At 2:00 a.m. on the morning following Passover, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) was jolted awake by the smell of burning wood and sirens. His wife and four children, as well as another family who had been visiting for the Jewish holiday, were rushed to safety while firefighters put out the flames that were ravaging the Governor’s mansion in Harrisburg.
It is still unclear if the attack on Gov. Shapiro was motivated primarily by antisemitism or was merely the action of a mentally unstable man spurred on by the Left’s violent rhetoric, of which antisemitism is a major component. News reports say the suspect was angry with the governor over his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the investigation is ongoing.
What is clear is that some ideas must be opposed at every turn or else they will continue to proliferate and manifest into the type of scenes we saw in Harrisburg over the weekend. It is not an attack on freedom of speech for teachers, government officials, and other cultural influencers to make it clear that violence is not an acceptable recourse to solve disagreements – it is necessary for a healthy society to understand the difference between good and evil. Hating someone based purely on their faith or ethnicity is firmly in the evil camp.
Recent polling reflects the fact that influential figures have not been making that clear. A poll that came out in March showed that 53% of Americans have a negative view of Israel, which is up from 42% in 2022. And that is not coming from just the Left – Americans on both sides of the aisle have soured on the Jewish state as it continues to wage war against the terrorists in Gaza to try to bring the remaining hostages home.
Part of the problem is persistent maleducation at America’s colleges. For too long, antisemitism has been allowed to flourish at universities nationwide. These elite universities have received billions of taxpayer dollars over the years, despite having extremely well-funded endowments, and in exchange for all those government dollars, many of their students learn to hate America, our history, and our founding values, while growing in sympathy for radical ideas such as virulent antisemitism.
That is why the Trump administration’s move to defund the most high-profile institutions is a significant way to show that antisemitism is unacceptable. Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump set up the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which is scrutinizing top universities for potential civil rights violations. Their first target was Columbia University, which has hosted some of the most egregious pro-Palestine rallies since October 7th. The administration threatened that Columbia would be cut off from $400 million of federal funding for failing to combat the “persistent harassment” of Jewish students – harassment that included trapping Jewish students in the Cooper Union library and tolerating weeks-long protests featuring the genocidal chant of “from the river to the sea.” However, the school eventually caved to the administration’s demands and promised to implement reforms designed to stop the toleration and proliferation of antisemitism on its campus.
The next target for the administration is the most storied Ivy League of them all, Harvard University. In the government’s letter to Harvard outlining what reforms the school needs to make, administration officials wrote that “The United States has invested in Harvard University’s operations because of the value to the country of scholarly discovery and academic excellence. But an investment is not an entitlement. It depends on Harvard upholding federal civil rights laws, and it only makes sense if Harvard fosters the kind of environment that produces intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor, both of which are antithetical to ideological capture.” Any institution that receives taxpayer dollars has a basic obligation to ensure that money is being well-spent.
The White House is not asking the school to do anything unreasonable – in order to keep their federal dollars, Harvard must implement merit-based hiring and admission practices (as opposed to diversity, equity, and inclusion quotas), they must screen international students better so as to prevent admitting anyone who is hostile to American values, and reform any college programs with a record of antisemitism or other bias. And yet, Harvard has thus far refused to acquiesce to any of these requests, even in the face of losing over $2.2 billion in federal funds.
Harvard’s stance highlights just how entrenched this ideology has become. They believe that the government asking them to be less antisemitic and hateful of the American values that led to Harvard’s creation is an attempt to stifle academic freedom and free speech. Former President Obama said as much in an X post defending Harvard’s stance.
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… https://t.co/gAu9UUqgjF
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 15, 2025
But the same people making that argument do not truly believe in it. Imagine if there was a publicly-funded college openly encouraging anti-black racism or barring Muslim students from attending purely because of their faith. Would they defend those policies in the name of freedom? Of course not.
The Founding Fathers also would have vehemently disagreed that academic freedom requires teaching that every idea is of equal value. They understood that students must receive an education in moral virtue in order to become citizens in a self-governing republic. The freedom to promote and act on any idea that exists, no matter how radical or destructive, is a recipe for chaos and violence. There is a difference between teaching that an idea exists and encouraging it as correct. It is imperative for these educational institutions to understand that and to impart truth, rather than radicalism, to their students.
We at Concerned Women for America (CWA) are grateful for the Administration’s war on antisemitism. It is critical that the American government continue to clearly state that such hateful, virulent speech is intolerable, that it must be met with speech that unwaveringly speaks truth and calls out evil for what it is. As the battle moves from higher education to other infected parts of society, we will gladly partner with them to ensure the U.S. government speaks with necessary moral clarity until the moral scourge of antisemitism has been erased from American soil.