Sep. 11, 2024: The Debate

Geese, not ducks, in Springfield?; How the federal government and NGOs created a gang problem in Aurora, CO; The BBC's anti-Israel bias

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The Big Story

​​Vice President Kamala Harris entered the debate last night needing a win. With an assist from Donald Trump and the ABC moderators, she got one. Will it make a difference? We don’t know. But here are a few of The Scroll’s sleep-deprived, hungover observations from the day after: 

• Trump lost the debate more than Harris won it. He was solid for about 10 minutes early on, hammering home his message on his two best issues, the border and the economy, but he stumbled over abortion and then allowed himself to be goaded by Harris’ taunting about the crowd size at his rallies. He struggled to explain himself, wasted considerable time litigating his grievances over the 2020 election, and wandered into several rhetorical cul-de-sacs, including an aggravating digression in which he praised Hungarian President Viktor Orbán in response to Harris’ taunt that foreign leaders were laughing at him. Trump did recover his footing later on. In his closing statement, he honed in on what should have been his message from the start: Kamala is promising all this great stuff, but she’s already the second-in-command to an incapacitated president, so why hasn’t she done it already? But it came about an hour too late. 

• That said, Trump’s story about negotiating with “Abdul” from the Taliban (Abdul Ghani Baradar) contained the funniest line of the evening. Watch it here:

• Harris cleared the low bar that had been set for her. She didn’t cackle or give any word-salad answers. She stayed on message—so much so that she simply ignored the rare difficult question directed her way by the moderators. (Asked about her past statements in favor of banning fracking and decriminalizing border crossing, she launched into a soliloquy about her friend who had been sexually abused in high school.) That said, it was a safe, defensive performance from Harris—the political equivalent of trying to run out the clock in football. She delivered no memorable lines and offered next to no clarification on what she might do in office or, crucially, how she would govern differently than Biden. Early in the debate, her delivery was nervous and stilted, and while she relaxed considerably as the evening wore on, her answers—and mannerisms—retained a canned quality. Luckily for her, neither Trump nor the moderators ever forced her to improvise. 

• We’re not sure we buy the theory that Dana Walden, a close personal friend of Harris and the co-chair of Disney, which owns ABC, directed the moderators to ensure that Harris had a good night, but we’re also not sure that they would have behaved any differently if she had. They live “fact-checked” Trump on at least four occasions, including when the former president was substantively correct. On abortion, for instance, Trump claimed that in states such as Minnesota that allow abortion into the ninth month of pregnancy, live babies can be “executed.” Moderator Linsey Davis interjected, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born.” Narrowly speaking, she is correct: Nowhere is it legal to actively “kill” a baby, an “execution” is a characteristically Trumpian exaggeration. However, in Minnesota, it is legal to withhold life-saving care from a baby born alive after a botched late-term abortion. Whether that counts as “killing” is a moral and political question, not a factual one. 

• Harris, on the other hand, was not fact-checked once, not even for howlers like the repeatedly debunked claim that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” after the 2017 riot in Charlottesville. Nor was she pressed to clarify when she ducked direct questions about her record or past positions. According to a calculation from The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra, Trump made 14 false statements throughout the debate, while Harris made 16. Trump was fact-checked four times and pressed for follow-up on six occasions. Harris wasn’t fact-checked or pressed for follow-up once. 

Finally, we’re left with the question: Did any of it matter? Harris supporters were jubilant after the debate; Trump supporters were frustrated with him and outraged at ABC. But only a narrow slice of the electorate follows politics closely, and neither we, nor anyone else who comments on politics for a living, has any real idea of how undecided voters might interpret what they saw last night. For all the talk of Harris’ knockout blow last night, CNN’s flash poll of debate watchers showed that they had moved slightly toward Trump on the economy (though the change was well within the margin of error):

In a Reuters focus group of 10 voters who said they were undecided before the debate, six said afterward they had decided to vote for, or were leaning toward, Trump, while three said they would back Harris, and one was still unsure. A post-debate poll from the Democracy Institute found 45% of voters saying Trump had won, vs. 34% for Harris. Go figure.

Trump is a known quantity, after all: Voters know he is a brash, undisciplined loudmouth with a towering ego, and yet about half of them still want him back in the White House. Harris, meanwhile, remains the vice president of an unpopular administration that a two-thirds majority of voters say they want a change from. She may have out-jousted Trump last night, but the American people already know she isn’t Trump. Her problem is they suspect she may be nothing more than a younger, more telegenic Biden. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: As the fall semester starts up, CUNY is once again becoming a hotbed of antisemitism.

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The Rest

→Here’s a gem from New Yorker staff writer and former Politico editor Susan Glasser on the debate:

[Trump’s] line about how the Vice-President “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” was pretty memorable, too. What the hell was he talking about? No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’s point. 

“No one knows” except readers of The Scroll, that is. Apparently, The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking department did not see fit to inform the magazine’s star political writer—perhaps because it did not know—that Harris had, in fact, confirmed in a 2019 American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire that she supported providing “gender transition surgery” to all “federal prisoners and detainees,” including those in immigration detention, as CNN reported Monday. 

→Update to yesterday’s Big Story: Audio of a police call obtained by The Federalist reveals that a Springfield, Ohio, resident reported a group of Haitian migrants for carrying four geese on Aug. 26, two weeks prior to Springfield becoming a national news story. A contemporaneous police report describes a case of larceny—“4 GEESE STOLEN”—by two Haitian men and two Haitian women, in which “EACH HAD 1 GOOSE.” No reports of ducks or cats being harmed have been confirmed, although J.D. Vance, in a postdebate interview, claimed that his Senate office had received “firsthand” complaints of abducted pets and wildlife from constituents in Springfield. We’ll keep you updated on this developing story. 

→And friend of The Scroll Julio Rosas, who is on the ground in Springfield, reports that residents have drafted a petition to recall the members of the Springfield city council over their failure to enforce housing codes. According to Rosas:

→Trump mentioned the Springfield story (in somewhat garbled form) during the debate last night, and he also referenced Aurora, Colorado, which has been the subject of a separate immigration-related controversy over the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, whose members took over a handful of apartment buildings in the Denver suburb before being driven out by local police last month. We suspect that one reason the Haitian cat story has been resistant to “debunking” by local officials is that the Aurora story was similarly “debunked,” only to prove true. Earlier this month, for instance, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis dismissed the reports of TdA taking over the apartment complex as a figment of locals’ “imagination”—before being forced to backtrack as local officials, X users, reporters, and security camera footage all confirmed the presence of the gang.

On Tuesday, Chris Rufo and Christina Buttons published an article in City Journal exposing how the gang got there. The answer is two of The Scroll’s usual suspects: the Biden administration and left-wing nonprofits. 

As Rufo and Buttons report, between 2023 and 2024, the city of Denver drew on federal funds authorized by Biden’s American Rescue Plan to pay just under $19 million to two local nonprofits to provide housing assistance and other services to thousands of migrants and asylum seekers from Venezuela. One of those nonprofits began working with the corporate landlord of the buildings at the center of the controversy, CBZ Management, placing the migrants in the company’s properties and providing them with up to two months of rental assistance. The nonprofit also, according to a CBZ employee, falsely assured the company that the migrants—many of whom spoke no English and were not legally eligible for employment—had “stable jobs and income.” And some of the migrants, apparently, were members of TdA, leading to a spike of shootings, assaults, robberies, and drug dealing, until local police were forced to condemn one the buildings as uninhabitable and evict some 300 residents. 

Read it here: https://www.city-journal.org/article/chaos-in-aurora 

→Quote of the Day: 

Basing my views about the Israel-Hamas war on UK media coverage, I arrived in Israel critical and sceptical of their military operations. … I came away from the trip satisfied that the IDF’s operations and rules of engagement were rigorous compared to the British Army and our western allies.

That’s from an article in The Telegraph by Gen. Sir John McColl, the former deputy supreme allied commander of NATO, following a trip to Israel last week as a military observer. After observing the war firsthand, McColl and his fellow experts concluded that Gaza was “the most complex and demanding operational environment that any of us had come across, including in Iraq and Afghanistan,” yet that the “rules of engagement were being adhered to rigorously” by the IDF. 

→McColl’s mistake, of course, was trusting U.K. media coverage, as our Image of the Day shows:

That’s from a story in The Telegraph on a recent report by the British lawyer Trevor Asserson into the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Asserson and his team of researchers found that the BBC had breached its own editorial guidelines 1,533 times in the four-month period beginning Oct. 7. Now, in our view, it seems a bit difficult to put a scientific number on how many times a news organization has violated a vague standard such as “editorial values,” but the nature of the problem becomes clearer when we look at specific examples, such as a BBC report from June, later retracted, that characterized a Gazan boy suffering from cerebral palsy as having been perfectly healthy prior to having been allegedly starved by the Israelis. The most damning examples, however, were from the BBC’s Arabic services: for instance, BBC Arabic contributor Mayssa Abdul Khalek calling for “death to Israel” or Lebanese reporter Marie Jose Al-Azzi calling Israel a “terrorist apartheid state” in a since-deleted X post. 

→Today is the 23rd anniversary of 9/11. A previous Scroll retrospective, collecting some of Tablet’s writing on the attacks and their aftermath, can be found here. We’d also recommend this 2021 Tablet essay from law professor Stephen Vladeck, on “The Normalization of the Post-Sept. 11 Regime,” which can be found here. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Divine Right, by Jeffrey Shandler

The Sept. 11 attacks altered many people’s convictions. For ultra-Orthodox Jews, they reinforced a strongly held belief in divine authority.

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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New York City’s Laboratory for Hate

CUNY threatens to spiral into antisemitic violence once again this fall unless Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD start enforcing the law

by Emily Benedek

On Tuesday night, Sept. 3, Ilya Bratman—U.S. Army veteran, CUNY English teacher, and Hillel executive director at eight CUNY and SUNY schools—hosted a welcome-back dinner for Hillel students at a kosher restaurant near Baruch College. Soon after their entrance into Mr. Broadway, guests were surrounded by a chanting, braying, mob.

“CUNY, CUNY, You can’t hide. You support genocide!”

"Terrorist! Terrorist! Terrorist!”

“All Zionists are racist!”

They blocked the doorway, preventing students and other diners from leaving, held photos of murdered babies in the students’ faces, and even hit a Hillel staffer. One of the male protesters, his face concealed by a mask, shoulders draped in a kaffiyeh, creepily formed his fingers in the shape of a triangle—Hamas’ symbol for a military target.

Then the slurs got personal. To a clearly Jewish-looking couple walking down the street, “You ugly ass bitch! Go back to Brooklyn!”

And, then, the kicker: “Where’s Hersh?”

For an hour.

When the cops arrived after 30 minutes of the melee, they moved the protesters “5 feet away” from the entrance, according to Bratman, placing them close to the restaurant windows, which they then hammered with their hands. There was nothing they wouldn’t say, from “You ain’t going home tonight,” to “Dogs off campus.”

Bratman says the tenor of the violence worsened over the summer, with demonstrators becoming more frustrated and volatile, last week marching outside Hillel with a white sign painted in red letters reading: “Bring the war home,” illustrated with a machine gun. “These people are not just insane,” says Bratman. “They’re criminally insane. We have a lot of insane people in New York on every block. But these people are dangerous. They’re not the regular guy that throws shit at the wall in Times Square.”

A seasoned Army veteran who saw action in Iraq, Bratman is naturally cool, engaging, and funny—a genuine hail-fellow-well-met. But his instincts now tell him that violence is coming. It’s the very beginning of the school year and everyone is distracted, and he desperately needs more press coverage to get the attention of the CUNY administration.

“What’s new about this round of protests?” I asked Bratman. To propose a story to my editor, I’ll have to say what’s new. Bratman just about lost it. “Protesters stalked, menaced, harassed, and followed Jewish students to a kosher restaurant, like they would have done on Nov. 9, 1938, and blocked the entrance, screamed obscenities, and banged on windows calling for violence against Jews,” he told me. “They not only terrorized students, but also other Jews, random New York Jews having dinner. The cops came, didn’t do anything, even though they heard distinct, specific threats against the lives of the Jews inside.”

Bratman grew up in the Soviet Union, so he believes that he understands where all this is headed if brave and well-intentioned people don’t step up and insist on what should not require saying: Jewish people enjoy the same rights as any other citizen of the U.S. “This is not a freedom of speech story,” he states. “These people are breaking the law. Free speech rights end when the speech is menacing, threatening, or intimidating—or when the speaker prevents me from moving freely through a public space. For whatever reasons,” he says, “the police are not enforcing the law.”

A lawyer and Navy SEAL named Bill Brown, who is trying to help Jewish students fight hate on campus, happened to be visiting Baruch College just as the protests began. He told Tablet, “These were not demonstrators. Demonstrators do not follow students to a restaurant and spew racial hatred and use derogatory language. These were criminals who wore kaffiyehs over their faces to intimidate, and they blocked the entrance to the restaurant so the victims felt trapped.” He praised the “bravery” of the Hillel students “who did a good job staying together in a group and looking out for each other.” He encouraged them to continue to document the violence and urged others both inside and outside the Jewish community to “stand up and peacefully make their voices heard.” He encouraged everyone to document all incidents via video, because it “helps others see just how bad things are” and provides evidence to support possible legal action.

The day after the restaurant melee, CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez issued a statement: “I was deeply disappointed to learn demonstrators disrupted a Hillel welcome dinner for students from CUNY and universities across the City, turning an event designed to help freshmen acclimate to college life into a disruptive hate-filled display that has no place in our city.” He affirmed that he was investigating the “incident” and said the school “will not hesitate to enforce CUNY disciplinary actions, as appropriate, if any of the demonstrators are members of the CUNY community.”

Bratman reported several students and one faculty member he saw at the protest. The ADL called on Baruch College President David Wu to condemn the violence. Wu did not return a request from Tablet for comment. William C. Thompson Jr., the chairman of CUNY’s Board of Trustees, responded to Tablet via his press spokesman on Sunday, calling the protesters’ behavior “deplorable.” He said, “We will not condone hateful rhetoric and any member of the CUNY community who participates in any actions that intimidate, threaten, or promote hate and violence, will face disciplinary consequences.”

Bratman believes that the large Jewish organizations like ADL and AJC should put their money where their mouths are and hire teams of lawyers to sue the colleges and students and faculty who are breaking the law—often repeatedly, and for months on end. He says that he’s tired of hearing excuses from the funders like: “the wheels of justice turn slowly.” In response, he says “we need to make the wheels turn faster. I guarantee you, if it was about a merger of two financial firms, lawyers would make that happen quickly.” The famed Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Right Under Law “is great,” he says, but its capacity is too limited to help the numerous colleges that are in need.

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CUNY would certainly appear to be a prime target for a massive and costly lawsuit defending the civil rights of Jewish students, assuming that there are judges in New York state and federal enforcement bureaucrats who are willing to defend such an unpopular cause. Even before the Al Aqsa flood convulsed American college campuses, CUNY had been called “America’s most anti-Semitic university” in an April 2023 opinion piece by CUNY business professor Jeffrey Lax in The New York Post. Lax pointed out that “in the metropolis with the world’s largest Jewish population,” CUNY had “successfully completed a years-long initiative to expunge all Jews from its senior leadership.” Lax wrote that in a city that is 20% Jewish, it would be “the first time since its 1961 founding that CUNY’s senior leadership will be Jew-free or Judenrein.”

While recruitment at the city’s top Jewish schools “had all but ceased” for CUNY schools, Lax argued, the university was also “hell-bent on replacing its Jews with anti-Semites.” Recent CUNY hiring decisions would seem to support this allegation. In 2021, Chancellor Rodríguez tapped Saly Abd Alla, a BDS supporter and civil rights director for the Minnesota chapter of CAIR—the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a pro-Hamas group—as “chief diversity officer” at CUNY. In 2022, Abd Alla was tasked with investigating claims of antisemitism and anti-Zionism which Lax had made internally—an assignment that the Post’s Melissa Klein called “a master class in ‘gaslighting.’”

The problems at CUNY garnered national attention in May 2023 when Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a graduate speaking at CUNY Law School’s commencement, called for a “revolution” and expressed hope that the “rage” of her fellow graduates would be “fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism around the world.” She said she had chosen to attend CUNY Law because it recognized that “the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress people in this nation and around the world.” With her head covered in a hijab, the Yemen-born, Queens-raised future lawyer lashed CUNY for continuing “to train and cooperate with the fascist NYPD, the military” and scorned the university for continuing “to train IDF soldiers to carry out that same violence globally.”

Trying to stave off legal consequences, in December 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a letter to the presidents of New York’s colleges and universities declaring that failure to address “calls for genocide” made on college campuses “would constitute a violation of New York State Human Rights Law as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” In October, after the outbreak of campus protests, Hochul had asked former state Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman to review “CUNY policies and procedures,” with an eye to recommending actions for the CUNY Board of Trustees “to bolster its anti-discrimination policies and help protect Jewish students and faculty.”

Lippman told the Post at the time he wanted to “analyze the actual atmosphere at CUNY and not just focus on formal written policies” in an administrative handbook. “How does it look on the ground? … And what can we recommend systemically, that will make it better?” Bratman was interviewed by Lippman’s team in January and said it included top lawyers from his current firm, Latham & Watkins, who seemed to be conducting a thorough study. But the report, which was supposed to be released last spring, has not seen the light of day. The governor has yet to explain the delay, and whether, as rumor has it, it is election related.

In another apparently PR-minded attempt to ward off lawsuits, Chancellor Rodríguez made showy announcements of several campus efforts to fight hate, including a new Center for Inclusive Excellence and Belonging (CIEB), and a student-run social media campaign called “Our CUNY: Hate Divides Us, Diversity Defines Us”—announcements that were conveniently made this summer, when school was out of session. This year, the New York City Council reportedly allocated $600,000—up $50,000 from last year—to CUNY for all the fancy portals, information gathering, training, and social messaging it has in mind to expand its “anti-hate initiatives”—a category that dilutes antisemitism in a pool of other “hatreds,” namely “Islamophobia.”

Who is investigating the claims the students make? Bratman said each of the 25 campuses in the CUNY system has one (or fewer) DEI personnel. And the single DEI officer might be an elderly person who receives hundreds of reports. If each report requires 10 hours of investigation, how would the task be possible—even if the employee were by chance a seasoned investigator who could analyze and write clearly? “The person will get to the 17th incident by November, and then the 60-day resolution window that they’ve put in place has already passed,” Bratman said.

But the more fundamental problem at CUNY, Bratman pointed out, is that the basic job of educating children has been abandoned. “Academia has been lost,” he said. “The essence of academia—open discourse, civil dialogue, and academic excellence—is gone. Academia used to be about growth, research, exploration, discovery, openness. Now it’s about boycotts. Today, the teachers believe their job is indoctrination.”

A faculty member in the physics department of another CUNY school who preferred to remain unnamed told me that students have stopped asking questions. “People don't even know how to talk and think here. In some physics classes, we all notice that people don’t ask questions anymore. They don’t think about what they might want to know or say and ask questions. The intellectual level is very low.”

Along with a colleague, this professor is starting a club to show the students how to discuss an issue—ask questions, gather facts, make up a hypothesis and form an argument in a civil, academic manner. “They don’t know how to have a reasoned discussion based on facts, where you have some respect for the other side,” he said, adding optimistically “we want to show them what it is.”

Bratman said the baby boomers and the millennials are gone; the faculty is made up of people raised as social justice warriors. “The faculty is the scariest entity in this struggle,” he told me. “The faculty are the troublemakers, the faculty drives the context, the faculty sets the agenda, the faculty indoctrinates our students instead of educating them, instead of allowing them to grow.”

“They only want one voice to be heard and one solution: ‘intifada revolution.’ That’s what they will tell you is their agenda.”

A colleague in the English department told him that he plans to teach English 101 based on “Palestine and trans rights.” When Bratman “pushed back,” the faculty member told him he wants the students “to feel how I feel and how every Palestinian feels under their oppression and genocide.”

According to Bratman, “It’s fascist. It’s 1984, and it must be said very, very clearly.”

He asked me to step into the shoes of an 18-year-old student.

“You send your 18-year-old kid to school, right? They’re an impressionable, young, scared person, anxious. They come to class, their professor says, 'In the class, you’re going to take on a queer identity, or the role of an oppressor.' So what can the kids do? They can try to drop the class, which is going to be very hard for them because it’s their first year.

“Two, they can be a fighter in the class. It’s going to be terrible. They’ll have to take a stand every day, which is very hard for a young person to do.

“Or three, they’ll have to acquiesce. And most students will choose to acquiesce for the grade and to not make waves. That’s what’s happening to our students. They’re not just indoctrinated. They’re bamboozled, bombarded, propagandized by these faculty members who have lost their minds or worse, and who only have an agenda, only teach through bias, only teach through one perspective. Their whole goal is to minimize the opportunity for young people to grow.”

Bratman pointed out that every semester, teachers submit their curricula and syllabi to the provost, who is free to determine if they are or are not acceptable. “No one is saying no because they’re too afraid. Or too lazy.”