“It’s an anti-Western culture on campuses which is revealing itself as antisemitism”

“It’s an anti-Western culture on campuses which is revealing itself as antisemitism”

I had the pleasure of appearing recently on Newt’s World podcast hosted by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

This was my second time on the podcast. I previously appeared on June 21, 2023, to discuss Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal.

This time the topic was antisemitism on campuses:

On Tuesday, October 31st, Patrick Dai, a 21-year-old junior at Cornell University, originally from Pittsford, New York, was arrested for making online threats to Jewish students on the Cornell campus. Dai’s actions represent an upward trend of the rise of antisemitism on college campuses, since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. Newt’s guest is William Jacobson, Clinical Professor and Director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School.

Listen below (dialogue starts at 1:30):

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Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors)

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Newt Gingrich (01:42): On this episode of Newt’s World. On Tuesday, October 31st, Patrick Dai, a 21 year old junior at Cornell University, originally from Pittsford, New York, was arrested for making online threats to Jewish students on the Cornell campus. Dau’s actions represent an upward trend of the rise of antisemitism on college campuses since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. I’m really pleased to welcome back my guest, William Jacobson, Clinical Professor and Director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School. He’s also the founder and publisher of Legal Insurrection, a popular politics and law website, which you can find at legalinsurrection.com. Bill, welcome and thank you for joining me again on Newt’s World.

WAJ (02:45): Thanks for having me back.

Gingrich (02:47): I’m curious, you know, there’ve been a whole series of frankly shocking acts of antisemitism on our campuses. What’s your perspective on all of this?

WAJ (02:57): My perspective is that this was a long time coming, that people cannot look at it and say something happened on October 7th that ignited this, that started it. I can trace it all the way back to my days at Harvard Law School in the early 1980s, and I would call it the racialization of education and the racialization of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Much like the campuses have become racialized by Critical Race Theory, so-called ‘anti-racism’ theory, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. And in that equation, the Jewish students have been left on the sideline.

The conflict is portrayed on campuses as white oppressor Israel, much like they call the us the white oppressor, and oppressed non-white Palestinians. And that over the years, and I’ve witnessed it at Cornell and I’ve witnessed it in my website coverage, has metastasized into open antisemitism. And the October 7th Hamas attack was what bubbled it to the surface, but it wasn’t the underlying cause.

Gingrich (04:14): Is this just an offshoot of the whole notion that there’s an anti-colonial rebellion worldwide. And if you’re white, then you’re colonial and if you’re anything else while you’re part of the worldwide rebellion?

WAJ (04:28): I think that’s a large part of it, that the doctrines that have taken hold on campuses are so-called anti-colonialism, so-called liberation, but it’s all done in racial terms. And so decolonization is the term they like to use. And they portray Israel as somehow uniquely evil in the world. And much like the Iranian Mullah formulation of us being the Big Satan and Israel the little Satan, they view Israel as essentially a proxy for Western imperialism, for the United States. And so it really has taken over the campuses in very racial terms.

And it has radicalized a lot of students because what happens is they receive, really nowadays from kindergarten on up through college, an ahistorical presentation of the world, that somehow whatever evils the United States had and whatever evils Israel had are unique to them, are unique to Western societies. But of course we know that’s not true. Colonial domination, capture of lands  and resettling of territories is something that’s been going on as long as humans have walked the earth. And certainly it’s happened with Muslim societies, it has happened with other societies. It’s not uniquely Western, it’s not uniquely American, it’s not uniquely Israeli and certainly not uniquely Jewish, but that’s how it’s portrayed.

So all of their anger, all of their hate for Western societies is taken out on Israel. And that’s really what’s happened

Gingrich (06:18):

Last week, the Ayatollah Khomeini said, when we say Death to America, this is not a slogan, this is a policy. Why is it so hard for these students to understand that Death to America includes them?

WAJ (06:35): Because they don’t see it that way. They, in many ways, based on their rhetoric, see themselves detached from our country. And that’s a massive problem in itself. They see themselves as not part of our society. And that’s why so many of them are calling to tear it down, so they don’t view tearing down our system and tearing down our society according to what they say as necessarily a negative. Of course, it’s an absurd proposition. They don’t realize how privileged they are to be in this country. And of course there are tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people around the world who would do anything to be here in place of them.

So I think people don’t understand that the anti-Israelism, the anti-Semitism is also anti-Americanism on these campuses. If you had one of Kamala Harris’s Venn diagrams, that she loves so much, you would have almost a very significant, I’m not sure a hundred percent overlap, but a very significant overlap between the students who would describe themselves as anti-American and the students who describe themselves as anti-Israel, there’s a huge overlap. They’re the same activists.

So they don’t, when they hear Khomeini say those things, if they even hear it, I don’t think they necessarily view that as a bad thing because they’ve been taught since childhood that we are uniquely evil in the world, that we are systemically racist, that it cannot be solved, that you can only work to overcome it and tear it down. It’s really a horrifying perspective how our education system is raising students.

Gingrich (08:21): Two things. One, you mentioned Kamala Harris. I’ve noticed that her stepdaughter had raised $8 million for Hamas since October 7th, which is kind of astonishing. Here’s the vice president’s daughter raising money for a overtly terrorist organization.

WAJ (08:39): I think she raised it for one of those front groups to provide plausible deniability. So Hamas and other Islamist organizations have a lot of so-called charities around the world. I think that’s how she did it. I forget the name of the group, but it’s one which I think is known to be affiliated. We’ve seen this many times in the US and some groups have even been prosecuted for it. Various Islamist charities that are really just front groups, but they have layers of corporate deniability. And I think that’s what she’s doing.

But the question is, why is she doing that and why isn’t she raising money for the International Red Cross? Why isn’t she raising money for any of the organizations, which whether you like everything they do or you don’t, are legitimate humanitarian organizations. Why would you go to a group with shady connections? And I think that’s just another example. I don’t know much about her stepdaughter, but it’s another example of how people who are college age or in their twenties, maybe now even in their early thirties, were raised very differently than we were raised when it comes to the outlook on the world and the outlook on our own country.

Gingrich (09:52): There was an FBI report that I think anti-Semitic activities, incidents have jumped almost 400% in the last year. I suspect now in the last three weeks it’s even more dramatic. And yet the vice president went on TV to explain to us that the great challenge we face is Islamophobia. How can you watch the evening news and conclude that it is the group who have been doing the persecuting who are the ones who are in trouble, and that the people being persecuted must in fact be the ones who are bad. It’s almost like the world turned upside down

WAJ (10:29): In a lot of college statements that were issued, college presidential statements after you had an event on October 7th, which was the single largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, which was done in ways that would make even ISIS ashamed. The mutilation, torture, mass rape, the stories are still coming out, burning of bodies, dismembering of children in front of their parents. I mean things that are so beyond that.

These are Holocaust level events, although necessarily numerically, but in terms of qualitatively Holocaust and ISIS level events inflicted specifically on the Jewish people because they’re Jewish. And almost every college presidential statement that has come out throws Islamophobia into the condemnation of what just happened. Now, why would you do that? Put aside whether you should have efforts against Islamophobia or any other phobia. I noticed there’s no efforts about anti-Christian bias, which is much more pervasive than Islamophobia.

But why would you do that? Why on this moment of all moments unique to the Jewish people, done and inflicted upon people because they were Jewish and done by Islamists, widely cheered throughout the Islamic world. Why in those sentences do you need to throw in Islamophobia? Why are you so incapable of recognizing the harm that was done uniquely to the Jewish people that even for a day you can’t acknowledge that independent of something else? And that’s really a problem. I think it speaks to a lot of what’s wrong with our societies. We refuse to identify what are the real threats that we face.

Gingrich (12:26): I can’t decide whether it’s a moral equivalence problem. We can’t talk about one without being balanced or whether it is a political constituency problem, that there are now enough people who are Arab Americans, particularly in places like Michigan, that the Biden administration really can’t figure out how to handle this conflict that is now not just in Israel and Gaza, but the conflict’s now inside the United States.

WAJ (12:54): I think it’s a combination of the two. One, I think it’s ideological, the need to draw moral equivalence, the need to bring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into everything you do. So you can’t decry antisemitism, vile acts of violence, without decrying other sorts of hatred in the world. So I think that ideological perspective is part of it. And I think part of it is political. I think that it’s not limited by any means to the Arab American community. The progressive wing of the Democratic party hates Israel, you know, the squad, Rashida Tlaib, Ilan Omar, and many other people. There’s a significant percentage of the Democrat party that hates Israel. And I think that’s what the administration had to contend with. And by far it’s, you know, secular opposition to Israel. It’s not necessarily religious based. And so to me that’s the political angle.

If you look at Gallup polling over the years on who do you have more sympathy for or who do you synthesize with? Now I don’t love the phrasing of that question ’cause sympathy could mean a lot of things. But essentially Democrats are 50-50 now. They no longer have more sympathy, whatever that means, for Israel versus the Palestinians. So the Democratic Party at its base, at its progressive wing, is something that Democrat politicians have to contend with. And I think that’s the political angle that’s driving it.

Gingrich (14:29): It puts Senator Schumer in a difficult position because he now in New York has both a very large Jewish constituency and he has an increasingly militant left, left-wing, anti-Israel constituency, and he’s trying to dance and not get destroyed in between the two of them. And it’s the huge shift from where he would’ve been 10 years ago.

WAJ (14:51): Yeah, and I think people have pointed to him above all else. I haven’t tracked what he’s been saying, but he certainly hasn’t been out front and center. You know the famous line about the most dangerous place in the world is between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera. Where has Chuck Schumer been the last three weeks? Again, I’m not going to say he said nothing, because I’m sure he said things, but this is not the Chuck Schumer we know on almost every other issue where he makes himself the center of attention and he is the spokesman dominating the airwaves. He’s not been around. And I think in this moment people are showing their true character. And I think Schumer probably is taking into account his political calculation. I’m not sure why. It’s not like he’s not going to get reelected. I think he’s got a while before he is up again and he’s a shoe-in to be reelected. So I’m not really sure why. I think perhaps there are some people in the Senate, some Democratic senators who are in disagreement with him, but I’m not sure why he’s in hiding relative to how front and center he should be on this issue.

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Gingrich (18:49):

I think part of it’s ferocity that if you take this group on head on that their ability to come back and to just be so intense and so hostile is kind of amazing. And I think people just flinch from standing up against them.

WAJ (19:09): They’re very aggressive. We’ve seen them with their takeover of the Capitol, for which nobody’s been charged unlike other takeovers of the Capitol, their disruption of congressional hearings regularly. I was just watching this morning, the House Judiciary Committee hearing and there was a Cornell student among the people testifying about campus antisemitism. And that’s one of the reasons I watched it because I knew there was going to be a Cornell student there and she was interrupted by people screaming and protesting.

So they are very aggressive. They take over offices, they take over buildings, they get treated with kid gloves, they are never held to account. So I think it does intimidate people like Chuck Schumer because he knows that there have been protests outside his home in Brooklyn. I think fairly strong protests outside, I think it was two or three weeks ago, I might be slightly off on the timing, that there were significant arrests of very aggressive protestors outside his home in Brooklyn.

So yes, these are dangerous people, they’re aggressive people, they think they can intimidate others and it has an impact on politicians.

Gingrich (20:18): Congressman McCormick of Georgia who offered the resolution to censure Congresswoman Tlaib for her anti-Israel comments, and I think at one point calling for the destruction of Israel, he announced that his staff was working from home today because they actually had had death threats because that’s the intensity of the reaction on the other side.

WAJ (20:39): That doesn’t surprise me at all. We’ve witnessed this in increasingly vitriolic left wing of the Democratic Party. We’ve seen it with Antifa, we’ve seen it with other groups, that they are committed to street violence, they’re committed to street intimidation. We see them going around in what appears to be a semi-organized fashion, or maybe it’s just caught on in their circles, tearing down flyers with regard to Israelis, including children who’ve been kidnapped by Hamas. So there’s something gone very, very wrong on the far left wing of the Democratic party, which has an enormous potential for violence.

Gingrich (21:27):

I did Laura Ingram show and before I went on, she had five of the pro terrorist women members of Congress speaking and she had ’em put back to back to back. She got the full intensity of all five of ’em. And by the fifth one there was a level of hysteria and hostility that was really startling. I mean, it resembled some of the things I’ve read about in terms of the pre-Civil war congresses where people ended up getting beaten with canes and what have you. There’s a ferocity there that is I think, very challenging and in which frankly has led me to wonder what we should do about it both on campuses but also as a country. Because as a historian I find the parallelism with the intensity and the militancy and the organization from 1929 to 33 of the Nazis in Weimar, Germany, very similar that you have this emerging group willing to impose its views. People intimidated against standing up against it, not quite believing that it really, really means what it’s saying because if you think about what they’re really saying that it’s so horrifying that you’d have to deal with them.

So let’s start with, where you operate, which is the campuses, what would you do to recapture the campuses for civilization?

WAJ (22:48): The first thing you have to do is get rid of what is euphemistically called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which is simply a racialization of everything. It is viewing everything that happens through a racial lens and some other identity lenses, but basically it’s a group identity approach to the world, but particularly a group racial identity approach to the world.

It’s poisonous, it dominates the campuses, it certainly dominates Cornell and it has enormous, enormous negative implications for society. If you wanted to destroy our country from within, what would you do differently than set people against each other based on race and ethnicity? I’m not sure you would do anything differently.

So first step is what has happened in Florida, regardless of who someone supports for the Republican nomination, what Ron DeSantis has done in Florida is to defund the bureaucracies. And that I think would be a really good step to refocus education on campuses, not just on academics, but to the extent you want to fight hate and fight bigotry on campus, uphold the dignity of the individual, uphold our constitutional guarantee of equal protection that each person is to be treated as an individual, not as a proxy for their racial or ethnic group.

That’s how we need to refocus it. That’s not going to solve the problem today, but if we did that, I think it would go a long way towards solving the problem with the incoming students on college campuses.

Gingrich (24:36): Would you cut off federal funding to schools that continue to offer that kind of focus?

WAJ (24:44): Yes, I would. I think that’s got to be considered. That’s not going to happen obviously unless there’s a dramatic change in the political structure in Washington. But states can do it also> I would absolutely, no federal funding for these DEI bureaucracies. I think that would be a really good step. The faculties at certainly the so-called elite universities and colleges have been completely captured by radicals, particularly in the humanities. And I think that that’s something that needs to be addressed. I have been saying for a long time, I do not believe that universities, at least at the so-called elite level, can be reformed internally because there’s no internal opposition to help with that reform.

If you look at the statistics on how professors self identify, how faculty self identify, and if you go back 25 or 30 years, I think the statistics are that as between liberal and conservative, it was about 60 40 liberal to conservative. So campuses always leaned left. But if you look at it currently, it’s something like 28 to one. And if you look at the youngest cohort professors who’ve only been teaching for 10 years or less, something like 40 to one, there is no internal opposition left on campuses. I would prefer that outsiders not have to take the lead. I would prefer that campuses could reform themselves, but they can’t. So I think federal funding, state funding, how about enforcing state and federal civil rights laws? Because most, a lot of what happens on campuses is discrimination that violates the law, but it doesn’t get enforced. So I think there’s a lot of things, but funding I think is the key. I think the money is the key here.

Gingrich (26:40): Do you think that if you were able to defund the DEI efforts that that would lead to a substantial shift in the universities?

WAJ (26:52): Yes, it’s not going to cure things in and of itself, but it would be a dramatic improvement if those race-based, race-focused, ethnicity-focused, racial lens-focused administrative programming and mandates were eliminated. That would be a dramatic rise. At Cornell. there are efforts, and I think they’re coming into fruition next fall, so next academic year, to require these sort of DEI courses. Not just training but coursework for incoming freshmen. So you’re going to have new generations of students indoctrinated to believing that we are a systemically racist country, that it can’t be cured. The only thing that can help it is to tear things down. And that race and the color of your skin is the most important attribute as to whether you’ll be successful in this society. And that’s simply not true. But that’s what’s happening. It’s getting worse. It is not getting better.

Gingrich (27:54): In addition to taking that head on, how do we deal with the sort of psychological pressures and cultural pressures that seem to be designed almost to drive Jewish students off campus?

WAJ (28:08): I think you’re right. I think this is in many ways a cultural problem that has happened on campuses. It’s a deeply anti-Western cultural problem, which is taking itself out, as has happened of course for many centuries, on the Jewish population who are seen for whatever the reason as an easy target. While there are some colleges that have significant Jewish populations, they’re never majority or almost never majority, except for religious colleges, they are vulnerable because they are not the majority and they are the victim held out as the ultimate evil. The so-called International Jew who is hated by everybody. And that is led mostly on campuses by the left wing and the Islamists. So the so-called Red Green Alliance, that the far left and the Islamists all have the same enemy. And those two groups, the far left and the Islamists on campuses are very powerful and that is why Israel and Jews are being singled out. But people should understand that this is an anti-American culture on campuses. It’s an anti-Western culture on campuses which is revealing itself as antisemitism.

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Gingrich (31:47): To reinforce your point about DEI’s importance. Ali, who is a former DEI director wrote in the New York Post quote, ‘I saw antisemitism on a weekly basis in my two years as a faculty diversity, equity, and inclusion director. In fact, I can safely say the toxic DEI ideology deliberately stokes hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people.’ Now given that kind of testimony and evidence, why are the board of trustees tolerating turning this into a course?

WAJ (32:22): That is a really good question and that’s a question that I posed to the Cornell board of trustees and never really got an answer from them, is you need to understand, you need to stop all new DEI programming at Cornell until you can understand the negative impact it’s having both on the campus generally, and also its connection to the rise of antisemitism on the campus. It is a wonder, and I think it’s because a lot of board of trustees probably don’t take their job as seriously as it should. It’s very frequently a perk of being a big donor to a university or to a college. That’s one of your rewards is you get to be on the board of trustees. And I don’t know if they really view their job as seriously as they should take it. My guess is if you ask them, they would say yes, we do take it seriously, but their conduct doesn’t show that.

And I think Cornell is a very good example of that, that I’ve been warning about this for years. Others have been warning about it and nothing was done. I also think that DEI has taken on a quasi-religious fervor at Cornell and elsewhere and nobody is willing to question it.

The campus in July of 2020, a couple of months after George Floyd died was declared by the president of the university to be an anti-racist campus, that they were gonna have an anti-racism initiative on campus that would involve faculty, staff and students. And the recommended reading for that summer for the entire university was ibam. Ken’s had to be an anti-racist, which if you’ve ever read it, is a pretty horrible book. It advocates racial discrimination. And so you have a university that declares itself to be anti-racist that recommends Ibram Kendi’s book as the reading for the summer for the entire campus, which is now implementing mandated coursework and mandated training for staff.

They tried to implement that on faculty and faculty revolted. I don’t think they revolted so much substantively over the topic. I think they revolted as they didn’t think the administration could force faculty to go through that sort of training. So you know, Cornell has a fevered pitch of DEI so bad that the university’s and the president’s reaction to what just happened on campus where you not only had, you know, pro Hamas demonstrations, you had a professor who said he felt exhilarated when he heard of the Hamas attack. You had threats by a student who’s now in FBI custody against other Jewish students on campus threatening to slit throats and shoot up the Jewish Living house, Jewish dining hall I should say. And kosher dining hall is a better description. It’s open to anybody, it’s the kosher dining hall.

And what does the president do, and the senior administration, they announce that they are going to beef up the DEI resources to include broader coverage of antisemitism and of course Islamophobia. And so that one goes to show you that antisemitism wasn’t really addressed by this DEI initiative on campus. And they are so wedded to the idea that DEI must remain that rather than examining deconstructing DEI, removing it from the campus, they are simply going to throw a module in there on antisemitism.

So I don’t think the board of trustees has the guts at Cornell, at least they haven’t shown it so far, to take on the DEI bureaucracy and the DEI quasi religion that has taken hold on campus. And until they do that, whatever they do is just going to be a band-aid.

Gingrich (36:27): Whatever the various words of trustees are like. You begin to have people like Ronald Lauder who has now threatened to stop donations to the University of Pennsylvania or Les Wexner and his wife Abigail, who’ve have the Wexner Foundation, which is now breaking its ties with Harvard University. And you get a number of these kind of things. And you’ve had in the legal profession, a number of the major law firms send a letter saying they’re not gonna hire anybody who’s involved in anti-Israel and pro Hamas demonstrations. Those are the beginning of a kind of reaction I don’t think we’ve seen in years.

WAJ (37:05): I think it’s a positive development that donors are finally paying attention and finally understanding that they may think they’re supporting education when they donate tens of millions of dollars to these universities. But in fact they’re actually donating to highly activist institutions to turn out additional activists who are contrary to their own interests.

I think it’s a positive development. I don’t think in and of itself it’s going to change the institutional behavior because it’s too baked in. And particularly if you look at a Harvard, so Harvard for example, has an endowment just over $50 billion, that’s billion with a B, not million with an M. And so they are largely immune to the pressures of donors. If they never got another donation, they would survive. The donations are not to sustain the operation, it’s to put, you know, frosting on the cake. I think these elite institutions largely feel immune to donor pressure. And of course we also know that foreign funding, there’s billions of dollars of foreign funding.

If they lose Ronald Lauder as a donor, they’ll pick up an anti-Israel left wing tech billionaire as a donor, or they’ll pick up somebody affiliated with Qatar. So while I’m in favor of these donors becoming active, I don’t think we should kid ourselves. These administrators at these elite institutions consider the institutions to be theirs, not to be the donors, not to be anybody else’s.

Gingrich (38:50): Do you think though, that either cutting off federal aid or cutting off the tax deductible status would’ve a bigger impact?

WAJ (39:01): Oh, absolutely. I mean the numbers would just dwarf whatever the donors are donating that. You know, federal funding is just massive. You may recall it was a long time ago, but, and it ended up in a Supreme Court decision, Harvard Law School would not permit military recruiters on campus. And Congress passed a law saying that you can’t get federal funding if you don’t treat military recruiters on equal footing with other recruiters. And it went up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court held that that law was constitutional. And so Harvard was faced with the loss of federal funding, not just for Harvard Law School, but for the entire university, so they backed down. Yes, federal funding is so massive that if that were to be put on the line, I think that would change institutional behavior dramatically.

Gingrich (39:59): I want to tell you, I’m very impressed with your courage, because you must face a fair amount of pushback from your colleagues and from your administrative leaders to take the stand you do. Has it made you particularly uncomfortable to speak out like this?

WAJ (40:17): When I was hired, I was nonpolitical. If you’d Googled me in 2006 and 2007, you would’ve found that I was a lawyer in private practice. I won this case. I lost that case. Never political. I got hired at the end of 2007. It was really the 2008 campaign Obama versus McCain that got me political. And I started my website in October 2008, a year after I started at Cornell. And within two to three weeks before the end of October, I was already getting the nastygrams and the hate mail emails to the university. How dare they have someone like me on faculty? Only because I was supporting McCain and I was pointing out that Obama’s got some problems here. And that continued for the better part of a decade that continued, for eight plus years. Not every day, but consistently harassment from off the campus attempts to get me fired.

The university was always very good about it. They always backed me up. And it always came from off campus until George Floyd. So post George Floyd, I saw protestors in the streets with their hands up saying, ‘hands up, don’t shoot.’ And I knew that that was from the Michael Brown case that created Black Lives Matter because we followed it at the website and I knew that that was a fabrication, that Michael Brown was not shot with his hands up saying, don’t shoot. He was shot because he punched a policeman in the face and tried to steal his weapon. So I wrote a post that I’d written many times before saying, hey, you know, all you people are marching, hands up, don’t shoot. Do you realize that’s a fabricated narrative from the Michael Brown case and that the Obama Justice Department investigated and found there’s no credible evidence that Michael Brown was shot with his hands up saying, don’t shoot, and people lost their minds <laugh>.

Then the complaints came from within the building and there were attempts to get me fired, petitions to get me fired. 21 faculty members denounced me. 15 student groups declared a boycott of my course, but I didn’t back down. I got a lot of outside support and they didn’t end up firing me. But yeah, it’s been uncomfortable. I don’t have a huge amount of contact with my colleagues since they signed a letter denouncing me.

But I am one of the only people on Cornell’s campus who speaks out contrary to the prevailing narrative, and there’s a price to pay. And what happens is people just end up leaving. They don’t wait to be fired. They just say, why should I live in an environment like this? And I understand that, it’s a question I ask myself all the time, and that’s why there are so few conservatives left on campuses because they make a life decision that this is now not how I want to lead my life, and they’re not hired anymore. And so, yeah, it’s been a difficult road, but I wouldn’t be on your show talking if I didn’t speak out. And I would hate to be somebody just sitting on the sideline fuming about what’s happening without trying to do something about it.

Gingrich (43:29): I think people who’ve never done it underestimate the level of courage it takes to actually stand for your beliefs when the society around you is deeply hostile. And I commend you for having the courage to do this, but I think it’s really important, and I think people like you around the country are sort of a little bit like the Minutemen at the beginning of the American Revolution. You’re the standard bearers for freedom in a way that is really, really important. And I hope that to a little extent, this particular podcast encourages you to believe that what you’re doing is worthwhile and is a contribution to the survival of America and the survival of freedom within the rule of law under our constitution.

I want to thank you for joining me. I think our listeners are going to find this fascinating and very, very timely conversation, and I hope they’ll go and take a look at your website and take a look at your writing as it evolves over the next few years. So Bill, thank you very much for being with us.

WAJ (44:35): Great. And thank you for having me on. I appreciate it greatly.

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