Rep. Elise Stefanik and Sean Hannity only care about antisemitism when they can weaponize it.
It was predictable that P***y Grabber fan girl and lackey Elise Stefanik would go on Fox News to take a victory lap over the resignation of Harvard’s Claudine Gay. After all, Harvard grad turned election-liar Stefanik not only put a target on Gay’s back, Stefanik is now gunning for a third resignation from the trio of university presidents Stefanik performatively attacked during a House Fox News audition hearing about antisemitism on college campuses.
It was just as predictable that Hannity piled on and added a racial dig against Gay for good measure.
Let me be very clear that I am not defending either Gay or Harvard. I am here to say that both Hannity and Stefanik are among the phoniest, most disingenuous and probably fairest-weather friends to Jews.
In his preamble to Stefanik's victory lap, Hannity complained that Gay’s resignation included “No apology for her vile testimony before Congress on antisemitism or the allegations of rampant plagiarism throughout her academic career.” He whined, “Instead, she just resorted to the left's favorite talking point, get used to it. You will hear it all year long. She played the race card.”
Stefanik crowed, “My take, Sean, is there is a reason that the testimony of the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT made history as the most viewed testimony ever, with over billion views, and that's because their testimony was morally bankrupt and pathetic.”
Project much, Congresswoman? “Morally bankrupt and pathetic” describes nobody more than Stefanik, herself. Besides trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which even Fox now admits was legitimate, Stefanik has been a stalwart supporter of the now-ousted Rep. George Santos, surely the lying-est and probably the most criminal member of the House of Representatives, ever. Just yesterday, Stefanik pulled her endorsement of a Republican merely for having the temerity not to endorse Stefanik’s hero, the classified document-stealer and mishandler, sexual abuser and fraudster Donald Trump. When a judge found Trump had defrauded banks and insurers, what did the disgraceful Stefanik do? She filed an ethics complaint against him.
Stefanik’s attacks on democracy and our rule of law should get her banned from any credible news network. But on Fox “News,” it makes her a member of their MAGA tribe.
Predictably, Stefanik claimed to care about antisemitism. “It was a moral question,” she said, about Gay's refusal to condemn it on campus.
Stefanik went on with her anti-antisemitism posturing but her real game was obviously going after colleges and universities, regular MAGA targets. “It is unacceptable that it took Harvard a month to demand the resignation of Claudine Gay,” Stefanik said self-righteously. “Penn made the right decision immediately, but this is after it was forced in front of the world to see. And I believe these university presidents sit atop these institutions that have rotted out and have institutionalized antisemitism, particularly after Hamas's terrorist attack against Israel in early October. We've seen Jewish students assaulted, physically harassed and facing just vile attacks every single day.”
Hannity prodded Stefanik to be more anti-antiracism. He asked if the universities would have testified the same way "if it was clearly something said that was racist, misogynist, xenophobic, transphobic. Would they have given you the same answer? I suspect the answer is no, they wouldn't say, 'Well, it depends on the context.'”
Stefanik, of course, agreed. “They would not have, Sean, and that's why it was so pathetic, and it was so clear for everyone who saw that, how wrong that testimony was,” she said. Then she continued pretending to care about antisemitism - after patting herself on the back again for her viral video: “What you can't see in the video that has now been viewed over one billion times is there were Jewish students from each of those universities who were at that congressional hearing. And as I was listening to their responses to my question, the university presidents, Jewish students - you could see them shaking just of the abysmal lack of moral leadership.”
“And then on top of this, you've seen just the shredding of academic integrity in Harvard's case,” Stefanik said, from her glass house. “It was very clear with this intense scrutiny that Claudine Gay was a plagiarist president, that she had plagiarized nearly 50 excerpts in her work, which is a very limited body of academic work when compared to other Harvard university presidents.”
While Stefanik plays an anti-antisemite on TV, when it's expedient, she is just fine with Trump referring to immigrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S., which is straight out of Hitler’s playbook. Hitler said it was Jews who were poisoning the blood of Germany and used that rhetoric to justify the their systemic murder.
And it’s not as if that was the only time Trump sounded like an antisemite. As NY1 noted, on the Jewish High Holy Day of Rosh Hashanah, Trump posted on social media, “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed false narratives!” the image read. “Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward! Happy New Year!”
More from NY1:
In November, Trump dined with rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, both of whom have praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust. Last month, Trump’s campaign compared his federal prosecution connected to his effort to overturn the 2020 election results to Nazi Germany, a statement the ADL denounced as “completely inappropriate and flat out offensive.”
When white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us” as they marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and a neo-Nazi murdered a counterprotester, Trump said there “were very fine people, on both sides,” a remark he defended for years after.
At the end of the interview, Hannity pretty much gave away the college-witchhunt-under-cover-of antisemitism game away. He told Stefanik to “take a bow” for providing MAGA world with “one of the best moments” for having been “able to literally stump college university presidents on what was a layup question.” He added, “two down, one to go, in my opinion.”
Don’t expect either of these two liars to ever criticize Trump’s antisemitism. Ever. Well, unless it becomes expedient.
You can watch it below, from the January 2, 2024 Hannity.
I agree with Ellen that neither Hannity nor Stefanik truly care about the issue of anti-semitism or about what actually happens when bigots physically attack the people they hate. I didn’t hear either of them lift a finger when the Tiki Torch marchers in Charlottesville ran around yelling “Jews will not replace us!” I didn’t hear either of them lift a finger when there were over 1400 documented hate crimes in the wake of Little Trump’s squeaker win in 2016, as noted by the Southern Poverty Law Center at the time. These attacks included synagogues having swastikas spray painted on them, and young Muslim girls having their hijabs ripped off their heads.
Stefanik’s attempted “gotcha” moment with the colleges was a fairly craven matter. Whether or not one wants to get into Gay’s issues with possible plagiarism is frankly irrelevant to this. And it wouldn’t have come up as a possible issue if Angry Right Wingers hadn’t decided to go after her with everything they had.
I also want to note that “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” is NOT automatically a call for genocide or any other kind of violence. This is why Professor Gay and the others who testified at Congress didn’t fall for the obvious setup that Stefanik and the other Angry Right Wingers were attempting. Professor Gay correctly and appropriately noted that the context is extremely important. Who is saying that slogan and who they are saying it to. If we’re discussing Hamas terrorists or their supporters cheering on the deaths of Israelis, then obviously it’s something to be condemned. But what if we’re discussing Jewish peace activists who are gathering with Palestinian activists at Harvard and other campuses to beg for a cease-fire to stop the killing and revenge killing? Angry Right Wingers would like everyone to conflate the two ideas and then just condemn the peace activists, and they’re hiding behind the Hamas attack to try to get away with this.
Past that, Angry Right Wingers have long been making nasty comments about colleges and universities somehow corrupting the students, since they don’t teach Far Right extremist propaganda. So this was an easy opportunity for Stefanik to put on her “I’m OUTRAGED” act in front of Congress, and an easy opportunity for Angry Right Wing pundits everywhere to muse about the sheer awfulness of anyone who doesn’t immediately call for the complete razing of Gaza.
