger?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, but I'm not gonna dignify Rolling Stone by treating it as if it's a serious publication worthy of the attention of GoodFellow's viewers.

I think what I can say is that there's been for decades now a sustained campaign of vilification directed against Henry Kissinger that to revert to the theme of our earlier conversation has an obvious anti Semitic element. We talked about double standards earlier. Well, there clearly is a double standard here because very few, if any, other secretaries of state since World War II have been subjected to this kind of treatment.

Nobody has ever published the trial of Dean Acheson, or for that matter the trial of Hillary Clinton. And I think that one can't explain that double standard any other way. The genealogy of anti kissingerism is quite interesting because in the period when he was in office the critics were actually mostly on the right.

And some of the most hostile criticism of his time in office came from neoconservatives and Reaganites who were hostile to the policy of and hostile to the opening to China. But as time went on, it was the criticism from the left that became dominant especially after the end of the Cold War.

The most influential book, I'm sad to say, about Henry Kissinger is not mine but Christopher Hitchens. And Hitchens really dashed off that book as a magazine article, and it has about as much substance as his similar attack on Mother Teresa. And yet it's been adopted as if it were a serious work of historical research by a generation of people who had already really made up their minds to hate Henry Kissinger as well as Richard Nixon and indeed to hate American foreign policy.

And so they decided to personify all of the things that they felt were bad about the United States. And this one man who just a bit of a coincidence is one of the few Jewish people to hold the office of secretary of state. So that's my explanation. I mean, I am old fashioned.

I think that when someone dies, by and large, Nunnessy Bonham is a good rule, and it's inappropriate to run that kind of article. But I noticed that it didn't restrain the New York Times either, which is, I suppose, somewhat more reputable than Rolling Stone. This didn't seem to me like the right time to run hit pieces on a man who had just died.

It also seems, and this is the last thing I wanna say, extraordinary to overlook the extraordinary challenges that Henry Kissinger faced when he became national security adviser in January 1969. And people seem to forget in all of this vilification that at that point the United States was essentially losing the cold War.

And I don't think it's entirely an accident that after eight years in which Henry Kissinger played an increasingly important role in American foreign policy, the situation of the United States was strategically significantly improved. But none of the critics talk about that.

>> Bill Whalen: John?

>> John Cochrane: Well, there's so much to talk about with Kissinger.

Yes, it is interesting that his critics on the left want us to have sent every, every flashpoint of the 1970s, turned it into another Cuba, yet somehow We would have won the Cold War anyway. You pointed out in your piece not losing the Cold War was one of the best things Henry did, and setting detente we might not have liked, but setting you couldn't have done Ronald Reagan's we win, they lose in the 1970s.

He also pointed out one of his great achievements was keeping Russia out of the Middle East, something that we don't have today. The question I wanted to ask you is, let's bring back Henry Kissinger to current foreign policy, which since 2000 has not been a great success, to put things mildly.

Anthony Blinken is now two questions for you, which I showed you ahead of time Anthony Blinken is now shuttling back and forth. I wonder whether Henry Kissinger's successful shuttle diplomacy between the Soviets and the Chinese is not a model that works when you're shuttling back and forth to talk to Hamas.

There is something rational and conservative in a way about big power that doesn't work when you're going down. And certainly now. The other thing I notice is that we are in retreat again. Ukraine, Afghanistan. How many wars do you get to lose? Blinken has, within weeks, already wants to freeze Gaza into another North Korea.

When do we get to win? I don't think Henry's foreign policy would have done that. And I wonder if his great statesman foreign policy would have done well with some of the economic challenges which are unfortunately where we're going now.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, these are hard questions to answer.

 

>> John Cochrane: I'm glad.

>> Niall Ferguson: Let me offer a simple insight. The last conversation that I had with Henry Kissinger just a couple of weeks before his death was about the Middle east, and it was fascinating to hear his reactions. And a couple of insights stand out in my memory.

One, that in many ways Israel's position was a weaker one than it had been 50 years before when, on his watch, a surprise attack against Israel was launched by Egypt and Syria. And the second point he made was that ultimately there needed to be some different approach to the problem of the Palestinians.

And I detected in his remarks a sense that a mistake had been made back in the 70s in ceasing to treat the Palestinians as essentially a problem for Jordan, but allowing the Palestinians to be represented by the PLO. And I think that Henry implicitly acknowledged that that was one of the errors of American policy in the 1970s.

I found it deeply impressive that a man who had a past his 100th birthday was still sufficiently engaged, knowing that his health was finally failing to conduct a conversation like that, to have a kind of master class on the Middle Eastern situation. Would he handle it differently? Yes, John, and he would have handled the Ukraine crisis differently, too.

And that's, I think, the thing that we must try to learn from his extraordinary life, that statecraft is not a question of choosing between the good option, the one that the Harvard faculty would approve, the nasty option. It's always a choice between evils, and you have to try and figure out what the lesser evil is.

I don't think the Biden administration has been very good at making that choice, and that is part of the reason that we miss Henry Kissinger.

>> H.R. McMaster: What I'd like to point out, though, as somebody who studied the history of how and why Vietnam became an American war. Is that Kissinger's critics don't think Think about what happened before Kissinger, what happened after Kissinger?

What happened before Kissinger was the deceits and lies of the Johnson administration that really set up the Nixon administration with a real problem with Americans who were losing faith in the effort and also policies not to mobilize and the way that the draft was conducted and the way student deferments were handed out.

I mean, when you decided you didn't want to go to Vietnam, you can say, hey, I don't want to serve my country or I'm morally opposed to the war. Are you gonna pick a or b? And then also what happened after. I mean, look at the brutality of the Vietnamese communist regime as Saigon fell in 1975.

Does everybody remember the boat people who fled, the refugees, who fled the horrors of the Vietnamese communist regime? So I think that Kissinger needs to be seen in context of what happened before him and after him when he's vilified about Vietnam and obviously Cambodia as well. Look what happened in Cambodia after Kissinger.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Well, it just raises the question, Neil, as you have studied the coverage and responded to it, what aspects of Kissinger's record tend to be most confused? Would it be Cambodia and Chile?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, how long have you gone? I mean, the tendency of the negative historiography is to emphasize what was happening in Chile, in Cambodia, in Bangladesh and East Timor, and what do those things have in common.

Well, the answer is contained in the title of a book by William Shawcross about Cambodia. That title was Sideshow. These were not central strategic players in the Cold War. I've called them a peripheral, and I've been criticized for that. But that's the reality that in a cold war between two nuclear armed superpowers, there is a hierarchy of strategic importance, and policymakers have to make priorities.

And that's what the critics who zoom in on these particular countries misunderstand. The reason that the us government was prepared to tolerate the appalling conduct of the Pakistan government in what became Bangladesh was that Pakistan was the channel to China. It was the only channel to Beijing that had delivered the result that led ultimately to Nixon's visit to Beijing.

In the case of Cambodia, it was the North Vietnamese who violated its neutrality and were using it, HR knows this very well better than I do. We're using Cambodia as a theater and a channel for supplies and manpower to wage their war against South Vietnam. Of course, it made sense to attack those North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia.

And as William Shawcross has acknowledged, he greatly exaggerated the civilian casualties of the campaign in Cambodia to the point that he's now essentially retracted the argument of the book Sideshow. Now, I figure if William Shawcross has retracted the argument of Sideshow, it ought to be incumbent upon the people who quote the book to accept that maybe it was wrong, because, after all, he was the author.

I could go on, I could talk about Chile, where Allende's downfall was as much Allende's fault as anybody else's. And it was certainly more due to Chilean domestic forces than to the CIA, much less to Henry Kissinger that Pinochet came to power. It's somewhat tedious to have to relitigate some of these foreign policy issues 50 years after the fact.

But I think it's necessary work, because until we start understanding the strategic priorities that are inherent in a cold war, we will not understand how to manage our strategy in the second cold War that Henry Kissinger explained to me four years ago, we are now in. So that's why I'm doing this, because I do think that we're left with a false impression that somehow the foreign policy of the Nixon and Ford administrations was very, very bad, no good, when in reality it was actually one of the most successful strategic approaches at a time of considerable national weakness that the United States has ever had.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Let's end this on this question. Will we see another Henry Kissinger in our time? Because his story, Niall, is a quintessentially American story of coming to America, upward mobility, decades of public service. Will we see this again, Niall?

>> Niall Ferguson: I think there are two reasons why not.

One, let's not forget that he became a public intellectual as a Harvard professor, a republican Harvard professor who then went on to serve Richard Nixon. I don't know how many Harvard professors like that there are gonna be in the next 50 years, but how about zero. The second thing which is striking to me is that our system has become so much more bureaucratic that the NSC itself is, I think, at least ten times larger in terms of manpower than it was in 1969.

And so for any individual to be able to manage the foreign policy apparatus, even a genius like HR McMaster, finds it extraordinarily difficult. And so HR, who held the post that Henry Kissinger held in 1969 through to 73 of national security adviser, is the right person to ask this.

Was it possible to exert the kind of influence that Kissinger did? I would suspect not just because of the structure of the government, which has become so much more unwieldy.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, Niall, it also depends on personalities and relationships, maybe even more than the bureaucratic structure. And of course, he has his ups and downs with President Nixon, but he had a high degree of credibility and a good relationship with Nixon.

And then, as he's sure told both of us, Never have the jobs of national security advisor and secretary of state been in greater harmony than when he held both positions. And I think That's also unprecedented as well.

>> John Cochrane: I gotta be the HR, I'm trying to be optimistic here that America still is a land where great talent can rise, that an over bureaucratized government, which are surely is, is also one that's fairly dysfunctional, and that we're HR to take on this task.

I'm sure he could cut through that. But I do think the worry is in the rise to the top, we now have perfected the politics of personal destruction. Something that George Shultz kept saying is it's harder and harder to get good people to go serve the government. First of all, just getting through your Senate confirmation is a disaster.

And they're gonna go read your high school yearbook and try to find something embarrassing in there. So could a person like that, even if the force of character could come in and cut through the bureaucracy, would they be filled along the way by the politics of personal destruction that we now have going on, I don't know.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Niall, I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and my first job of any real importance was delivering the Washington Post, this would be 1971. And this was kind of my introduction to the world I'm in now and that I started reading the Washington Post every day and I noticed that here is this man with the German accent just dominating both the a section of the paper but also the style section of the paper.

And I think that's the other great difference here. I'm just not sure if gonna see again a non president in Washington DC having such a dominant both news position and social position in this day and age, that person would be quickly wiped out on social media by jealous aides and so forth.

So that's the Kissinger legacy to me. Just, this man just had such a large presence in Washington DC.

>> Niall Ferguson: It's true, and one of the more entertaining chapters that I'm writing really relates to Henry Kissinger in the social and cultural life of the nation. He in many ways came to personify a particular time in American history that I look back on with a certain nostalgia.

The 70s had their downsides, and you don't need to ask John Cochran to go into details on the economic downsides. But one of the things that's striking is that it was a time when a man who'd arrived as a refugee, who'd been a mere lowly grunt, a rifleman at the battle of the bulge, could ascend to the position of secretary of state.

Really the highest unelected position you can hold as an immigrant and could be regarded as an extraordinary thinker and doer. I hope we haven't lost that. I don't think we have, but I suspect we have lost it at Harvard.

>> John Cochrane: Well, yeah, back to our earlier conversation. Are we selecting people for being the absolute best in a critical time in a dangerous world?

Henry was selected. There was a lot of anti Semitism back. There's a lot of golf courses he couldn't go to if he had chosen to play golf. And yet there was still a system that selected him for being extraordinarily smart, knowing what he was doing.

>> Bill Whalen: Gentlemen, no lightning round this week.

I'd like to end with just one quick question to go around the horn here. I wanna know one family holiday tradition that you all practice. And, HR, why don't we start with you?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, one of our favorite things is to all be together and open one gift on Christmas Eve and share something that we're grateful for across our family, so that's fun.

 

>> Bill Whalen: John?

>> John Cochrane: Well, the tradition that I miss most, which we won't do this year, is bundling four kids into a minivan, taking them out into the cornfields around Chicago, where you would find a Christmas tree farm. Spending hours while Beth found the perfect Christmas tree, cutting it down and coming home to hot chocolate.

Sadly, the children were too old for that. But I'm still putting in hope for grandma Lydia's Christmas cookies, which are wonderful.

>> Bill Whalen: Good, and Niall, you get the last word.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, there's something magical about a midnight mass, a midnight service in a little English village in a church that stood on the same spot for many centuries.

And that is, for me, the most moving of all our family traditions, to go there, see our neighbors. And I see the church itself bathed in a in a truly holy light. And as the bells toll, midnight, one senses the meaning of Christmas, it's easy to lose sight of in this day and age.

But when I'm in that church and midnight comes, I think I'm truly close to the meaning of Christmas.

>> Bill Whalen: Well said, Niall, and we're gonna end that on a very positive note. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure hanging out with you in 2023. Look forward to doing it again in 2024.

I think it's gonna be a rather eventful year, we won't lack for things to talk about. On behalf of my colleagues, Niall Ferguson, John Cochran, HR McMaster, all of us here at the Hoover Institution, we hope you enjoyed our content for 2023. As I said, we'll be back in early 2024 with a new episode.

Until then, take care, thanks for watching, thanks for supporting GoodfFellows.

>> Jenn Henry: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring H.R. McMaster, watch Battlegrounds, also available@hoover.org.