Christopher Rupo is the senior fellow at Manhattan Institute. He's a contributor, editing, contributing editor of City Journal and a key aide to Governor Ron DeSantis. And he's always breaking story after story, wanting to find out what's happened with the curriculum in our schools, what's happened with transgender, what happened with these books that are in libraries that are inappropriate for kids. They like to say he's into banning books.
He just wants appropriate books for ages and thought it was important for parents to know about it. Christopher, welcome back. It's great to be with you.
First off, too, I just thank you again for Saturday night. You were on One Nation, did a great job, but also be able to expose to a lot of people. Little did we know over the weekend that Columbia would be back at it. And in case you don't know, Chris was able to do some research and find out where this whole pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist attitude came from at Columbia and other Ivies. And it came from their faculty who's been hired over decades to go ahead and spread this anti-American, anti-Western European and anti-Semitic teachings at these elite institutions.
Chris. Yeah, that's exactly right, and I would say that what we're seeing at Columbia was inevitable given the catalyst of Hamas's brutal terror attack against Israel, which brought it to the surface in a very public way for the first time. But we have, you know, Columbia has spent now hundreds of millions of dollars advancing DEI ideology.
This is explicitly anti-Western and it's often anti-Semitic. The Heritage Foundation did a study and found that DEI directors at state universities, for example, frequently post content that could be deemed anti-Semitic and definitely post-contact that could be deemed anti-American. But it's also about Columbia's hiring of radical Islamist faculty members, in part using foreign funding that Columbia has tried to hide. A number of times in the last 20 years, Columbia has taken money from countries like Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab, you know, non-democratic states and then tried to hide the source of that funding so they could hire some of these anti-Zionist faculty members. They now have dozens of these anti, so-called anti-Zionist faculty members, and they're the ones that are really pushing this ideology on campus. And it's worked, and when did it start, roughly? It really started, ironically enough, in the early to mid 2000s. So around, I mean, first it started with Edward Said decades ago, but there's programs that Columbia really got built in the wake of the Iraq War. And of course, opinions differ on the Iraq War.
I think it was a huge mistake. But it's very interesting that Columbia would start to hire some of these kind of post-colonial or decolonizing scholars in the wake of that period. That was a fashionable cause on the left. And now they're finding out decades later, having built this massive faculty, having trained students in these ideologies, that actually they've come back the other way. This is a disaster for Columbia. The administration is really in rough shape.
You've seen donations from alumni plummeting at all of these Ivy League universities. And this is really the consequences of their own actions dating back now more than 20 years. And these knuckleheads out there with their nose rings and purple hair and their pup tents who are demanding three meals a day in Uber Eats, listen to some of their complaints. So that's genocide. I mean, this is some of the crap we've been listening to across the country. And now it makes sense to you. That's prompted you to go investigate this, right?
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I will think it's important to point out that there's actually some good news. There's a silver lining to some of these awful images we're seeing on television. And the silver lining is this, that the pro-Hamas protesters are deeply unpopular with the American people. And so there was some polling done recently that categorized institutions on a basis of popularity. The pro-Hamas campus protesters, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, these other elements have something like a six percent favorability rating in the United States.
And so the vast majority of people who are watching do not like this. And so it's up to political leaders right now to take advantage of this opportunity, tremendously unpopular campus protests, tremendously unpopular campus administrations. And political leaders need to point out that we are giving billions of dollars a year to these Ivy League universities, even though they're private institutions. This is a choice that's made by legislators and therefore made by voters.
And it's a choice that we can undo tomorrow with sufficient political will. And so I'd like to see some political action on this front to say, you know, you have absolutely a First Amendment right. If you want to be a pro-Hamas protester on campus, that's the speech that you want to deliver. You have a right to do so. You don't have a right to disrupt. You don't have a right to occupy.
And you don't have an entitlement to public funds. I want to see people making this argument because it's something that we can do about it. People are not hopeless or helpless. We have the ability to take action.
Yeah. And by the way, over the weekend on Alumni Weekend in Columbia, there was another encampment that propped up. The faculty tried to talk to members of the faculty, tried to talk to him and say, take this down. It's not good. And Saturday afternoon, the encampment consisted of about seven tents.
The group fluctuated in size throughout the day, ranging from twenty five to sixty people. Eventually, security brought them back up. I thought it was pretty ironic. They were talking about it on One Nation Saturday and it's continuing. So they didn't learn that lesson. When I brought this up to Andy McCarthy and we're watching all the hellacious behavior at Harvard, at UCLA, at Stanford. This is what he told us.
He said he was ahead of the game. He wrote a book about it. The most important project that the Muslim Brotherhood has ever had in the United States was the Muslim Students Association, which will be done with just really a handful of campuses in the Midwest in the 1960s. They have grown in the ensuing 60 years to the point where they have multiple chapters on almost every United States and Canadian college campus.
And they are they're basically a factory for Sharia supremacist and anti-Semitic literature. I mean, that's basically what it's all about. So they've been spewing this stuff out for three generations. And he says he couldn't really get anybody's attention. I think now he got their attention. The other thing that Trump talked about doing is taxing the endowment and letting people know that things are going to change and then making them be transparent about who's giving the money.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. You know, I've been working with the congressional committee and persuading trying to persuade congressional staff to immediately demand by force of subpoena. All of the foreign funding over the last two decades from all of the Ivy League universities to find out exactly who's giving them money, exactly what conditions that it comes with and exactly what is funding some of these activities and some of the supposed scholarship on campus. But while I think it's an attractive rhetorical line to say tax the endowments, there's a much simpler thing is defund the existing money that we're already giving them. It's very difficult to institute new taxes. You're going to get resistance from Democrats. You're going to get resistance from Republicans. But even if you are a kind of traditional establishment, small government conservative, there's an argument to say, hey, look, Harvard has 50 billion dollars in its endowment. Why are we giving them 800 million, 900 million, a billion dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies? We should terminate that funding immediately. We should put conditions on that funding at the very least.
And to say that American taxpayer money is not going to pass through the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Republicans, if it's going to be supporting these radical left wing ideology. Thanks, Hutton and Withrow. Hot Mike is here on the Outkick Network. We've got your afternoon covered with the latest sports discussion and it's available wherever you find your audio.
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Well, I just want to tell you also over the weekend, Donald Trump talked to Fox and Friends weekend. And he said one of the departments you like to get rid of is Department of Education. Could that work? Of course, it could work.
You know, it would take an effort. Republicans have been promising to abolish the Department of Education since it was established, you know, half a century, approximately half a century ago. And so it is a rhetorical line that's used on campaigns. But the question is, is the public ready for significant institutional reform? In the past, the answer was no. Currently, I think the answer might be yes.
And certainly President Trump is one of the only people who is bold enough, who is courageous enough, who is, frankly, crazy enough to do something like that and actually make it a reality. And so I think it's time to absolutely push that. And look, I think that given what has happened the last four years since COVID, since critical race theory, since trends in schools, since all of these disasters in American education have become public, you know, we know that the, you know, approximately 5000 people in the Department of Education are certainly up to no good.
We should send them home. We should get the pink slips ready because, you know, absolutely. I think that it's time for the Department of Education to go because you believe even if you put your person at the top, it's still it's still rotten at the core. Yeah, and the problem is that there are, you know, 5000 people who work there. They're committed, left-wing ideologues. If you look at the political donations, you know, they're almost virtually 100 percent of the employees at the Department of Education give to Democrats, left-wing candidates.
You can take over the top slots in the management and the upper management, but you can't overturn the institution as a whole. And so when I've spoken with former cabinet secretaries, conservatives, Republicans, they say, you know, very honestly, the permanent staff will tell them you're going to be gone in four or eight years. I'm going to be here for 30 years. I'm going to retire here.
I'm having a pension here. I just have to outlast you. I have to outmaneuver you.
I have to delay you. I have to obfuscate. The permanent bureaucracy knows that it's in control and knows that most Republicans are not smart or sophisticated enough to get around it and to replace them. And so I think that the simplest, cleanest and most effective solution for many of these cabinets, cabinet positions and departments is simply to terminate funding in the budget and have the president wind them down immediately. Look, you know, one of the things I've noticed and you've probably noticed this, too, is, you know, we have that government shutdowns where only the essential services are funded.
I think most people think, hey, wait a minute, life has not changed. Let's just have the essential functions and get rid of the nonessential functions altogether. I know there's got to be a total audit. We have to reconfigure our spending without people looking as an attack on the disabled, attack on the elderly, attack on the chronically ill. There's just got to be a way to attack spending and make it smarter, let alone some of the tough decisions that have to be made while increasing our defense. Because this suddenly we're paying more in interest as we as they predicted, we pay more in interest than we are for our entire Defense Department.
It is a bad cycle. Lastly, Chris, from when you talk to Governor DeSantis, do you sense that he's going to go hard for Trump and go to bat for him? Yeah, of course. And I think that Governor DeSantis, above all, is a kind of ruthlessly efficient, effective and pragmatic leader. He knows how to wield power. He knows when to fight, when to step back. And I think that he knows that this is a critical election.
And I think he's also mature enough to put aside any personal feelings he might have had from the primary campaign and saying, hey, look, we have one shot. Of course, DeSantis wanted to win. The people selected Trump. It's time for Trump. And I really think that DeSantis, if he can step up, if he can help Trump win, I think he's the natural successor.
Much like Richard Nixon lost a primary election or lost a presidential election, much like Ronald Reagan lost a Republican primary election. There's a lot of room left for DeSantis in his political career. He's still very young. And I think the wise move for him, and I'm sure he'll take it because he's a wise leader, is to go all out in support of President Trump because this is a crucial election. I agree.
He's got great instincts, extremely bright as type of person as you want, leading a state, leading a country. Christopher Rufo, thanks so much. I always appreciate your hard work. Thank you.
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