Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the
show: Donald Trump is demanding that UCLA pay a one billioin dollar fine as a penalty for
antisemitism on campus–that’s on top of the $584 million in cuts for research grants
that his administration has imposed. But one Billion? Why not one Trillon? David Myers will
comment. But first: the Danes resisted fascism. We can too. Sarah Sophie Flicker will explain –
in a minute.
[BREAK]
Everybody who knows about resistance to Hitler knows about Denmark. The Danes rescued
more of their Jews than any other country, 99%. And Jews here learned at an early age that when
Hitler ordered the Jews of occupied Denmark to wear the yellow star, the King of Denmark and
the Prime Minister rode through Copenhagen on horseback wearing the yellow star themselves.
And then everybody put on the yellow star.
We’re joined now by the great granddaughter of that Prime Minister, Sarah Sophie Flicker. She’s
an organizer who works at the intersection of culture and politics, especially on abortion rights
and gender justice. She’s a founder of the Women’s March on Washington and co-author of the
Women’s March official book, Together We Rise – a New York Times bestseller. In her new
article for The Nation, “The Danes Resisted Fascism, and So Can We” was number one on the
‘most read’ list at thenation.com all weekend. Sarah Sophie Flicker, welcome to the program.
Sarah Sophie Flicker: Hi, Jon. Thanks for having me.
JW: Like the rest of us, you learned that story about your great-grandfather and the King riding
on horseback through Copenhagen, defying Hitler by wearing the yellow star. It’s really an
unforgettable story.
SSF: It is an unforgettable story and was some sort of lighthouse for me and the work that I do
now. And I held fast to it my whole childhood, my whole young adulthood, and I really resisted
researching it because I loved it so much and, in my household, the sorry was true. And the few
times I was like, well, why aren’t there any pictures? Or it was always like, it doesn’t matter. It’s
true. I think we all knew it wasn’t entirely true and the truth as it turns out as I began researching
it is in many ways far more powerful than the myth because nobody wore the yellow star. Not a
single person, not the king, not my great grandfather who was a prime minister for the beginning
of the war, not a single Jew. I’m half Danish, half New Jersey Jew all the way through and
through. My parents now live in Denmark. My mom never became a citizen, so being Danish
was as animated to me in my youth as being American.
JW: Over the years, you’ve heard a lot of other stories about your Danish family in World War
II. Tell us about your aunts and uncles.
SSF: Yeah, and these stories are all true. A majority of just regular people joined the resistance,
and they joined the resistance without training, without prior knowledge of how to resist. They
just did it and they did it – they sort of got in where they fit in. My grandfather, he was part of
the resistance, and what I was told was that he would sleep with his boots on so he could spring
into action immediately. Then I had an aunt who worked in a hospital, and it turns out hospitals
were a major point of resistance in Denmark. They did everything from fabricating medical
records of Jewish people to say that they were too ill to travel, they hid people there, they
smuggled information. It was a hub of resistance. And my uncle Mogens was a pretty well-
known journalist in Denmark. And during the war, he smuggled information at a great risk and
then he went on to join one of the underground illegal papers.
JW: The only part of the story of Danish resistance that I know is about the escape to Sweden.
How on Rosh Hashanah night in 1943, the Nazis ordered the roundup of all Danish Jews to
transport them to concentration camps. But a sympathetic German embassy official warned
Danish leaders. They told Jewish leaders, and the Danes somehow got almost all the Danish
Jews, thousands of them passed SS patrols onto small fishing boats that ferried them to Sweden
10 miles away, thousands of people. That story is true, but it was only one chapter in a longer
history of resistance that you’ve been learning about and a history that you think has some good
examples for us facing Trump’s fascist moves. One of my favorite parts of the story that you tell
that I didn’t know anything about was the 10 Commandments for Danes.
SSF: Yeah. When I finally was brave enough to release the fabricated story, and as Trump took
his second term and as an organizer, I thought, okay, I’m going to go against the Danish grain.
There’s a law in Denmark called the Jante law, which is the people’s law, which is you don’t
center yourself. It really frowns upon ego, things that are very commonplace in the US, and that
was a big hurdle for me to get over because I was very much raised with that. And I think in
organizing, we tend to believe collectively that it’s a group of people that do the best work. And
so often it’s not a charismatic leader or one special, unique person. In researching all this, I
stumbled on, it’s very hard to find this story of a 17-year-old resistance member named Arne
Sejr, let’s say, I’m probably mispronouncing it, and he wrote down with a pen and paper, I think
it’s called the 10 Commandments for Danes, and they were just simple, straightforward, basically
just don’t comply,
JW: Don’t work for the Nazis, don’t shop in their stores, don’t believe the propaganda, protect the
people they persecute.
SSF: And he made, I think he wrote down 25 copies, and he handed them to the notable
members of his little village, and somehow these commandments went viral. Other people wrote
them down, eventually printing presses, printed them. And I think there were probably posters. I
have not been able to find an image of them, but we do have them written down. I think the one
that stands out to me the most is to protect whoever is being targeted. That just is a baseline. I
think that is always important to hear, but also, it’s clear from those commandments, this
teenager is suggesting little things like if you are asked to do something that benefits the Nazis or
here it would be this administration, do bad work, work slowly, gum up the works, be a grain of
sand, grind the whole thing to a halt. And people did that. And we don’t have to fix everything
that’s broken, but we can do one small thing a day. We can do a couple small things a week. We
can do one big thing. We can work up our courage after doing lots of little things to do a big
thing. I mean, that’s how these things work. And so, the commandments feel so powerful because
they give us permission to do the right thing.
JW: One of the great things about the Danish resistance is not just that its size, but the variety of
institutions that were part of it. When the order came to deport all the Jews from Denmark, the
state Lutheran Church had a sermon read in every church supporting the Jews. A hundred
percent of the ministers helped rescue the Jews, along with we’re told 90% of university faculty,
most of the doctors, you talked about the role of the hospitals and hiding Jews and helping them
flee. So different institutions with completely different histories all did a different thing as a part
of this resistance. And what about humor? Did the Danes tell jokes about Hitler?
SSF: Of course, because fascists hate laughter more than bombs – that’s a paraphrase. But I was
really also inspired a few years ago by a book called Pranksters vs. Autocrats, which is written
about the Eastern European method of creating dilemma actions, which are basically just making
wild fun in all the ways that you can of those people threatening to do these harms because they
can’t handle it. I mean, that’s the funny thing about all of this stuff is basically these are just
people with really fragile egos who are trying to assert their power because they don’t know how
else to feel important. Hannah Arendt wrote about that in Eichmann in Jerusalem, and I had read
that in college. I do not remember this whole chapter on Denmark, or at least a whole huge
chunk of it about Denmark. And the phenomenal thing, I mean it fills my heart every time I even
speak about it that Hannah Rent wrote about was that beyond the things we’ve talked about so
far, there’s also this phenomena that, I don’t know a word for it, but her sort of idea was that the
German soldiers, the SS soldiers who were stationed in Denmark over time, their belief system
was run down by this wall of morality that they were faced with every day, be it being made fun
of every day because certainly people were making fun of all the soldiers stationed there every
single day, whether it was people asking them, how do you live with yourself?
How are you doing this? And our rents thesis was that over time they started questioning their
own morals and their own belief systems and big number of German soldiers stopped complying
with Hitler at that point.
JW: And you think it’s possible that we could do something similar with ICE agents and with
local police, that instead of throwing stuff at them, you say, talk to them, ask them some
questions, and what do you suggest this attempted conversation should be like?
SSF: There’s so many beautiful videos out there right now of people filming ICE agents, of
physically getting in the way of them taking people of all these various ways that people are
interfering with this machine and trying to grind it to a halt. But the thing that you hear in almost
every video is there will be some voice in the background saying’, do you have a family?’ ‘How
do you live with yourself?’ ‘Why are you wearing that mask? What are you ashamed of?’ ‘If
you’re so proud of this, show your face,’ whatever it is. I think it is part of a bigger tactic, and I
personally am a huge fan of the people that are throwing glitter, glitter at the ICE agents because
glitter doesn’t come off and it’s a pretty good marker of someone who’s up to some serious evil.
JW: So right now, ICE has this huge budget to recruit tens of thousands of new members.
They’re having a hard time. They’ve had to increase the sign-up bonus to $50,000. They’ve
lowered the admissions criteria. I asked AI, how can you discourage people from applying for
the new ice jobs? And I want to tell you the AI answer: “counter the recruiting message
campaigns: expose the realities, share firsthand accounts from former ICE employees to
highlight the psychological toll, the moral conflicts and public backlash associated with the job.
Challenge ICE’s recruitment slogan, ‘defend the homeland.’ with facts about deportation rates,
family separations and civil rights concerns. Undermine the appeal by highlighting career risk,
stress, the long-term reputational damage of working for a controversial agency. Emphasize the
potential for legal scrutiny; expose internal issues: point to the high burnout rates, internal
dissent and whistleblower cases. Share reports of toxic workplace culture.”
SSF: Wow, AI! I mean, that’s its own set of commandments right there. I have to believe that
there’s a way to touch people caught up in this stuff. It’s so heartening to see this movement
building. When I stood on the stage of the Women’s March in 2017 in DC, that was beautiful, but
I remember thinking, where were you all three months ago? And where will you all be a year
from now? And I think we’re finally moving in a direction that’s building, which is the correct
way. And I think we can see the tides are shifting. We can see that it is not simple, and it
certainly takes courage, but like people in Denmark, and I would say people here, it’s like, be
scared, but do it anyway, and do a little bit. Download Five Calls, have that be your first thing
that you do, and just that’s a great app that tells you exactly who to call, what to say on what day.
I think that courage is contagious, and inertia is sort of what allows these things to happen. While
Denmark is so different from the us, it’s a tiny little country. There is this history. My great
grandfather came up with a term called samfundssind, which I’m saying totally wrong, but it
means “community-mindedness” and it’s a through line in Denmark, and certainly they don’t do
everything perfectly. And there’s many things that I’m disappointed in with my homeland right
now, but there is this undercurrent of ‘we protect each other, we take care of each other, and that
everybody deserves equality and dignity.’ And I would say the thing that scares me a little about
the US is we have such an individual, of course, like American exceptionalism and individualism
and all this. And I think it’s time for us to pass that aside for now. We can revisit it and talk about
it later, but we don’t all have to agree on everything right now. But we do have to agree that
every life is a universe. And that is something that I was taught as a Jewish kid, a Jewish socialist
kid. Every life is a universe, and the onus is on us to protect that. And so when I think about the
commandments, the Danish commandments, and should there be US commandments, I think
that has to be the through line. And there’s so many ways that we can take action.
JW: And I understand you’re working on Ten Commandments for us right now.
SSF: Yeah, it just seemed sort of obvious when I stumbled on the commandments and I
immediately brought them to all these organizers that I work with who I respect so much, and
each with their own area of expertise. And we realized, oh, these commandments are so
applicable to the US if we just play around with the language a little bit. And then because we
have the benefit of technology, which doesn’t always feel like a benefit, but for these purposes it
can be. There’s plenty of good things we can do with technology. We are thinking that there
could be a QR code that takes you to a resource page with a menu of options where people can,
when we think about resistance, it sounds like something you need to know something about, or
you need to have studied. You don’t. I think about this all the time. I have three kids. If you’re a
mom and you’ve organized a birthday party, you know how to organize.
JW: One last thing: the Danes resisted Hitler almost unanimously. And since then, scientists tell
us that Danes are just about the happiest people in the world. Lately they’ve ranked number two
on the World Happiness Index, according to the scientists of world happiness. This year, the
United States is number 24. And by the way, Mexico is number 10, far ahead of the United
States. So the Danes are together, they take care of each other, and it makes them happy.
SSF: Yeah, I mean, it’s not perfect, again, and I don’t want everyone coming and screaming at me
about all the ways that Denmark is imperfect, I’m well aware. But they have a very robust social
safety network. And my great grandfather, Prime Minister Stauning, was the first working class
prime minister of Denmark. And he was the person that kind of brought democratic socialism to
Denmark. And when you have a child, the father takes paternity leave, the mother gets robust
maternity leave, a nurse comes to your house with supplies and checks in on you. My dad is
choosing to live the last decades of his life there with my mom, and he has some health issues.
There are people begging to come to their house, to clean, to do physical therapy, to drive him to
nature, whatever it is. These are things that we deserve, nice things, and we deserve to live with
dignity and joy and equality.
And I’ve been working on the Mamdani campaign in New York, and the night of the primary
was just such a joyful night, like joy I haven’t felt in a while politically. And I just remember
repeating to people like, ‘look, we can have nice things. We can have nice things!’ And I just
hope that people who are socialism dubious maybe take a little time to do some research because
it’s actually a really beautiful way to live and makes people feel happy and seen, and they want to
take care of each other because that’s sort of implicit to the whole system.
JW: Sarah Sophie Flicker – you can read her wonderful article. “The Danes Resisted Fascism,
and So Can We,” at thenation.com, where it was number one on the most popular list all
weekend. Sarah, thanks for all your work – and thanks for talking with us today.
SSF: Jon, thank you so much. This has been really wonderful.
[BREAK]
Jon Wiener: Donald Trump is demanding that UCLA pay a $1 billion fine as a penalty for
antisemitism on campus. That’s on top of a $584 million cut in grants his administration ordered,
mostly for medical research. For comment, we turn to David Myers. He’s a distinguished
professor at UCLA where he teaches Jewish history. He’s written for The LA Times op-ed page,
The Forward, and The Atlantic, and he’s been an activist working for Mid-East Peace for
decades. David Myers, welcome back.
David Myers: Good to be with you Jon.
JW: A $1 billion fine for not doing enough to protect Jews on campus – why not $1 trillion? If
Trump really cared about antisemitism, why let UCLA off the hook for a billion?
DM: [Laughter] You’re right by that logic. Why settle for a billion?
To ask a billion dollars of a public university is really an act of really breathtaking audacity, but I
think it reflects a strategy to dismantle the remarkable edifice of higher education that has been
built up so fastidiously and successfully over the course of centuries. So as to further the political
agenda of the Trump regime.
JW: I want to go back to the beginning at UCLA, the Gaza encampment on campus. It was in the
plaza outside Powell Library. That’s what all this really is about. It was up for about a week at
the end of April last year, and there was that terrible night of violence. You and I talked about it
here right afterwards.
DM: April 30 th .
JW: April 30th, 2024, a mob of Zionist militants came from off campus and attacked the
encampment. Remind us what happened.
DM: April 28th, which was a Sunday, there was a counter demonstration, pro-Israel counter
demonstration directly across from the pro-Palestine Gaza encampment, and already there saw
on the fringes of the two encampments tensions beginning to boil over. I was present for hours,
really trying to separate the two groups. The far greater part of hostility came from the pro-Israel
side in terms of what I experienced, and in some sense, this was maybe for some, kind of a
testing of the capacity to harass — and in the next two days, to actually undertake significant acts
of violence against the pro-Palestine encampment — because that’s what we saw two days later.
In any event, what did happen on the 30th is that a group of violent pro-Israel thugs set
themselves upon the encampment, tearing down some of its walls, throwing in smoke bombs,
beating people with wooden planks as well as their fists.
And really remarkably, they were permitted to do so for almost four hours without any police
intervention, even though there was a contingent of University of California police observing
from a distance. It’s ironic that what has emerged out of all that we have been talking about so
far, and we will talk about, is the allegation of antisemitism. I believe that there were acts of
antisemitism on our campus in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023, and I also believe that there
were acts of anti-Palestinian discrimination on our campus after October 7th. What happened on
April 30th, 2024, was by far the most egregious act of harassment and intimidation that I’ve
witnessed in my career at UCLA, in my 34 years at UCLA, and certainly in that terrible period
that began with10/7.
JW: After the encampment was taken down by the police, a small group of Jewish students and
one Jewish professor sued the school, and the Trump Justice Department investigated, and
concluded that “Jewish and Israeli students at UCLA were subjected to severe, pervasive and
objectively offensive harassment that created a hostile environment by members of the
encampment.” I’m sure you know this by heart by now. And this was a violation of the
Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause and also a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 Title
VI. I wonder if you agree with that and with the Department of Justice statement that, even after
Jewish students complained of a ‘hostile environment,’ UCLA acted with “deliberate
indifference” towards Jewish students. and that the result is that UCLA is guilty of “putting
Jewish Americans at risk.”
DM: That wasn’t what I observed on campus, and that’s not what I understood to be the case. As
I took a step back and tried to analyze what had gone on, I believe that there were acts of
antisemitism. The most memorable one that comes to mind is a papier-mâché pig holding a bag
of money and a figurine in a kaffiyeh in cage with a Star of David at the bottom of the papier-
mâché statue, placed out in front of the meeting of the Board of Regents.
So I think there were indeed episodes like that and other instances in which pro-Israel students
were subjected to harassment or required to divert their path to a class by going around the
Royce Quad. I think those things did occur, and I’m not in agreement with the strategies that
were reflected in them, but between that and the claim that they’re ‘serious and pervasive
antisemitism,’ there’s a considerable distance and that I did not see.
I did not see the pervasiveness of it. I saw what I would consider egregious acts of antisemitism,
albeit very isolated, and the whole narrative of the ongoing continuous, pervasive, unrelenting
nature of anti-Jewish harassment and intimidation is not something that I saw, or heard of from
the students with whom I spoke. And so, I was surprised by the nature of the claims made by the
three students and professor in the lawsuit.
I was also surprised that there was a kind of conflation between their commitment to Zionism
and what they described as their religious faith, as if the two were identical, something which
really stood at the center of that lawsuit. And I was surprised, frankly, at some level that UCLA
agreed to settle, at another level, not. Insofar as the question of whether there was merit to these
claims of serious pervasive discrimination, I am quite skeptical about that. Insofar as UCLA
wanted to put an end to the lawsuit and demonstrate its bona fides in combating antisemitism. I
completely understand it.
The great irony is that, hours after the settlement was announced, the Department of Justice
issued letter telling UCLA that it had planned to cut $584 million of research funds enormously
significant to the wellbeing of the university — and for that matter, the wellbeing of our city and
country, because much of that money was going to medical research. So that sequencing of the
settlement announcement and then the DOJ proceeding with this massive punitive act against
UCLA leads one to ponder what could the possible motivation be, if not something other than
combating antisemitism.
JW: One other thing about the DOJ finding: they concluded that UCLA allowed pro-Palestinian
activists to “enforce” what it termed a “Jew exclusion zone,” namely the encampment outside the
library. Now, my understanding is that Jews were not excluded from the encampment. Lots of
Jews joined the encampment, because they support Palestinian rights, and they opposed what the
Netanyahu government was doing in Gaza. So what about this DOJ finding of a ‘Jew exclusion
zone’ at UCLA?
DM: Well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head by calling the fact that there are many Jews in
the encampment — and many Jews who were encampment-adjacent, who felt considerable
sympathy with the pro-Palestine movement but may not have been in the encampment. And that
I think bespeaks the diversity of opinion within the Jewish community around Israel-Palestine
and the post 10/7 world. And so often in this discourse that has emerged, the focus is exclusively
on those who represent the pro-Israel position. Were people who were identifiably pro-Israel
prevented from gaining access to the encampment? I believe they were. Were people subject to
questioning about their political beliefs in order to get into the encampment or the ways in which
they might or might not behave well in the encampment? I believe they were. Was it a significant
inconvenience? Yeah, it depends how you understand significant. But yeah, people had to go
around the Royce quad if they didn’t pass, if they weren’t willing to pass through the entry point
of the encampment, that was an inconvenience.
JW: Now, I understand that this is not the only time that students have been forced to walk
around something in order to get to their destination. There are movie shoots at UCLA often that
require—
DM: Construction – there are movie sites all the time. So was it an inconvenience? Yes, I think it
was. Did it amount to ‘pervasive and severe antisemitism’? My own sense is no, it didn’t. Were
there acts of antisemitism on our campus in this period? There were. Was it pervasive and
serious? I don’t think that case can be made.
JW: So as you said, UCLA agreed to settle this case. They paid three Jewish students and a
medical school professor six and a half million dollars, although the money went to all kinds of
Jewish organizations, not just to them.
And then as you say, Trump cut federal funding to UCLA research by $584 million as a
punishment–he says for the harassment around the encampment that some Jewish students
reported. The medical researchers of course, who have had their funding suspended, didn’t have
anything to do with the Gaza encampment, and many of them in fact are Jewish themselves.
Among those whose grants were cut, according to The L.A. Times, was Judea Pearl, a UCLA
computer scientist, the principal investigator of a $1.2 million suspended grant to apply genetics
to large scale electronic health records. He said, “I’ve been a principal investigator for NSF for
maybe 50 years.” Who is Judea Pearl?
DM: Judea Pearl is a distinguished computer scientist, longstanding member of the faculty, and
father of the murdered Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, who was brutally killed in
Pakistan by terrorists. And Professor Pearl has been a very strong advocate for Israel, for
Zionism and for the position that antisemitism is a very serious problem on our campus and he
himself — I had some exchange with him — believes that this attempt to shake down the
university has no merit. He certainly would like the university to do more to combat what he sees
as antisemitism, but even someone from his perspective, as far as I understand it, believes that
there’s no connection between the attempt to fine the university a billion dollars or cut $584
million in research grants and the attempt to combat antisemitism.
It’s what I think of as a conceptual non-sequitur. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s no evident
connection between the two propositions. It seems, as I said at the outset, to be a case of trying to
bring the university to heel in order to advance a political agenda, which is to remove a very
significant bastion of liberal democratic values at a time of what seems to be a kind of takeover
of the American democratic way. Imperfect as it is. But at this point we should fight for it — to
the last.
JW: So the governor said the state will fight the one billion fine and the $584 million cuts in
research funding with lawsuits. But there’s also some talk from the office of the president of the
university about negotiating with Trump’s people in search of a settlement. Of course, Columbia
agreed to pay the Trump administration $220 million. Harvard is in court and also in negotiations
over a settlement. And The New York Times reported on Tuesday they were considering paying
Trump $500 million. But of course, those are private universities with endowments in the
billions. UCLA is a public, taxpayer supported school. UCLA argued in federal court in San
Francisco just on Tuesday, that what Trump is doing is illegal and unconstitutional. And it’s the
same argument has been made by dozens of lawyers and found to have merit by dozens of
federal judges — that it’s against the law for the president to refuse to spend funds appropriated
by Congress, namely the research funds that he has cut – that’s clearly illegal. The president just
lacks this authority, and the courts agree with that interpretation of the law, but that’s going to
take a while: The government will then appeal this, and it’ll get to the Supreme Court, I dunno, in
2026 or something like that. And in the meantime, 1800 NIH grants are suspended. Can UCLA
wait until 2026 or 2027 for this to be resolved?
DM: Not without paying an enormous cost and not without enormous cost to the public, which
will be the principal victim of this criminal operation. It’s really hard to see how we go on with
that massive loss. We will find a way. I will say that UCLA is an aggregation of some of the
greatest scholarly talent that I’ve ever witnessed in my life, at every corner of the university. And
people I think are feeling at once deeply dismayed by this assault upon such an important pillar
of higher education in the United States, and at the same time quite resilient. We’re not going to
submit to the attempt to tear down our university.
JW: The LA Times report on the litigation had a subhead, “negotiation still possible.” The
alternative, of course, is a deal. You referred to the deal that Harvard is about to make. We are
told Harvard would agree this deal: Harvard would agree to pay $500 million, not to the
government directly, the way Columbia’s deal works, but that Harvard would agree to spend
$500 million on vocational programs and research. And in addition, Harvard would see its
research funding restored and avoid the appointment of a Trump monitor. Important goals. Of
course, Harvard has a what? 60-something billion-dollar endowment. UCLA is a public
institution supported by taxpayers through the legislature and the governor. Can you imagine
UCLA making a deal like the one Harvard is working on? What would this be? UCLA would
give millions of dollars to LA Trade Tech College, or something like that?
DM: Well, supporting vocational education is a worthy cause and I encourage the federal
government to do that with the resources that it collects from us in the normal ways, not by
shaking down institutions and really attempting to cripple them in the name of this very patently
transparent political agenda.
I suspect given the way things have gone with other institutions, that there will be some
settlement. My fervent hope is that it is not at the level of what has been discussed in Harvard’s
case — a half a billion dollars – because, while Harvard has a 53 or 54 billion endowment, we
have nowhere near that.
I also have to say that it’s just patently wrong that we are compelled to accede to these absolutely
outlandish, audacious and baseless claims.
And yet in the way things have been unfolding, he has tremendous leverage. He’s an enormously
powerful president, perhaps the most powerful in all of American history. He’s arrogated to
himself all sorts of rights that don’t belong to the executive. I fear that in this environment, a
settlement will be reached, and it will be very large. California is a big target. UCLA is a top rate
of public university in the United States. It’s a win. These are not just moneymaking propositions
for Trump. These are enormously significant symbolically. If you take down Harvard and you
take down UCLA, you have significantly disabled higher education in the United States. It’d be
very hard for any institutions after that to resist.
JW: And there’s one other problem with making a deal with Trump. We know that negotiating
with Trump doesn’t end with making a deal. Even in his real estate days, banks stopped wanting
to deal with him because deals with Trump are just one more step in the negotiation. And the
idea that this is a normal agreement where both sides fulfill their responsibilities, this has not
applied to Trump in the past. So I don’t quite see where the confidence comes at Columbia or
Harvard or Brown or any of these other places that they’re actually going to get their money. OR
maybe Trump will come up with new findings of new offenses. What do you think?
DM: I have no confidence that he won’t continue to litigate it over and over again and claim
violations and therefore withhold funds. He may be a master of the art of the deal as he
understands it, but he is not someone who respects the ethics of a deal making at all. Meaning
you engage in difficult, often brutal negotiations, you shake hands, and it’s over. And as you said,
that’s just not the way he operates. And there’s something enormously unethical in his version of
deal making.
And I would say I’m not only fearful of the fact that there won’t be continued demands made on
institutions that have already agreed to settlements, but there’ll be continuous demands that there
be monitors over the operation of research and scholarship at our institutions. Some institutions
have made deals to stall the possibility of having monitors imposed on this or that domain of
their scholarly operation. I’m not at all convinced that that demand will be surrendered. I think
behind Trump there is someone who has a vision which is more than just moneymaking. It’s
really about the opposite of viewpoint diversity as they so often claim, it’s viewpoint uniformity,
what the left is always accused of. I think that’s really what they’re after. And if monitors are an
effective way to achieve that, I’m quite convinced that we’ll see that in our time.
So I have no confidence that the deals that are made, either on financial terms or in terms of the
degree of scholarly supervision, intellectual supervision will be upheld on their end.
JW: You’re part of a group called Jewish Bruins in defense of UCLA that has just been
organized. Tell us about this group and about your open letter.
DM: Yeah, so really just a small number of people with whom I spoke just this past weekend felt
it was important in symbolic terms to demonstrate to the wider public that, as Jews, as proud
Jewish members of the UCLA community, we do not accept the terms that have been imposed
upon UCLA — that in exchange for repairing some broken system that permits antisemitism, we
should pay a billion dollars in fines. We don’t accept that paying the United States government at
this point in time will do anything to diminish antisemitism on our campus or in society. And at
the same time, we don’t accept that antisemitism is raging and rampant on our campuses. So we
put together a letter. And here I have to say that our intention was to appeal to people from my
perspective to Judea Pearl’s perspective. So we didn’t talk about whether we think antisemitism is
or is not a serious and pervasive problem. We just said we find the association made between this
request for a billion dollars and claims of antisemitism on campus to be specious. And we just
put the letter out yesterday and we have several hundred signatories. And if people are interested
in signing on, if you have a connection to UCLA, you can go to my Facebook page and find that
letter and I encourage you to sign it.
JW: The website is called ‘Jewish Bruins in defense of UCLA.’ It’s a Google doc. Here’s the
link: – one word.
DM: I think it is important that we stand up. We as Jews stand up in defense of UCLA.
JW: David Myers – he’s a distinguished professor at UCLA who teaches Jewish history. David,
thanks for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.
DM: It’s always good to be with you, Jon.