Cornell Law School Front, October 4, 2019 (Wikimedia Commons/Axel Tschentscher)
Legal Insurrection blog founder and Cornell law professor William Jacobson recently discussed his experience with cancel culture and journalism in an hour-long interview on Fox Nation’s “Tucker Carlson Today.” Jacobson also talked about the rise of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in education.
At the beginning of the interview, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said of Jacobson:
“…one of the best journalists of our time is about as far from a trained journalist as you can get. He’s a law professor at an Ivy League school. His name is Bill Jacobson. He runs Legal Insurrection, and he has been one of the people covering the woke destruction of education for the rest of us.”
Experience with Cancel Culture Attempts at Cornell from 2008 to 2020
Jacobson started the Legal Insurrection blog in 2008, one year after joining the Cornell Law School faculty. After authoring a post about then-candidate Barack Obama, the law school began to receive outside emails demanding he be fired. According to Jacobson, the dean at the time told him not to worry about these emails and that the law school would take care of them.
However, despite these assurances from the dean, Jacobson explained that outside pressure intensified. The messages and threats increased so much that the university assigned a detective to accompany him during a commencement ceremony.
“Until 2020, it was all from off campus,” Jacobson told Carlson. In 2020, calls for Jacobson’s termination began from the campus community. The demands began in the wake of a piece Jacobson wrote on the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” chant used by Black Lives Matter in the summer 2020 protests,
Jacobson explained that there was an “alumni email campaign to get [him] fired” and that “21 of [his] closest colleagues, everybody on [his] hallway, signed a letter denouncing [him].” Though Jacobson was not directly named in the Cornell Daily Sun Letter to the Editor, 21 clinical law faculty members said they were “outraged by commentators, some of them attached to Ivy League Institutions, who are leading a smear campaign against Black Lives Matter.”
The dean of the law school at the time also issued a statement saying that Jacobson’s blog posts “do not reflect the values of Cornell Law School as I have articulated them. I found his recent posts to be both offensive and poorly reasoned.”
When asked how he got through this period, Jacobson said that “an outpouring of support from readers” of his blog helped him a lot. “I got hundreds and hundreds of emails from around the country supporting me, so that gave me strength,” he said.
Jacobson also pointed to his time studying Russian in the Soviet Union. “Part of it was, oddly enough, my studying in the Soviet Union where we were surveilled, where we were in a repressive environment. You have to be able to create some sort of mental shield around yourself.”
The Legal Insurrection Blog: Gibson’s Bakery to Elizabeth Warren Wiki
The Legal Insurrection Foundation has three projects: the Legal Insurrection blog, the CriticalRace.org database, and the recently launched Equal Protection Project.
Jacobson said that Legal Insurrection focuses on providing in-depth reporting on stories. “We dig into things deeper than really anybody else. And we do stick with them.” Two stories Jacobson’s team has focused on are the Gibson’s Bakery case and reporting on Elizabeth Warren, stories that were followed for six and seven years, respectively.
The team had so much research on then-candidate and now-senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that they created a webpage. “We created a website called ElizabethWarrenWiki.org. It looks like Wikipedia, but it’s not. It’s our website, and we have everything documented there,” Jacobson told Carlson, “And then in 2020 when she ran for president, you know who fell in love with the website? Bernie Sanders supporters.”
When asked if he ever intended to become a journalist, Jacobson replied, “No, it was never on my agenda.” “It was literally a lark of somebody challenging me saying, ‘I’ve never heard anybody explain your side so well,’” he said.
Activism and DEI in Education
“Turning students into activists is an explicit goal of the progressive education movement, [and] has been for 30 years,” Jacobson remarked.
Jacobson defined critical race theory (CRT) as “an approach to law and an approach to society that focuses on race.” He argued that those who use this framework believe that the structures that are considered “race neutral,” perpetuate racism that’s embedded in American society. At an academic level, the theory is “fairly theoretical. It is, as some of them like to say, a law school ideology.”
However, he warned that implementing CRT in real-life is a “societal dead end.” Jacobson remarked, “It is trying to turn us into Yugoslavia where you have people who identify not by national identity, not as Americans.” Instead, he argues, that this focus on race will lead individuals to identify themselves by their identity groups.
One example Jacobson brought up during the interview was the story of Ramona Bessinger, a teacher in Providence, Rhode Island. After a new curriculum focused on group identity was introduced, Bessinger’s students began calling her “America.” She also alleged that her colleagues said she had “white privilege.”
The CriticalRace.org database was also discussed during Jacobson’s interview with Carlson. The law professor explained, “CriticalRace.org started with 220 universities and colleges. We’re now up to over 500. It would probably be easier to figure out the ones that don’t have deep critical race theory in them than the ones that do.”
Reading How to Be an Antiracist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi was what caused Jacobson to launch the web-database. The book was recommended as a “Community Book Read” by university president Martha Pollack in June 2020.
The Legal Insurrection team has lately been focused on DEI and anti-racism initiatives in medical schools. Jacobson said, “Medical schools are deeply programmed with ‘DEI anti-racism’… almost all of them have anti-racism task force forces [and] have DEI programming. Some of them have mandatory reading of Kendi’s book.”
DEI put into practice
Jacobson explained that the DEI initiatives on college campuses have real-world implications. He told Carlson that he was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the New York State Health Commissioner.
As the Review reported at the time, Jacobson sought a preliminary injunction against then-commissioner Mary T. Bassett “from implementing and enforcing the racial preferences in the COVID-19 treatment policy issued by the New York Department of Health.” The court ruled that Jacobson did not have standing to sue, since he had not contracted COVID-19 or sought the medication, according to the interview.
When asked by Carlson where he thought the CRT in education debate was going, Jacobson was cautiously optimistic:
There’s a lot of pushback. But people need to understand these are deeply embedded in the systems. [Activists] like to talk about systemic racism. Well, this critical race theory is systemically embedded throughout education.
What he has found is that many parents are not in favor of these developments. “I don’t think, saying to parents, ‘We want your kids to march around the classroom rather than studying to get ahead in life.’ I don’t think that’s popular,” Jacobson explained to Carlson.
