The Sick Hypocrisy of the Republican Investigation Into College Campuses

House Republicans have launched an investigation into antisemitism at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania, following a hearing with those colleges’ presidents that highlights the GOP’s hypocrisy when it comes to free speech.

Harvard president Claudine Gay, MIT president Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday about their responses to incidents of antisemitism on their campuses. All three women have been criticized for saying that responses to alleged antisemitic instances—including the content of chants popular at pro-Palestinian marches—need to be context-specific.

“After this week’s pathetic and morally bankrupt testimony by university presidents … the Education and Workforce committee is launching an official Congressional investigation with the full force of subpoena power into Penn, MIT, & Harvard and others,” committee Chair Elise Stefanik said in a statement Thursday.

“We will use our full Congressional authority to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage.”

Stefanik had asked the university presidents whether students chanting “Intifada” violated the schools’ codes of conduct. Each president said it would depend on the context, with Gay pointing out that chants she finds “personally abhorrent” could still be protected under freedom of speech. Stefanik then insisted that this chant was calling for “genocide of the Jews,” a contested and subjective interpretation at best. A clip of her questioning that omitted the context—that the line of questioning was rooted on “Intifada” and not calls for genocide—then went viral, creating a firestorm.

Magill explained her stance further in a video on Wednesday, saying that “speech alone is not punishable,” but calls for genocide would be “harassment or intimidation.”

It does not seem to have occurred to Republicans, who regularly pride themselves on being the protectors of free speech, that they have launched a project to essentially police free speech on college campuses. The GOP seems to have no problem upholding free speech when, say, Donald Trump is threatening his political opponents.

Representative Jerry Nadler slammed his Republican colleagues on Tuesday for moves that “weaponize Jewish lives for political gains” while in reality doing nothing to “genuinely counter” antisemitism.

Republicans also don’t seem to have an issue upholding free speech when it relates to Islamophobia. Although they have taken many steps to supposedly address rising antisemitism, they have made no mention of the sharp rise in Islamophobia in recent months.

In fact, many Republicans are actually suppressing the free speech of groups trying to combat Islamophobia. In November, the University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine sued state Governor Ron DeSantis, university chancellor Ray Rodrigues, and university president Ben Sasse for barring the group from campus.

The students, backed by the ACLU, accused them of “violating their [First] Amendment rights.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened doctors who perform abortions with felony charges, even if a court says they can conduct the procedure.

A Travis County district judge issued a temporary restraining order Thursday against Texas’s strict abortion laws to allow a woman to terminate her pregnancy. The woman, Dallas resident Kate Cox, and her husband had wanted to have a child, but doctors warned the fetus had a lethal abnormality and would not survive past birth.

Within hours, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a warning of his own. “The Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) granted by the Travis County district judge purporting to allow an abortion to proceed will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws,” he said in a statement.

“This includes first degree felony prosecutions.”

Paxton acknowledged that Cox’s ob-gyn, Dr. Damla Karsan, was shielded by the order; the TRO “does not enjoin actions brought by private citizens”—a blatant threat to people who seek or provide abortions.

Cox was 20 weeks’ pregnant when she found out her fetus had trisomy 18, a condition caused by having an extra chromosome. This abnormality is almost always fatal, either before birth or soon after.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortions were banned in Texas except to save the life of the pregnant person. Since trisomy 18 is only fatal to the fetus, not the patient, Cox’s situation did not qualify for a medically necessary abortion.

She filed a lawsuit Tuesday asking a judge to let her terminate her pregnancy. Thursday’s ruling was the first time in at least 50 years that a judge has intervened to allow an adult to get an abortion.

Paxton’s office can appeal the ruling and ask a higher court to prevent Cox from getting an abortion, but he has not yet done so.

This is not the first time that Texas’s cruel and restrictive laws have caused legal backlash. Over the summer, a group of 15 women sued the state after they were denied abortions. All of the women had wanted to carry their pregnancies to term but needed abortions because their fetuses had fatal anomalies.

One defendant, Samantha Casiano, vomited in court while telling the story of how she was forced to give birth to a baby without parts of the brain and skull. Casiano said she had to watch her child die four hours after being born.

Mike Johnson compared himself to Moses and said that becoming House speaker was part of God’s plan.

Johnson was the keynote speaker at Tuesday evening’s National Association of Christian Lawmakers’ annual gala. The NACL is a Christian nationalist organization that says its goal is to codify a “biblical worldview” into law. Both its founder and Johnson are big fans of the “Appeal to Heaven” Christian nationalist flag.

During his speech, Johnson said that a few weeks before Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the speakership, God told him to “prepare and be ready.”

“We’re coming to a Red Sea moment. What does that mean, Lord?” Johnson said, referring to when God parted the Red Sea so Moses could lead the enslaved Jews out of Egypt.

“When the speaker’s race happened and Kevin McCarthy, who’s a dear friend of mine, was deposed and vacated from the chair, oh wow! Well, this is what the Lord may have been preparing us for.”

“At the time, I assumed the Lord is going to choose a new Moses, and thank you Lord, you’re going to allow me to be Aaron,” Johnson continued, referring to Moses’s brother.

But as the votes dragged on, Johnson said, God told him, “Now, step forward.”

While Aaron did help Moses, he also nearly caused the destruction of the Israelites. When Moses went up Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, the people grew tired of waiting. They convinced Aaron to make a statue of a golden calf, and Aaron was going to become the new leader. So really, Johnson said he was prepared to lead a rebel group that worships a false idol.

Johnson repeatedly eschews the separation of church and state, instead flaunting his extremist Christian beliefs. And yet he is still allowed to stay in power, despite the risk his ideology poses to the country.

Americans seem to have no interest in the Republican primary debates, even with two more of the mud-slinging spectacles freshly lined up by CNN for January.

Over the last several months, viewership of the debates has tanked. The first crowded debate in August hit a high of 14.2 million viewers, though those numbers have since plummeted, with just 3.2 million people tuning in to Wednesday’s debate between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Koch-backed former Ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and biotech millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.

The 90-minute punch-packed bully specials haven’t done much for any of the GOP contenders in the polls, according to aggregated data from FiveThirtyEight. As of Thursday, DeSantis’s and Haley’s numbers have barely budged; they continued to poll at a measly 12.7 and 10.6 percent, respectively.

At this point, it’s a scramble to gain an inkling of the attention so easily pulled by the GOP’s greatest showman, Donald Trump, whose strategy of outright avoiding public debates has proved effective among Republican voters—he leads the primary with around 60 percent of the vote, per aggregate polling.

To that point—Fox News’s sleepy town hall between Sean Hannity and a sluggish Trump was the most watched program on Tuesday, pulling just as many viewers as a full and formal debate stage, according to ratings released by the network.

If Americans are voting with their remotes, they’ve made it abundantly clear that none of the candidates on the GOP debate stage are of any interest to them.

Even DeSantis’s one-off, completely unrelated matchup against California Governor Gavin Newsom held more public interest than the most recent debate. Fox’s “Great Red vs. Blue State” publicity stunt, which saw the Florida governor thoroughly scorched and humiliated amid his own references to poop and science denialism, garnered 4.7 million viewers.

Still, faltering public interest might not be the only reason why Wednesday’s debate fell flat on its face. Droves of potential viewers complained online that they weren’t able to find it—perhaps unsurprising given that the debate was aired on The CW, the network most famous for airing Gossip Girl and the final (and worst) season of Gilmore Girls.

Taylor Swift was named the 2023 Time “Person of the Year” on Wednesday, and of course conservatives have been quick to claim that there is a vast liberal conspiracy to blame.

Right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec posted to X, formerly Twitter, early on Wednesday morning, writing that Swift’s “girlboss psyop has been fully activated,” and claimed that Swift is gearing up to be part of a “2024 voter operation for Democrats on abortion rights.”

Psobiec posted again, linking a video of Taylor Swift crying while talking about her frustrations with former Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn’s conservative voting record.

“I can’t see another commercial and see her disguising these policies behind the words ‘Tennessee Christian values.’ I live in Tennessee, I am Christian, that’s not what we stand for,” Swift said in the video. Swift broke her career-long political silence in 2018 to post on Instagram urging her followers to vote against Marsha Blackburn during the 2018 midterm elections when Blackburn ran for Senate.

Posobiec captioned the video of Swift, “The day the op was born.”

Former Trump adviser and resident internet twerp Stephen Miller also took to X on Wednesday night to air a similar grievance:

Conservatives’ claims that the billionaire superstar is secretly a political operative come after a remarkably apolitical year from Swift.

In 2022, she tweeted her disappointment with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but she hasn’t done all that much since. In October, Swift posted on Instagram encouraging young people to register to vote on National Voter Registration Day. As a result, over 35,000 people did so, contributing to a 23 percent increase in overall registrations. Swift’s call to action was distinctly nonpartisan.

So why all of the fuss? Do conservative men just hate to see a girlboss winning? Maybe a post by one of Donald Trump’s dear Fulton County co-defendants, Attorney Jeff Clark, can give us some idea of what’s going on.

Clark quote-tweeted Posobiec’s first post, and added, “This is what happens when we cede culture to the Left. Brainless youth raising themselves on Taylor Swift’s saccharine bland music and that washing over into the serious world of politics.”

Clark seems to hate Taylor Swift because he deems her representative of the so-called “brainless youth,” but to some degree, Swift is a uniquely apolitical pick for Time’s Person of the Year, with the possible exception of 2006’s “You” (seriously, what was that about?). But now it seems like conservatives are confused. Is Swift a major political player, or is she just a piece of leftist cultural flotsam washing up onto a more “serious” shore?

The answer is neither. Swift is a billionaire singer-songwriter and movie star who has kept everyone’s attention for the last 365 days. And ultimately, Swift was granted one of the biggest platforms in the world—the only women’s rights mentioned in the article anointing her as “Person of the Year” were Swift’s rights to her own master tapes.