Molly Jong-Fast Hits Back at Chris Matthews for Supporting Trump’s Campus Crackdown: ‘This Is Thought-Policing 101’
Molly Jong-Fast took exception to Chris Matthews on Tuesday’s Morning Joe, where the former Hardball host expressed support for President Donald Trump’s crackdown on college campuses.
Citing last year’s campus protests against the war in Gaza, the administration claims that universities are rife with “anti-Semitism. It has taken the highly unusual measure of withholding federal funding from those schools it says have not adequately addressed the administration’s concerns.
The response from universities has been mixed. Columbia University, for example, has repeatedly capitulated to Trump. On Monday, however, lawyers for Harvard University wrote the administration to say it would not accede to its demands. In response, Trump froze $2.2 billion in grants to the school.
“Well, I have to say that the administration sometimes sets its targets in the right direction,” Matthews said of the strong-arm tactics. “The elite universities in this country are not exactly covered in roses right now in the way that they handled these demonstrations. I think everybody, whether you’re a Jewish student or not, I think you wanna have a right to go to a class when you’re paying $90,000 a year in tuition. You have a right to go to the class and be taught by your professors and to enjoy the rights of a better university, a good university.”
Matthews went on to state that going after the schools “is not gonna hurt” the president before concluding, “I don’t wanna be loose about this, but I think Trump targeting these universities is probably not the worst move ever made.”
Jong-Fast jumped in immediately to object:
I totally disagree. This is thought-policing 101. This is not ok. The truth is – and I say this as a Jew – they are using anti-Semitism as a cloak, right? If this administration really cared about anti-Semitism, there’s a lot of stuff they could do. This is not about that. This is about targeting universities. This is about targeting speech. This is right out of an authoritarian playbook. And you know, they may say that it’s one thing, but what I’ve been really impressed with is that we’re seeing a lot of universities push back because they know this is illegal.
So we have, right after Harvard did it, we saw MIT go right after that. We have already seen the president of Wesleyan, Michael Roth do a really great job of pushing back. He was joined by the president of Amherst. There are huge numbers of academics and academic institutions that are gonna push back on this because this is absolute government overreach at the highest order. It has nothing to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with authoritarianism.
Watch above via MSNBC.
