Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner literally employed the Just Asking Questions trope on Tuesday to openly speculate whether Barack Obama is “antisemitic” because the former president praised Harvard for rejecting the Trump administration’s “ham-handed” effort to regulate the university.
Faulkner’s suggestion that the 44th president could be an anti-Semite comes as Donald Trump continues to escalate his war against Harvard and other elite universities over his administration’s claims that they are hotbeds of antisemitism due to campus demonstrations — which included hundreds of Jewish students — protesting the war in Gaza.
After the Trump administration accused Harvard of failing “to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” the university said on Monday that it would not comply with a list of the government’s demands.
In order to maintain federal funding, the administration warned, Harvard would need to cooperate with immigration officials, screen foreign students for their political views, overhaul academic programs that supposedly have “egregious records on antisemitism,” subject itself to a “viewpoint diversity” audit, invalidate pro-Palestinian student groups, and end all programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard President Alan Garber responded to the administration’s demands.
“Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions — rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect,” Obama, a Harvard Law graduate, reacted on social media on Monday night. “Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.”
With Harvard being the first university to reject the administration’s campus crackdown — which has categorized all participants in pro-Palestine campus protests as “antisemitic Hamas sympathizers” — Trump responded by freezing more than $2 billion of federal grants to the university and a $60 million contract.
During an interview with conservative radio host Jason Rantz on Tuesday, Faulkner noted that Harvard now has a “new fan” in Obama, pointing out that the former president had expressed his support for the university in its fight against the Trump administration.
“What is he saying? As a former president, what is he saying? Let’s hope other institutions drain your cash dollars and fight the current president,” the Fox News host exclaimed.
“He is lying about what happens at Harvard — rigorous debate. One of the issues here was a lack of diversity of viewpoint,” Rantz replied. “So I don’t know exactly what it is they are debating, except Jewish students say they have the right to exist on campus. This has nothing to do with academic freedom.”
Claiming that “a lot of folks within the Harvard administration are ideologically aligned with folks on the radical left” and that they are rejecting “anything perceived as conservative,” Rantz added that “Jewish students are going to pay a price” because of this standoff.
“Would that put former President Barack Obama and others in his political camp, by the way he went to Harvard Law School, pushing against this — are they antisemitic? We can’t say whether or not they are. I’m just asking the question,” she noted. “Because I’m not listening to what they’re saying because I almost don’t believe them. Because I can see what they are doing.”
Rantz said that, as a Jewish person, “if anybody is emboldening antisemitism and justifying it even for different reasons, I view it as antisemitic.” Even if they “might not be anti-Semites themselves,” he insisted, “they are certainly emboldening antisemitism,” and there is no “real difference” between the two because “it feels the same way” to him.
On the same day that Rantz seemingly labeled anyone who supports Harvard as “emboldening antisemitism,” MSNBC political analyst Molly Jong-Fast rejected the notion that the administration’s fight against Harvard was justified.
“This is thought policing 101. This is not ok. The truth is, and I say this as a Jew, this is not. They are using antisemitism as a cloak,” she stated. “If this administration really cared about antisemitism, there’s a lot of stuff they could do. This is not about that. This is about targeting universities. This is about targeting speech. This is right out of the authoritarian playbook.”
Jong-Fast added: “It has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with authoritarianism.”
Meanwhile, it was just a year ago when Faulkner was absolutely beside herself when a Democratic guest brought up Trump’s dinner with avowed anti-Semite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes while claiming the president had spewed “racist nonsense” in the past. In the end, she admonished her guest for even “talking like that” during the segment.
