CNBC panelists descended into a shouting match Tuesday as host Joe Kernen called out the left’s double standard when it comes to defending free speech.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Education (ED) is set to freeze $2.2 billion in multi-year grants to Harvard University after the Ivy League university refused to agree to its new terms and conditions, which included auditing antisemitism, improving screening of international students for “hostile” views and enforcing disciplinary processes. CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin tussled with his fellow “Squawk Box” co-host, Kernen, as he argued that the freeze in funding is a violation of free speech.
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“I’m a Jew, I hate the antisemitism piece of this more than anything, more than anybody,” Sorkin began. “Do I think that people can scream from the rooftops if they want? I hate to say that, but I think that they can and in the same way that we think it was not right for the [former President Joe] Biden administration to go after tech companies, around whether you think it was laptops or COVID, or this or that … What I’m saying is, to the extent that, if we’re trying to have a consistent view about free speech.”
“But it wasn’t consistent then,” Kernen said. “Again, we’re calling what-about-ism instead of calling it for what it is, which is hypocrisy. It’s hypocrisy. Why didn’t the left care that we couldn’t read about the lab origin of Wuhan or the [Hunter] Biden laptop? Not a peep.”
Sorkin, who said he agreed with Kernen’s point, argued that the same standard should be applied to speech for all presidential administrations. Kernen told Sorkin that the left, along with these universities, only defend free speech when it suits them.
“We can’t go back in time and decide to it now!” Kernen said. “You let it go back then. You let it go back then.”
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“If we believe that the government should not be involved in speech, which is what you would argue [is what] this entire election was about, right? That’s what the election was about.”
Former President Joe Biden’s administration collaborated with Facebook to flag so-called “disinformation” on COVID-19 vaccines and the virus. Social media platforms censored the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election, which Facebook had reportedly done to gain favor with the Biden- Harris administration, a House Judiciary report revealed in October.
The corporate media further branded the theory that COVID could have originated in a lab as a conspiracy largely because Trump talked about it in his first term. The lab leak theory has since gained credibility among government agencies as more evidence has come out in support of the belief.
Kernen further argued that Harvard University allows for students to shout antisemitic rhetoric on campus, but expresses outrage when conservatives practice their rights to free speech.
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“The left, they don’t care about. They’re not up in arms about sending people to jail for a tweet over in the U.K. You don’t get to pick and choose. They pick and choose when sometimes they want free speech, when it doesn’t suit them, they don’t want free speech,” Kernen said. “If you misgender someone, you get thrown off the faculty. But if you say ‘from the river to the sea’ and lead a demonstration at that campus and say ‘genocide the Jews,’ you’re all celebrated at Harvard. That’s where this comes from.”
The administration’s move against Harvard came after a congressional investigation found that the school failed to issue any punishments to students who participated in antisemitic protests following Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The protests included a multi-day encampment, occupying the campus and disrupting classes.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
