“A lot of people mistake this as a fight to save education. It’s not. It’s a fight to save the country.”

“A lot of people mistake this as a fight to save education. It’s not. It’s a fight to save the country.”

I was guest recently on the Victor Davis Hanson podcast, guest hosted by Jack Fowler in Victor’s absence due to illness. (The January 15 update on his condition is here.)

We covered a lot of issues in over 45 minutes, including the history of Legal Insurrection, the early events we covered that brought us to national attention, the Black Lives Matter movement, and what we do at CriticalRace.org and EqualProtect.org.

Here is the full video, followed by a partial transcript.

00:00 Shocking Hostility at Cornell
01:31 Victor’s Recovery Update
02:09 Guest Introduction: Bill Jacobson
04:46 Cornell’s Free Speech and Academic Freedom Issues
08:10 Hostility Towards Jewish Students
14:45 Legal Insurrection: Origins and Impact
27:09 Early Coverage of Black Lives Matter
38:33 Equal Protection Project: Fighting Discrimination
44:46 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)

Fowler (01:10):

Well, hello ladies and hello gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen, in his own words. I’m Jack Fowler. I’m the host. I’m the substitute….

In the meanwhile, he’s deputized me to keep it going. And he said, ask really important, interesting people to come on as guests and ask them important questions. And I’m like, I’m all over it.

And frankly, one of the most important people out there that I could think of is my friend Bill Jacobson. William A. Jacobson, who is the founder of Legal Insurrection and the Legal Insurrection Foundation. A truly important site punching that’s been punching over its weight since, almost 20 years [WAJ: 18 years], I think, Bill….

Fowler (03:09):

… Hey, Bill, I’m very grateful you’re here…. You are a non leftist, I think that’s fair to say. Maybe we could even call you Bill a conservative, and you’re a professor at Cornell University, which is a prestigious Ivy League institution. And like all colleges, it has a development department that seeks major funds from alumni and these development officers tell conservative alumni something along the following lines. Oh, yes, indeed. Free speech and academic freedom thrives here at Cornell.

I’d rather think that you Bill, professor of law, are in the belly of the beast instead of at some bastion of free speech. And your institution in the recent years, much more publicly, has shown itself to have real issues with the First Amendment with academic freedom and with Jews, American Jews. Would I be right to think this, and is the prevailing culture of Cornell something that can only be practically challenged by aggressive legal action?

WAJ (04:46):

Let me step back because the question is what do we mean by freedom of speech and what do we mean by academic freedom?

And I’d say for the most part, the university is not going to punish you for your speech if you’re a faculty member. But that really jumps over the initial issue, which is there’s no diversity of viewpoint on campus.

So yes, there is relatively free speech, but there’s almost exclusively from the left faculty on campus who express their speech. So it’s not really at Cornell and at many of these so-called elite universities. The question is not will the university punish you? It’s okay, who is even here to speak? And at Cornell, based on the statistics from the Cornell Sun student newspaper, they’ve reviewed donation histories, political affiliations, it is approaching 100% Democrat. And I can tell you from my own experience, it is approaching 100% in the range from your standard liberal American liberal, which is probably the biggest cohort, to the extreme left.

There really is no alternative viewpoint. So to me, it’s a little bit of a dodge. If the university says, well, yes, we have free speech, we don’t, you know, kick people out if we disagree with them. Well of course you don’t because almost the only people on campus are people you all agree with. And so that’s the more fundamental problem to me, which is that for 30 plus years, there has been a purge of non-liberal, and I like the way you put it, non leftist. I don’t know what conservative means anymore. But I know that I’m not leftist, I’m not a collectivist, I’m not that sort of person. So the people we would normally in pop culture refer to as conservatives are essentially non-existent, in the faculty at Cornell. And to the extent there are some, there are extremely quiet.

And that’s where I think the issues of free speech and academic freedom come in, is that knowing you won’t be hired, knowing you won’t be promoted, knowing you won’t get tenure, if you are, quote unquote conservative, people hide their feelings.

So it’s not so much that the university punishes you, it’s a culture on campus, which is a monoculture and only allows one viewpoint to flourish. That doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions. I am the exception. There might be some others, but the exceptions, in a sense, prove the rule, which is it’s a monoculture on campus, and that’s the most fundamental problem.

So if the development office is pitching people saying, well, we haven’t terminated a professor because of their speech, or we haven’t kicked students out purely because of their speech, they may be right, but they’re not actually answering the problem. And it is a DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion infused campus that dominates everything. So put it all together.

Yes, technically there is free speech and academic freedom at Cornell. As a practical matter, there’s only one group that benefits from that.

Fowler (08:05):

Bill, picking up on, I’m still only asking five questions. So this is a corollary, the first I mentioned it about, about the treatment of Jewish students and maybe Jewish faculty on campus…. I kind of was shocked by just the openness of the hostility towards Jewish students at Cornell at, on the main campus. Cornell is also has, facilities in New York City…. [W]ere you stunned by what has happened in the last few years after October 7th?

WAJ (08:54):

Not really stunned. I think it came to the surface very quickly, but I’ve been covering and dealing with these themes really for well over a decade, for approaching two decades, the extreme anti-Israel fervor of the faculty. So not only have they purged conservative faculty, they’ve purged pro-Israel faculty. Again, that’s not to say there are none, but it is a minority.

If you are your standard leftist academic hostile to Zionism, you know, believes Israel’s a white supremacist state. If you are buying into that, you’re going to have no problem getting hired. And you’re not gonna be shy about expressing your viewpoint. On the other hand, if you’re taking more traditional pro-Israel, or at least Israel friendly attitude, good luck being hired in the humanities and social sciences, it’s going to be a problem everywhere, not just at Cornell. … So it is a hostile environment that there have been very active anti-Israel coalitions built over the years, long before October 7th. And they were always built in a very racialized manner. So it was always students of color, people of color, versus Israel. And you can go back to 2014, 17, 19, we covered this at the website. What they would do is before they would bring a boycott motion to the student assembly, they would create a coalition of non-white student groups. And that would be, and so it was a very toxic sort of environment, a very race infused hostility. There was a lot of intimidation.

That same hostility applied to conservative students on campus as well. I know because I’m essentially the only openly politically conservative professor on campus. I’m the faculty advisor, almost every right of center student group. So the pressure that pro-Israel students came under on campus, conservative students came under, but it all came to the surface after October 7th.

And when I say after October 7th, I mean like October 8th, I always say to people, if you want to understand how bad it was, don’t look at October 7th. Look at October 8th.

There were marches on campus calls for Intifada, which was the violent suicide campaign against Israel. Denunciations, graffiti, intimidation of students, intimidation of Jewish students. So all that I’d been seeing for a decade prior to October 7th came right up to the surface, with heavy faculty involvement in those protests. The faculty, in many ways, instigated and managed them.

So yes, it created a very hostile environment. So hostile to the extent that an undergraduate student who’s now serving four years in prison made open violent threats against the kosher dining hall and Jewish students on campus. We infamously had the professor who at a rally, not that long after October 7th, said he felt exhilarated when he heard about it, the fact. So it was a very toxic environment.

I’d say it’s calmed down in the past year because the administration finally started enforcing the rules. And what I’ve always said is, you don’t need new rules for these students, the anti Israel students. You just need to enforce the same rules everybody else lives by. I’m not seeking extra punishment for them. But we have rules. You can’t march through the library with a bullhorn and disrupt everybody. But when that’s applied to them, they say, oh, you’re violating our free speech. No, we’re just applying the rules evenly. You can’t blockade doors, you can’t blockade buildings. You can’t do all those things…. The Trump administration took notice of it at Cornell. And I think in reaction to that, Cornell started to clamp down. And again, when I say clamp down, I don’t mean treat the anti-Israel students worse than anybody else, just apply the rules to them that you apply to everybody else.

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Fowler (17:13):

… Okay, now on to legal insurrection. Bill. I remember discovering legal insurrection, well over a decade ago, and thinking, who are these guys that speak so boldly without an iota of weakness? No hedging your bets. Punching above your weight. You had spunk. You were actually even a little mysterious, like, who are these people? <laugh> <laugh>….

So I want to know, Bill, what compelled you in all your spare time to launch this site? ….

WAJ (18:43):

…. It started, because I had been in private law practice prior to that for 22 years. I had dinner with the former client. We got into an argument over the presidential 2008 election. He’s for Obama. I was for McCain Palin. At the end of it, he said, you know, I’ve never heard anybody explain your side as well as you have. You should start a blog. I had no idea what a blog was. Never heard of them. Wasn’t really political at all. Prior to that. Publicly. Nobody would’ve known anything about me politically.

And so I looked into it and I found Google Blogger, which was free. And I said, you know what? Why don’t I do this? And I needed to come up with a name, <laugh>. So I did a word association, and I was so frustrated by the media bias in the 2008 election in favor of Obama. I said, what word comes to mind? Insurrection. That’s how I’m feeling. I looked it up by definition. That’s illegal. Thought to myself, well, you know, probably not a great idea. You just started a job as a law professor to pick a name that means illegal. I said, why don’t I call it legal insurrection? Which actually is a contradiction in terms, there is no such thing as a legal insurrection.

And that was it. That was the branding. There was no plan…. And I start posting about Obama <laugh>. And my first post was how Obama was much more radical than he’s letting on. And my stuff took off, and it got noticed. That was October 12th. By the end of October, the law school’s already getting emails that I should be fired. To their credit, they didn’t fire me. It took off from there. Our stuff just got picked up because we weren’t shy. I didn’t know enough to be shy. I didn’t even know enough at that time to pick a pseudonym. A lot of law professors who blogged at that time in 2008 used pseudonyms. I didn’t even know to do that….

It was just me and we got millions of visits. It was crazy. Then I bring in a second one who was an undergrad student from the Republican Club, because I was the faculty advisor. And she said, can I write for you? I said, sure. Great. We meandered along for another year or two with two people, again, getting millions of visits, a lot of press and things like that. And we started to add more people.

We were loosely affiliated with the Tea Party movement. I wouldn’t say we were a tea party blog. We didn’t affiliate with the particular group, but more with the general movement, what I call the Leave Me Alone movement, which is kind of my political philosophy. Just leave me alone…

And then we became more professionalized. It was all volunteer for many years. And, so it took off and people liked our stuff….

Fowler (26:51):

Yeah. Well, you had great instincts, Bill. You and legal insurrection were early on after Black Lives Matter, BLM. And what motivated that? Did you have an instinct about that, going after them, and what is your take on the legal and societal consequences of that? I will call it nefarious organization?

WAJ (27:53):

We followed Black Lives Matter before it was even a formal organization. We followed the Trayvon Martin – George Zimmerman case in Florida, where George Zimmerman correctly and properly invoked self-defense in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. And it was that case that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter hashtag.

We also then covered in 2014, the Michael Brown shooting, the so-called Hands Up, Don’t shoot shooting. That case gave rise to the formal organization. So we were tracking Black Lives Matter really before it was even Black Lives Matter, that whole movement and the people involved. And we covered very closely at the website, the Michael Brown case.

And for those of the listeners and viewers who don’t know, hands up, don’t shoot, never happened. It’s a fabrication. The Obama Justice Department, the Obama, not the Trump, the Obama Justice Department reviewed that, investigated it [and found] it was a legally justified shooting.

There’s no credible evidence Michael Brown had his hands up saying, don’t shoot, all the credible evidence, including the forensics and the ballistics, and the gunpowder on his hand,  showed that Michael Brown was shot because he sucker punched a policeman sitting in his patrol car, reached in and tried to grab his gun, was shot the first time, and then there was a second shot.

So Black Lives Matter was created from a fabrication, and I can’t say this enough, the entire launch of Black Lives Matter was based on a fabrication about the Trayvon Martin case, that it was a racist case, and a fabrication about the Michael Brown shooting.

And so from its infancy, Black Lives Matter was based on a fabricated narrative of racism in our society. The people who organized the formal organization … were self-proclaimed, uh, Marxists, they used that organization to try to destroy our society. That doesn’t mean everybody who’s gone to a march is a Marxist, but it does mean that the people behind it, the people who organized it, did it for the purpose of destroying our country. And we saw that unfold post George Floyd.

So my big takeaway is the single most influential and impactful social movement of this century in the United States was birthed from fabricated claims of racism. And people need to understand that…. And so that’s my big takeaway, is that Black Lives Matter then literally destroyed our country. After George Floyd  all of the plans they had to burn down our cities and tear up campuses and force out conservatives, et cetera, came to fruition. It came to fruition at Cornell also, because after after the George Floyd death, I saw people marching saying, hands up, don’t shoot.

And I wrote a post at my blog, which I’d written actually three or four times before saying, Hey, you know, that’s a fabrication <laugh>, that didn’t happen. And people lost their minds. There was a concerted effort. Internet petitions, you know, 15 student groups organized a boycott of my course. Every professor in my hallway signed a letter denouncing me. The dean denounced me.

All this craziness, all because I told the truth about this fraudulent movement. This movement founded based on fabrications. And so I’m very familiar with BLM. I’ve been following it forever. I’m never gonna stop speaking out and letting people know that it was based on a fabrication.

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Fowler (34:18):

One more question before we take our last break. And after that, there’ll be the fifth question. But here’s the fourth question for Bill Jacobson, the founder of Legal Insurrection. … Tell us about CriticalRace.org. Why did you launch it and what is its purpose?

WAJ (34:57):

CriticalRace.org was launched in February 2021 as an outgrowth of what we saw on campuses and elsewhere post George Floyd, the so-called Summer of Love, when Minneapolis and many other cities burned. We began to look into it and we began to understand this racialized view of the world, the racial politics in education had really exploded everywhere. And so we researched it and we found so much we said, we need a place where everything is in one place. And so CriticalRace.org is a series of interactive databases. We have researchers who go through and document what is happening at various colleges. And we’ve now covered medical schools and other professional schools. We have over 700 schools in our database. We continually upgrade them. And so it became a resource for parents, students, legislators, the media, media, we’ve been linked many times by other media….

We’re really staffing it up because we now want to document how the schools are masking what they’re doing. They’re taking things down, they’re rebranding them. So at Cornell, diversity, equity and Inclusion, which permeates the entire university, is now called Belonging and Understanding. It’s almost comical what they’re doing. <laugh> Or understanding and belonging. I can’t remember which comes first….

It’s expanding into unmasking what’s going on. And that’s our big project for 2026. We’ve added researchers to unmask what these schools are doing.

Fowler (37:53):

Terrific. Bill, you’re a wrecking crew. I’ll call you an undersung hero. You  are a hero of our movement.

… The Equal Protection Project is another legal insurrection effort that takes on blatant racism. Tell us about it ….

WAJ (38:56):

So Equal Protection Project, which is equalprotect.org, was an outgrowth of our critical race website. We had so many people coming to us saying, there’s a scholarship, but my child can’t apply because the child’s white. Things like that. We said we can no longer limit ourselves to just documenting what’s happening. We need to start taking legal action. And that’s what EqualProtect.org does. We have challenged in three years, we’re coming up on our third anniversary, over 200 universities and colleges regarding over 700 discriminatory, programs and scholarships. We’ve had a very good success rate. We’ve had dozens of federal investigations resulting from our work, Department of Justice, Department of Education, and so we’ve been extremely active. We have really ramped that up. I think of the 700 we’ve done, I think over 500 with this past calendar year, we’ve added attorneys.

We’re moving very aggressively….And it has been a phenomenal success…. So a very important part of what we do is media coverage. When we roll out a complaint, we hit the local media market. Sometimes that publicity in and of itself compels a university to change the program and correct their ways, because what they’re doing is indefensible. You cannot have a program that says we’re only open to certain races or certain ethnicities. Not if you’re getting federal funding, you can’t do that…. Just a little bit of publicity, a little bit of sunlight is sometimes enough to get these universities to change….

Every time a local newspaper writes about our story, we’re educating the public. And the interesting thing is, the comments on these local papers, as opposed to the New York Times, are almost always favorable to us. People know this is wrong. Doesn’t matter what color you are, you know we should not be selecting people based on the color of their skin. And so we’re educating millions of people. And if you go to our website, equalprotect.org, we talk about how education is one of our three primary focuses that we want to change the culture. And I think a lot of the things the federal government under Trump has been able to do is that for several years, the culture surrounding critical race theory and DEI changed. And it was that change in culture, which allowed political results to follow. And so that’s what we’re continuing to do.

We’re expanding. We’ve added two full-time attorneys in the past year. We’re adding more. We’re going to just keep going forward, because we have to.

If you wanted to destroy our country, what would you do differently than the left has done with regard to education? What would you do differently than to teach children to view the world through a racial lens? What would you do differently than to teach children to hate each other based on group identity, to hate their parents, to hate their country, based on group identity? And that’s what we’re fighting against.

A lot of people mistake this as a fight to save education. It’s not, it’s a fight to save the country. And that’s what we’re doing, fighting in the trenches every single day at the Legal Insurrection website, at CriticalRace.org and EqualProtect.org. And we’re just doing it. We don’t have a plan. We just do it. I think instinctively we knew we needed to do this.

Fowler (44:45):

… People ask me all the time about what groups punch above their weight. Bill says “we” and you, from everything he said, you would think there are like 50 people involved. This is a skeleton crew, if there ever was one. The victories they notch are tremendous.

So if you’re interested in a conservative organization, I will call it conservative, an American-loving organization as really being consequential, Legal Insurrection, Legal Insurrection Foundation, CriticalRace.org, and the Equal Protection Project are things you should check out, even if, if you wanna donate, but also check out to be inspired because they really are doing things in defense of our unalienable rights

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