Jonas Du-College Protests are on the rise on Libral Campuses

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Joining us now to talk about what's going on in
college campuses. Jonas Do is here, Columbia student journalist and
also a Young Voices contributor and recently on Newsmax as well.
I'll tell you the anti Israel protests that erupted at
Barnard College. Once again, here we go, Jonas, welcome in,
Thanks for being here, Thanks for having me. So. I
guess it's not as rampant as it was with Colombia

(00:23):
and all of those schools before the holidays during the
Biden administration, but it hasn't gone away.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Either, certainly not no, definitely not the fervor we saw
last spring with the encampments. But there's still a small
but committed group of raval rousers and people intent on
disrupting university life here to you know, protest Israel and
spew pretty hateful content here on campus.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
The chaotic discussions and protests and how things got with
Barnard College, I guess the end of the February twenty sixth,
I believe the date was on this How violent was it?
How bad did it get? Were their arrest made? Were
they shut down? How did that one play out?

Speaker 2 (01:08):
So essentially, what happened was about a month and a
half ago. On the first day of classes, there were
a group of anti Israel protesters that stormed a class
that was being taught on the history of modern Israel.
They handed out anti Semitic flyers, interrupted the professor, declined
the professor's invitation to go listen in on the class,

(01:28):
and so Barnard expelled two students who participated in that.
And so the protest last week was in protest to
the expulsion of those two students. So, you know, a
group of about two dozen storms Millbank Hall, which houses
the den of the college. They shoved through a public
safety officer sending them to the hospital, and they staged

(01:49):
they called it a sitting outside of the dean's office
in the hallway, and they did vandalism on the walls.
They basically prevented the dean from having freedom of movement
for some time. And you know, it wasn't as violent
as we saw last year, but you know, there was
an injury reported and the college ended up, you know,

(02:11):
calling the NYPD, but not actually having them come into
clear the area because they didn't want to escalate the situation.
So and people right now sort of No one has
been punished for that act as far as we know.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
You know, the tone Barnard being in New York is
pretty said with the governor's policies there, and everybody knows
that it's quite liberal, and she probably is all about it.
May even helped hand out flyers, who knows. But at
the university, I would think that the fact that you know,
moms and dads are writing checks to this university for
my kid to get an education, at some point it

(02:46):
becomes about money, doesn't it. And with that said, isn't
the university kind of jeopardizing the funding and the enrollments
and everything that makes that machine run by allowing this?
I mean, they could shut this down quicker goodn't they?

Speaker 2 (03:03):
They absolutely could. The College's Colombian Barnard. They're both private universities,
so the police aren't allowed on campus unless they're specifically invited,
but the school is free to invite them at any
time to shut down try just like these. The school
can also decide to do things like immediately suspend the
students as soon as they start participating in something that's

(03:24):
you know, lawlessness, but you know they've chosen not to
do that in these cases. But I do think that
we've seen more decisive action from BARDED with the expulsion
of those two students. They are being pretty harder on discipline,
at least than they were last year. And it was
just announced yesterday that the Trump administration Health and Human

(03:45):
Services Department is going to be looking into the millions,
in some cases billions of dollars in set of funding
that Columbia receives because they want to make sure that,
you know, the government money isn't being used to promote
anti Israel, anti American idol on campus.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah. I mean it's hate speech. Let's just call it.
If this were, you know, people jumping on HBCU campuses,
for instance, with protests that you know, too much is
going on with the black community that we disagree with,
and we're going to protest it and put graffiti on
it denouncing what's happening in the black population. I mean,

(04:23):
this would be shut down and people would be in
jail tomorrow. I don't understand the allowance of the hate
speech that's coming from these protesters when it comes to
anti Semitic, you know behavior, So yeah, I hope they
shut it down. It's just as bad as any other
hate speech that goes on in our country, and if
we're going to continue to allow this, it just perpetuates,

(04:44):
you know, racism, anti semitism, and it's got no place
on college campuses anywhere really in our country. And I
just don't understand how university is kind of you know, yeah, Okay,
we suspended a couple of them, but you know what,
they need to be a little bit more bold about
shutting this down and saying if you get caught doing this,
you're not suspended, you're expelled. Okay, you're out. We're not

(05:06):
allowing it. As a matter of fact, we're going to
bring in police, and if it starts out again, we're
going to shut it down quicker than could be their mindset.
They just can't get out of that pit of democratic,
left leaning mindset. That is what New York is all about,
and most democratic entities as well. Well. I appreciate you, Jonah,
thanks for the update this morning.