Even by its own standards, the weekly Friday news recap featuring PBS News Hour host Geoff Bennett, Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, and New York Times columnist David Brooks was especially tone-deaf and unintelligent. The trio would have you believe that Columbia University settling with the Trump administration is both a threat to universities through “institutional capture” and democracy itself. Nobody at the table thought that concerns about anti-Semitism on campus were worth discussing.
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Bennett then turned to Brooks for the only mention of anti-Semitism in the entire segment, “We spoke with Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, on this program last night. And he said that the Trump administration isn't just using this — the issue of anti-Semitism to support and defend Jewish students. They're using this as a way to chill speech that they find politically offensive. How do you see it?”
Columbia’s own internal investigation was incredibly damning, so Columbia probably settled because it didn’t want to open itself up to federal investigators to see just how bad things were.
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