 Bill Ackman is a hedge fund manager. I think his net worth is $4 billion. He's married to the MIT former MIT professor, MIT scholar, and very interesting design scientist, Neri Oxman. Bill Ackman was basically, I'm not totally sure what his relationship with the Harvard Corporation, which sort of oversees the hiring and firing of Claudine Gay, is, but it seems like, I mean, he's a massive Harvard donor. He got very outspoken, very riled up after the congressional testimonies, very dissatisfied with Gay's answers, and seems to have, you know, basically even before that, been exerting an awful lot of pressure on the Harvard, the Harvard Corporation and the administrators of Harvard to basically be treating the sort of homosympathetic speech that was rife on campus in a way that was, I'm not totally sure what he exactly wanted to happen, but it seems like he felt dissatisfied and angry and riled up with the fact that students were, you know, acting as if the apartheid regime of Israel is, and I say that with air quotes, is responsible for the events of October 7th. So Bill Ackman was sort of like very involved over the course of October and November, but it's still, I think, at this point, and then he became very outspoken about wanting specifically, you know, Claudine Gay's head on a pike, so to speak, but it's sort of unclear what relationship exactly he had behind the scenes with the powers that be. What do you think of that, Erin? Yeah, so again, I can't really, I genuinely don't know, you know, what kind of conversations may have gone on between him and the Harvard Board, although by his own account and everything I've seen reported, I don't think that the Harvard Board was happy that he was going on this kind of Twitter crusade, and I actually suspect that it may have, he may have inadvertently prolonged Gay's life as president of Harvard University because they think they felt like if they got rid of her, you know, at the height of Ackman's anti-Gay tweet storms, it would have, sorry, yeah, anti-Claudine Gay to be clear, anti-Claudine Gay, yes, I'm sure Bill Ackman loves people of all sexual orientations. Anyway, I think that they probably felt like if they ousted her when, you know, at the moment when he was demanding they do it, it would look really horrible if they were capitulating to outside pressure and donors, and he himself tweeted that he heard that that was one of the reasons why they initially on December 12th, I believe, affirmed their support for Gay and did not fire her. You know, in terms of the role he played throughout the rest of the controversy, he certainly amplified the plagiarism allegations on Twitter, more people saw them, so maybe that played a role, but to be honest, I think that they would have gone pretty viral even without him, and I think it sounds like it sounds as if what really happened was that once these plagiarism allegations hit a critical mass, support for her really cratered among the faculty and students too, and it just became untenable for her to leave the university, and I really don't think Ackman has very much to do with that. I not to pat myself on the back, but I think it was largely the strength of just the allegations and of my reporting on them that made it hard for people to ignore, just the facts spoke for themselves, and yeah, and if anything, again, I think that probably the collapse in support would have happened even more quickly had Ackman not been tweeting so aggressively because I think that those aggressive tweets made faculty feel dug in and like they had to defend Gay against this outside pressure, but once the facts really changed and became so sufficiently unflattering, they kind of said, even if we're even if when some ways we're giving into Ackman, you know, come on, can this person really be the president of Harvard with these strikes against her? So the day after Gay was fired, aka resigned, you know, depending on sort of which narrative you want to go with, she technically resigned, but I think it's pretty clear that it's one of those you need to, you know, pack up your things and get out of here type conversations. But after that, Ackman started tweeting about DEI. This is a little bit kind of out of left field. I mean, this ties into a lot of the long standing critiques that many of us have lodged against some of these elite institutions. But the thing that's kind of interesting is that I think Ackman somewhat single handedly turned this into a DEI conversation. Maybe Chris Rufo was somewhat involved in that as well. What exactly, how did that pivot happen, Aaron? Can we read, can we just read a little bit of his very long Twitter post? He says, you know, in light of today's news, I thought today's news being Claudine Gay's resignation. I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about. And scrolling down best a lot of this, I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign. It was the quote canary in the coal mine. I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that has been promulgated on campus, an oppressor oppressed framework that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests. Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI. Yeah, this whole thing kind of annoyed me because, A, DEI, like we can talk about the oppressor oppressed sort of social justice framework, but DEI is almost sort of the more recent incarnation of that, right? Like DEI sort of more frequently applies to admissions practices and hiring practices. It's okay. I guess if we want to expand that term to sort of be the umbrella by which we talk about these other ideologies that have been rampant on campus, but it's a little bit weird. And then the other thing that annoys me about this is it's just like, were you born yesterday, Bill Ackman, right? Like this has been going on for, I mean, I entered college in 2014 and I left in 2016. I think in 2013, 2014, that was sort of the beginning of this most recent round of campus speech craziness and absurd double standards. But I'm a little bit like, well, Bill Ackman, you've been donating to Harvard for an awful long time and you sort of weren't like, who was minding the store? Who was keeping watch? Clearly not you. What do you think, Erin? Yeah, I had largely the same reaction, especially not so much to Ackman, but to Mark Rowan and some of these other donors who fomented the revolt against Penn. I was like, oh, now you realize that they're all terrorists and they're crazy? Okay, great. Well, we've been telling you for decades and now you figure it out. All right, like a little belated. I will say in Ackman's particular defense that he has gone beyond just saying, wait, anti-Semitism is a problem on campus. And some of the activists are a little crazy to seeming to really embrace a pretty thoroughgoing critique of the entire DEI regime. And yes, DEI is a recent incarnation of it. But I think when you look at his posts, he seems to understand, oh, wait, there's systemic race discrimination at universities. And basically anyone who's not a straight white male can claim victim status and use that status to gain special privileges and suppress any kind of speech that they deem offensive or harmful. That seems bad. He seems to understand now the nature of the problem. And I think that's a good thing. And he seems to have understood it better than some of the other. Yeah. Yeah, well, I want to ask you about the nature of the problem that he's outlining there, which what he's saying, and this is something I've heard, this is an argument I've heard a lot lately that the anti-Semitism that has been expressed in these anti-Israel or pro-Palestine movements is a natural outgrowth of DEI. This is where DEI leads to anti-Semitism. Is there anything to that in your estimation? Is that a sound argument? Yeah, I think it's a very sound argument. I mean, let me try to put it in the clearest way possible. Think about what a lot of DEI rhetoric focuses on. It focuses on disparities between groups and the premise is always that any disparities are caused by oppression of some sort, any innocuous explanation for the disparity, certainly any explanation that just says, well, one group just happens to be better at rising to the top of this field. That's certainly not allowed. Well, look, that creates a bit of a problem because in case you haven't noticed, Jews are overrepresented in a lot of fields. They are overrepresented in finance. They are in fact overrepresented in Hollywood. Although they're less overrepresented on Ivy League campuses than they used to be for various reasons we can maybe get into, they are still overrepresented on Ivy League campuses. They're not overrepresented on sports teams. Correct. They're not. Yet no one thinks that that is a reflection of systemic anti-Jewish prejudice on the part of the NBA. For some reason, no one's made that argument. But look, if you think that all disparities, especially disparities that favor white-coded individuals like Jews are ipso facto illegitimate and racist, well, then it looks like that then we have a problem because Jews are in fact overrepresented in a lot of fields. By the logic of DEI, that should suggest that they have kind of unearned privilege. That's the most innocuous formulation. The least innocuous formulation is they have their privileges as a result of a kind of illegitimate almost conspiracy or system of power that keeps others down. It's not hard to see how that's going to just turn into sort of bold fashion. Jews control everything. They're evil anti-Semitism. That really is the causal pathway from DEI to anti-Semitism. Now, there's another dimension here, too, which I think is related but separate, which is just that in practice this DEI proponents wouldn't say this out loud, but I think this is implicit in a lot of stuff, the rhetoric. It's just kind of a knee-jerk assumption. White people have unearned privilege and tend to be the bad guys, and white people can't be victims, and most Jews in America are whites. Now, some Jews would say, oh, I'm not really white, blah, blah, blah, but in practice most of them are classified as white by the census. They look white, and in the social construction of race that is currently operative in the United States, Jews are white. But when you've said that all white people are part of this system of power that makes them oppressors, then the very idea that Jews who are a subset of whites could be victims just becomes much more harder to cognize. I think that's the other big part of the story. This is as much, a lot of the anti-Semitism I think here is made, it's not necessarily caused by, but it's made possible by a kind of anti, phrase might get me in trouble, but a kind of anti-white cultural default where whites are just assumed to be in power and kind of bad in some way. When that is the cultural default at these institutions, it becomes harder to talk about subsets of white people who may be victimized in various ways, or at least for whom that assumption of power and privilege may be a little more complicated. So I do think DEI and kind of broader notions of progressive identitarianism do have a lot to do with anti-Semitism. I would just say that having made that argument, it is important to distinguish between harsh criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism, right? Those are not necessarily the same thing. And just because progressivism makes people focus more on the settlements or whatever, that's not intrinsically anti-Semitism. Or should the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcatcher?