Latest / The Nation Podcasts / No Kings Day: We Are Everywhere; plus Trump and Antisemitism / Start Making Sense

Transcript

No Kings Day: We Are Everywhere; plus Trump and Antisemitism / Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm John Weiner.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later in the hour, Trump has renewed his year-long campaign against universities that have been resisting his authoritarian rule.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's focused his attacks on the most prestigious private university, Harvard, and the most prestigious public university, UCLA.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: swing each of them in the past week for anti-Semitism.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: They've admired who teaches Jewish history at UCLA.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll comment.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But first, the No King's three day of protest will be this Saturday.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's going to be a big one.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leah Greenberg of Indivisible will explain in a minute.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you heard the news.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: This Saturday, March 28th is the day for the next no-king's mobilization, called by indivisible in its allies, it's going to be a big one.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: For that we turn to Leah Greenberg, she's co-founder and co-executive director of the indivisible project.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: a grassroots movement of thousands of local indivisible groups working to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now she's got a new weekly podcast, what's the plan?
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's about the actions we can take right now that have the most impact.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Egrinder, welcome back.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Great to be here.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the last no kings day of protest October 18th, we had 2700 events in all 50 states involving a total of 7 million people.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: That seemed to have been the biggest day of protest in American history.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you think will happen this Saturday?
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm superstitious, so I never give, I never assigned numbers in advance.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what I can tell you is that we are topping out at, we're topping over 3,000 events all over the country that are already on the map, which means that we are well over the 2,700 that we saw last time around.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are small towns and places that maybe have never even had a progressive protest before, but that are collectively coming together and pushing back.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we are seeing an enormous amount of enthusiasm and energy.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: For the event, we are seeing an enormous amount of outrage at everything the Trump administration is doing and we are expecting another big day of mass defiance.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, now it's time for your Minnesota moment that's news from my hometown of St. Paul that you won't get from Sean Hannity.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: What are the plans for the No King's Three Rally this Saturday at the state capital downtown St. Paul?
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: When we were thinking about what are the stories that a no-kings collectively can tell in this moment, one thing that we thought was really important was to center the story of the horror that was visited on Minnesota by Donald Trump, by his secret police.
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the extraordinary dedicated creative non-bound discipline resistance that rose up to me to it.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because fundamentally, this is a story of Donald Trump trying to brutalize a blue state
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: because he perceived it to be in political disagreement with him, using an extraordinarily racially discriminatory force that we're coming in and creating basically a renauteric.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then being defeated politically and practically by an army of
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, activists and or immigrant rights organizers and soccer moms and retirees and workers and faith leaders and just about everybody who collectively came together and pushed back and said no, you're not going to do this to my neighbors.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that is an incredibly important story to tell.
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: When you're operating under it would be authoritarian, things feel really dark a lot of the time.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's important that we tap into these moments that are actually about our collective power when we work together, when we take that, when we sacrifice and risk together.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the story of the flagship event in Minnesota is really going to be about centering those local voices, the people who organize the people who
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: protected their neighbors, the people who were in harm's way and pushed back with a little bit of support from some national voices and some national representatives who will tell that story into some creative ways.
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, for example, we've got Bruce Springsteen joining to sing his song about Minneapolis, as well as people who have been on the ground and who are leading the charge the whole time.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think you have some other out-of-towners coming.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we know that Bernie Sanders is confirmed as well as Jean Fonda who has been at many folks now has been well involved in organizing artists across the country to push back and raise their voices.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to have some folks from all over who are coming together with that Minnesota story.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also, the Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flamagan will speak.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's running for the Democratic Party nomination for the open Senate seat there.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hasn't indivisible made an endorsement in that race?
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Indivisible has endorsed Peggy Flamagan.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Our statewide network endorsed many a number of local groups.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had a resounding vote in her favor.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: All indivisibles are really excited to come around behind Peggy Flamagan.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: She is a fighter and an organizer and exactly the kind of person that we are looking forward to getting into the Senate.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, we remember the first no kings day rally in St. Paul last June.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The night before this democratic speaker of the State House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman was assassinated along with her husband by an anti-abortion activist.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And McKiller was still on the loose when the no king rally was scheduled to start.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: How did you decide to go ahead with that rally?
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: At a time when some people, including the police, said it was too dangerous.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, fundamentally I want to give credit to the local organizers of that rally because they were extraordinarily determined that threats would not stop them that in fact this was a moment to come together and memorialize Melissa Hartman and to stand against political violence and what we saw was an extraordinary number of people responded to that call and turned out that day.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I remember watching it on my computer 30,000 people showed up despite the apparent danger.
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remember, Attorney General Keith Ellison gave a great speech.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the same place that the rally will be held this Saturday.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, indivisible took the lead in scheduling the more than 3,000 no kings protest this Saturday.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are thousands of indivisible groups, but you don't do this alone.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have partners.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's an alphabetical order, the AAUP, the ACLU, asks me the AFVL, Amnesty International.
• 6:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I got to 24 partner groups and had not finished the letter A yet.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think it's fair to say, indivisible has a lot of partners.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: The beauty of this is that it is a broad front against fascism.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is people from to the left and to the right who are collectively coming together to say, we are not going to write our own full policy platform, but we are going to collectively agree on pushing back to fight for our democracy, to fight against illegal unconstitutional catastrophic wars, to protect our neighbors, we can come together to do that.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is really powerful.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I will also just note,
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: events of this scale, the amount of organizing and the amount of work that goes into it are wildly beyond the capacity of any organization to hold, and so this could not happen if it was not a massive collaborative effort within enormous number of folks across the ecosystem.
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I cannot successfully name everybody who throws in, but you know, American Federation of Teachers, SCIU, move on public citizen ACLU,
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: black voters matter, transformative justice coalition, we have a ton of folks who are collectively pushing so incredibly hard in order to make this happen.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's really, it's really so far beyond the point where it could be one organization.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, some of our skeptical friends always ask do protests really work.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mika Sifri has been thinking about that.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He points out at his sub-stack the connector few interesting cases.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Harvard first came under attack by Trump, it didn't make its decision to hold firm ensued the administration until after the first big hands-off rallies that was April 5th, 2025.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And while the courts, we think of as existing in their own
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: We do know that judges pay attention to the news and the ruling's blocking Trump from deploying the national guard wherever he wanted to take note of the significant public protest that took place against those deployments at that no kings events.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And finally, Congress voted to force the release of the Epstein files, nearly unanimously, only after 7 million people turned out for no kings to in mid-October, so I conclude protest works.
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, in some of those, we heard really direct support for some of those events, right?
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like when we, after at Hands-Off, we heard from people who were very personally involved in the Harvard organizing effort that there was an almost immediate vibe change, and so much of the theory of these massive multi-issue collective fraud front moves.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is really actually not about trying to win on one specific policy, it is about trying to change the atmosphere in which every other actor in American society is making their decisions right because fundamentally when you are looking at a
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, part of the danger are the things he does, but the bigger danger is how every other actor in society responds to him and whether they preemptively move to comply to obey, to do his bidding, to fall in line.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of the damage that we saw in the first year of the Trump administration wasn't to direct move by Trump.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was other actors who were, you know, they threw out their DEI policies, if they were corporations in order to appease him.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: started moving to have their algorithms favor Trump.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: They started to collect a university, started to fold to his demands.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: All of these actions were basically kind of individual actors trying to make a rational calculation that their interests were best served.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: by complying with the Trump administration and the fundamental theory of the case with the no king's rallies is that we're going to change some of those actors' calculations by demonstrating that resistance is everywhere that it is in every community that your people you know are part of it and that we are big and powerful and that we are ultimately going to win.
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so you better be making the kinds of decisions that you can live with and defend in a year or two years or in four years when there is accountability.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So more than 3,000 events organized for this Saturday, you've been doing a lot of work to make sure that every one of those 3,000 events is peaceful in nonviolent and you've been running a lot of trainings for organizers and protests and marshals.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Know your rights training, de-escalation training.
• 11:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tell us what happens in those trainings.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you sign up to host a nookingsment, you are gonna need a designated safety leave.
• 11:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: They are gonna attend one of our intensive safety trainings and create a safety plan.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: We really focus on how do we make sure as many people as possible, collectively, are trained and prepared and understand how to have a safe event, understand what kinds of options they have, make an assessment about how they'll work with or not work with local law enforcement, all of the things that go into pre-planning in order to make these as safe and as supportive as possible.
• 11:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and you've also held trainings for thousands of people in learning how to talk to your friends and family and neighbors about no kings and why they should join you at your local event, why it matters that they do it now.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next one of these is scheduled for Wednesday, March 25th, 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern, Eastern, tell us about what happens.
• 11:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's going to happen at that one?
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, look fundamentally, you know, we don't control the big networks.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: We don't control the algorithms.
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: The way that we are going to get to bigger and bigger protests and bigger mass movements is by people who form connections with each other and who talk through why it is important to get involved.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's really about the practical skills of building those relationships, of getting people involved, of giving them their own why and their own reason to turn out.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so,
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fundamentally, what we want to do is give people the tools to have really pretty simple conversations in which you invite additional folks to join you.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I took a look at the map for my home state of Minnesota to see what where things were happening there on Saturday.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just in Northern Minnesota, in Duluth, there's going to be a rally.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is Duluth is at the head of Lake Superior.
• 12:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rally will be at City Hall.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: up the north shore north of there on the road to Highway 61 going up to Canada at two harbors.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a rally at Silver Bay.
• 12:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a rally at Grand Marei.
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a no Kings rally.
• 13:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are some of my favorite places on earth.
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Up on the iron rains were Bob Dylan grew up.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's one in Ely the gateway to the boundary waters.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: in Bemidji at the Paul Bunyan Statue.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: In international falls, that's the northernmost place in the continental United States, the No King's protest and international falls is at Smoky Bear Park for blocks from the Canadian border.
• 13:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: You could come up with a similar list of small town No King's protests for every state of the Union.
• 13:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's really my favorite thing about No King's Day, the idea that we are everywhere.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's absolutely right.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, look, a lot of times the national cover just gonna be like the drone photos of the city with the big crowd.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's good and important.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: We want to get those big crowds out.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And also a lot of the catalytic effect of no kings is that person who signs up and says,
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm going to have a rally in a small town in Tennessee that hasn't had one of these before and then suddenly it turns out that there are 50 people who are in your small town or in the neighboring town who actually wanted to come out wanted to be together wanted to be in community and suddenly you have got a new community that you didn't have before.
• 14:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what we hear from people all the time is that that's just the beginning, right?
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Those folks stay in touch.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: They keep organizing suddenly.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is a new hub of people who are out there, who are doing the work.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is some of the power that we see on an ongoing basis.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not just about the day of.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is about taking as many people as possible and moving them into an ongoing cycle of action.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for people who haven't signed up yet, how do you find that no king's protest near you?
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can go to nokings.org and you can check out our map.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: There will be, I can pretty much guarantee you.
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: There will be one near you.
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, uh, I took a look at the map for my neighborhood of L.A. And I learned there's a nokings car caravan for L.A.
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The description says, why choose just one when you can join a bunch of them without taking a single step, rode out-rage L.A. is an organized car caravan that will do a big loop around central L.A. visiting half a dozen no-king demonstrations with our presence and our horns.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Along the way, we'll make sure to wake up the shoppers on rodeo drive.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll shake up the tourists on Hollywood Boulevard.
• 15:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll pump up the hipsters in Silver Lake.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll cheer up our immigrant neighbors in East L.A.
• 15:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The party starts in a parking lot at 10 a.m. in Culver City.
• 15:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it ends at my neighborhood, no kings event.
• 15:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: No kings, Pico Robertson at 330 in the afternoon.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love the creative stuff, you know, we are hearing some really fun plans across the ecosystem, across the country for people who are going to be doing new and innovative vaccines this year, time around.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I just remember that the last no-kings day, basically it was just fun, everybody looking good, everybody feeling great about seeing each other, it was a memorable day, I think this one will be too.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think this will be a powerful moment.
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that, you know, the clouds are dark.
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are all facing an escalating and horrifying war.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are, that is driving up our costs.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are continuing to push back against the secret police force around the country that is just recently being dispatched to airports.
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And also, fundamentally, this is a would-be authoritarian who is flailing and overreaching because he understands that he is losing to us.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Saturday is the moment where we project that collective power.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leah Greenberg, she's co-founder and co-executive director of the indivisible project.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's one of our heroes.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leah, thanks for talking with us today.
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Pleasure to join.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trump has renewed his campaign against universities that have been resisting his authoritarian rule.
• 16:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's focused his attacks on the most prestigious private university, Harvard, and the most prestigious public university UCLA.
• 17:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's soon each of them in the past week for anti-Semitism for what the Justice Department says is the school's failure to protect Jewish students and faculty from anti-Semitic attacks.
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: For comment we turn to David Myers, he's a distinguished professor at UCLA where he teaches Jewish history.
• 17:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's written for the L.A. Times op-ed page, the forward and the Atlantic, and he's been an activist working for Midesi P. Ford decades.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: David Myers, welcome back.
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Great to be with you John.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, last time we talked here, it was right after Trump said he was finding UCLA a billion dollars to punish the school for anti-Semitism.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: This came after a tumultuous spring of campus protests in 2024 over Israel's war in Gaza.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: A federal court blocked Trump's billion dollar fine and he dropped his appeal of that ruling and abandoned the idea.
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, his justice department in the past week under Attorney General Pam Bondi has filed a lawsuit against the University of California.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a title seven lawsuit of the Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: which prohibits employment discrimination based on religion among other things.
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Feds accuse the UC administration of, quote, routinely ignoring a severe and pervasive,
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: wave of anti-Semitism, according to Cambandi UCLA systematically ignored cries for help from its own terrified employees.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The legal claim is that Jewish faculty and staff at UCLA facing hostile work environment, because of the administration's failure to protect them from anti-Semitism.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: challenging those allegations.
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: You were one of the signers.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tell us about the response of those Jewish faculty and staff to Trump's lawsuit.
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well, the first thing I want to say is that it was two colleagues of mine, Law Professor, Zarela Gross and Joy Fischkin, who led the effort to assemble Jewish faculty and staff to really refute the claim that there was a severe and
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: discrimination in the workplace at UCLA that was a claim that is utterly foreign to the signatories of the slatter.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't resemble the campus that we know indeed there has been a great deal of political activism and tension on our campus but to the minds of the signatories that does not translate into the kind of workplace harassment that was alleged in the DOJ complaint.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: we represent, you know, a significant constituency of Jewish faculty and staff.
• 19:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the letter says that you and your colleagues oppose taking on anti-Semitism with, quote, more draconian limits on academic freedom and free speech to the detriment of all of us, including Jewish faculty and staff.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what seems to define anti-Semitism in the Department of Justice
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: is expression of support for Palestinian liberation or freedom.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's an equation of propelstein equals anti-Semitic, at least as far as I read it in the complaint.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: One woman, for example, quoted in the complaint referred to the encampment of the propelstein encampment as utopia.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was brought as evidence of anti-Semitism.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I mean, the equation seems to be total, one-to-one direct correspondence.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if you accept that, then you are virtually eliminating any possibility of expressing any support at any time for the cause of Palestinian freedom, self-determination, or liberation.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's no possible phrase or expression you could use that would not be deemed anti-Semitism by that.
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: That seems to me to be an unbelievable
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: most of the current lawsuit and most of the formal and informal complaints against UCLA are about this Gaza encampment set up in April 2024.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the site of the worst event in memory of UCLA, in my opinion, at least at the end of April, 2024, when a mob of Zionist militants came from off campus and attacked the encampment, police did nothing for hours, remind us about that horrible night.
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, which really was, I think the worst night in my 35 years at UCLA.
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, in a camp and had been set up, I believe, five days earlier on the preceding Sunday, there was a counter-demonstration directly across from the encampment, where
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: I got to see tensions really developing between the two sides and in fact a number of colleagues and I were restraining largely the pro-Israel side from screening at or even hitting the propelstein side, though the tempers were flaring on both sides.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that in some sense was an adembration of what would come two days later on Tuesday night when a group of pro-Israel activists
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: attacked the encampment physically with two by fours and their fists and other instruments for some four hours without intervention from law enforcement, the kind of remarkable unprecedented horrifying site in which this group of protesters with whom you can agree or not agree were subjected to four hours of physical attack.
• 23:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: and then what made it all the more poignant and really inexplicable was that the next day, the response by the administration was to call in hundreds of police and take down the encampment as if those who were guilty of the transgressions of the previous night were in fact those inside the encampment who had been attacked for four hours.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: That brought an end to the encampment and then the beginning of recrimination about who was actually guilty for having transformed our
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: that was something that Trump decided to take up relatively early in his tenure in what I think of as Operation Academic Fury 1.0.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: First attack on UCLA with holding $584 million in August 2025, then tacking on additional $1 billion
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: that was greeted with proplexity on the part of so many of us on campus who didn't recognize the campus described in the complaint.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now we're facing, as you described at the outset, academic theory 2.0, in typical Trumpian fashion, sort of, they forgot about the attack on the
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: probably as a act of deflection from other bad things that are going on, but in any event we're back with this new Department of Justice complaint, which makes similar claims and fortifies others that seem to be on the face of it unsustainable and even preposterous.
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In between,
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The two federal attacks on UCLA, UCLA itself agreed to settle a private lawsuit brought by Jewish students and a professor, UCLA last July agreed to pay $6.5 million dollars
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: in response to a lawsuit of this group that said the university allowed anti-Semitic discrimination to take place on campus during these pro-Palestinian protests.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most inflammatory part of that complaint was that protesters had created
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: a quote, Jew-free zone, close quote, on campus, with the knowledge and acquiescence of university officials.
• 25:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And under the Salam of the University admitted that it had quote, Fallon Short, it agreed to pay 2.3 million to eight Jewish groups, 320,000 to a campus initiative to fight anti-Semitism, and $50,000 to each of four plaintiffs.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But was the Gaza protest in campment really a Jew-free zone?
• 25:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: weren't there many Jews who were part of the encampment?
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And didn't the Gaza encampment actually have a Passover sater?
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, there was a Passover Sator and about services.
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: To the best of my knowledge, there was not a Jew if he's so, and I never saw that.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And someone who came to know the fiscal layout of the camp in Will, the aforementioned Professor Joey Fishkin, wrote a long description of what he saw as part of his own legal analysis of the various
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: legal efforts by the administration against UCLA, and he affirmed what I had just said and saw, which was, I never saw a goofy exclusion zone.
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I imagine that some of the signs and chance calling for Palestinian liberation might be uncomfortable for people who define themselves as strong supporters of the state of Israel who are Zionists, but that does not mean that there was a
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: intended for those of Jewish faith or identity.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was no such exclusions on that I saw, nor that careful observer saw as well.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: One other thing I wanted to just add about that settlement was that it's surface to claim that now figures centrally in the latest complaint, which is that Zionism is a religious belief.
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: that Jews constitute one people.
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this seems to me to be a complete confusion and distortion of what Zionism is.
• 27:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's a very coarse understanding of what Zionism is and it conflates a political ideology, a national movement, and a strain of Zionism, and for that matter, the most, in some sense, offensive, and supremacist strain of Zionism today,
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: an ideology that is, I suspect, very few of the people who call themselves Zionist as a religious matter would subscribe to.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: That claim was first heard in the arguments of the students that UCLA settled and now it has surfaced again as a central pillar of the claim in the Department of Justice complaint of February 2026.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Those in some sense are two of the pillars of this complaint.
• 27:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic and Zionism is a religious belief that therefore qualifies under Title VII.
• 28:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The new UCLA lawsuit is about the university creating a hostile work environment for Jewish faculty and staff.
• 28:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Harvard lawsuit, which we need to talk about just for a minute, which was filed last week, is about Jewish students.
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: who the Trump administration said had not been protected by the school from severe harassment.
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And because of that Trump says the government does not have to pay Harvard any existing grants, and Harvard can be forced to pay back federal grants that has already received billions of dollars.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: This new lawsuit came after a federal judge rejected
• 28:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trump's effort last year to cut $2 billion in grants to Harvard.
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you think about the executive branch cutting billions of research grants from Harvard because of the school's response to Gaza War protests on campus?
• 29:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think at some level could be reduced to the small-mindedness of Donald Trump who thought he was going to achieve a settlement with Harvard and Harvard proved to be a more formidable opponent than he imagined.
• 29:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Just to see in some sense that he was going to achieve a deal with Iran didn't and decided to go to war.
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's a common thread here.
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is a Trumpian.
• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: negotiating stance.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you don't get what you want on the terms you want, you invoke the nuclear option.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: So again, he's after months and months and months and months and months of negotiations with Harvard when Harvard's president Alan Garber proved to be somewhat less yielding than I think the administration thought they decided to file another lawsuit, making the same kinds of claims, the same kinds of species claims about slogans and chants creating discomfort.
• 29:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what happens on college campuses.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're going to encounter slogans and chants that make you uncomfortable.
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if you don't, you're probably not the right place.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, you want to take a pause and be ready to expand your mind.
• 30:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And encounter ideas with which you're uncomfortable.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like that's what's going to happen on college campus.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what advocates of viewpoint diversity are always saying we should be doing.
• 30:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, that's what occurred.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: to be frank, there were chants that I heard that sometimes made me uncomfortable or signs that I saw, but I don't assume that everything that makes me uncomfortable is therefore an odious and toxic anti-Semitic.
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: slur that merits federal intervention.
• 30:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's 17 steps too far from sort of encountering ideas that push you out of your comfort zone.
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it is really remarkable that precisely those advocates of viewpoint diversity for the ones who want to achieve viewpoint conformity around Israel, Palestine, around questions of Zionism, and even around questions of what Jewish identity is.
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The big picture here is Trump is claiming to protect Jews on campus, but his targets are institutions that have provided the crucial base of opposition to his authoritarianism.
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about Trump's use of anti-Semitism to target his opponents.
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a classic weaponization of a legitimate source of concern for political purposes.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I must confess, I gravely doubt the sincerity of Donald Trump in caring about the well-being of Jews, or in combating anti-Semitism.
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he has made his bed with
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: far right figures who have become increasingly disinhibited and expressing their own, anti-Semitic views, and he's narrowed it, narrowed once, of renounce them.
• 31:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I must confess, I find laughable, the proposition that Donald Trump is leading the crusade against.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: against anti-Semitism.
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's leading a crusade with some crusaders whose religious ideology doesn't fully understand on behalf of a kind of a liberal authoritarianism.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the fight against anti-Semitism of he defines it is a key pillar in that.
• 32:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's really about a certain kind of appreciation for an ethno-centric vision of Israel that he resonates with that resonates with
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: vision of a white nationalist America.
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what Jewish means for him.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: What's so interesting in this current moment is that some of his followers subscribe to that view and some have completely departed from that stance altogether and have said, know that version of ethnocentras and that is where
• 32:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: and regard as toxic and dangerous to the United States.
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: They connect it through that old anti-Semitic trope of a Jewish global conspiracy.
• 32:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there is kind of an implosion within Maga World.
• 32:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's quite fascinating to observe and terrifying.
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: In part because it's giving voice,
• 33:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: to a new virulent form of anti-Semitism that's meeting up with an anti-Semitism that I think, as I argued in a recent L.A. Times op-ed, is being stimulated by Israel's own action.
• 33:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we get to that,
• 33:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: we need to look at one more element of all this, which is Trump is not alone in invoking anti-Semitism.
• 33:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are some very prominent Jewish groups that are not just supporting him, but providing him with arguments and evidence in private lawsuits.
• 33:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, there's some groups, Jewish groups at UCLA that have become willing participants and the efforts to take down our university.
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is a curious feature here of Jewish history that I want to call attention to.
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is, for centuries, Jews survived.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: by affecting an alliance with the sovereign, what is known as the royal or vertical alliance.
• 34:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in the circumstances in which Jews lived, in music times, for example, that vertical alliance was really necessary in order to ward off attacks from the general populist, Christian Europe, which was strongly anti-Jewish.
• 34:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the current moment, it seems to me that the vertical alliance is a balance with the devil.
• 34:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: the state is not acting in the best interests of Jews, the state is not acting in the best interests of the well-being of all Jews and Palestinians in Israel, Palestine.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And think a new of horizontal alliances with other groups that are subject to discrimination, intimidation, attempts at deportation, that it seems to me where right is where the right line of Jews want to be in that space.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have just published an important article in the L.E.
• 34:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Times' op-ed page about the sources of anti-Semitism.
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a huge difference that we need to note between
• 35:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Students on campus chanting free Palestine and murderous attacks on Jews like the effort recently Temple Israel and West Bloomfield, Michigan.
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that raises the question which you have been studying, what are the sources of anti-Semitism in America today?
• 35:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not just a matter for opinion, you've been doing research on this and what have you found?
• 35:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'd say there are two things that are important to note.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: In recent times, sort of, owing to the political pressures of the day, I think there's been this claim that anti-Semitism can be described as a horseshoe, at the ends of which of that horseshoe are two largely equivalent bodies of anti-Semites.
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Those on the left and those on the right.
• 35:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: So relatively equal.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: What my co-authored Joshua Gatsup H.D.
• 35:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: student and political science at UCLA and I show is that, in fact, the bulk of research that has been done, certainly prior to October 7, suggests that anti-Semitism was considerably more pronounced on the right and far right than on the left and far left.
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that dispels, we think this notion of a virtual equation between the left and
• 36:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: After October 7th, there are competing vectors, and we don't really have enough data to make an unequivocal claim about which camp is more pronounced than Santa Semitans.
• 36:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: But we do think that it's probably time to set aside the horseshoe theory of Santa Semitans.
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's point number one.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Point number two is really addressing an elephant in the room that we
• 36:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: military action, violent is really action, is a catalyst to anti-Semitism to anti-Semitic action.
• 36:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: We think maybe also opinion and expression, but there's a body of research which we have surveyed that suggests it is a catalyst or prod to anti-Semitic action.
• 37:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And one might look at what happened in West Bloomfield and say that's exactly an instance of what we're talking about.
• 37:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: The person who undertook this terrible act had recently lost his brother and his brothers two children in Israeli attack in Lebanon.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: The brother was a Hezbollah commander.
• 37:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that, in some sense, captures or encapsulates the sequence that we're trying to understand better.
• 37:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we think that, you know, in addition to understanding these two rather set categories, left anti-Semitism,
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And right anti-Semitism, we really need to focus on a third factor.
• 37:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is Israeli action.
• 37:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I should add to that, not just Israeli action.
• 37:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a factor in its own right.
• 37:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I would also add even more recently, say since the Seconded Ron War, perceptions of Israeli action and Israeli behavior in empelling the United States to enter war.
• 38:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they're both Israel's own actions.
• 38:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: largely a far-right conspiracy theorist about or conspiracy theorists in general about Israel and Jews pushing the United States into war.
• 38:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Israel is a factor in this equation and we have to come to terms with it and understand it a lot better.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: David Myers, you can read his article, anti-Semitism appears from the left and the right, but not equally at LATimes.com.
• 38:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: David, thank you for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Always a pleasure to be with you, John.
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've been listening to Start Making Sense, a podcast from The Nation magazine.
• 38:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Renée Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer, Jack Merkinson is Executive Producer.
• 39:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Baskar Sunkara is President of The Nation, Katrina Vandenhuvul is editor and publisher of The Nation.
• 39:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our theme music is from Barcelona, Afrobe, License by Creative Commons.
• 39:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can find out more about Start Making Sense at The Nation.com.
• 39:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can subscribe to start making sense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts on John Weener.
• 39:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.