Politics
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block heads to D.C. for grilling on campus antisemitism
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block will testify before a Republican-led House committee Thursday, where he is expected to face aggressive questioning about antisemitism on his campus and how a pro-Palestinian encampment ended in violence.
His appearance comes as UCLA, among the nation’s most prestigious public universities, has been roiled by months of tense protests over the Israel-Hamas war, including a violent mob attack three weeks ago on a pro-Palestinian encampment.
The testimony — which will take place just over two months before Block steps down as chancellor — will be the first time the head of a California university addresses the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The group has grilled university presidents and K-12 school leaders on a national stage since the fall, contributing to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
Setting the tone for questioning, chair Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said in a Monday statement that the “committee has a clear message for mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders: Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of your duty to your Jewish students. No stone must go unturned while buildings are being defaced, campus greens are being captured, or graduations are being ruined.”
In a campus-wide letter distributed Monday, Block said he would “speak honestly, and personally, about the challenges UCLA faces and the impact of this pernicious form of hate” during the testimony. “I will continue to insist that antisemitism — as well as Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate and any form of bigotry, hostility or discrimination — is antithetical to our values, corrosive to our community and not to be tolerated.”
Thursday’s testimony will represent a key moment in Block’s 17-year career at UCLA and comes a week after he survived a “no confidence” vote by the university’s Academic Senate but saw half of voting faculty representatives endorse censuring him for his response to pro-Palestinian protesters.
The House committee is investigating how UCLA handled the encampment that was dismantled May 2 by police who arrested more than 200 people, in addition to allegations of antisemitism that have grown on the Westwood campus since the Oct. 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel and the nation launched its retaliatory war in Gaza.
The committee, made up of 44 representatives — 24 of them Republicans — has three Californians, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel and Democratic Reps. Mark Takano and Mark DeSaulnier. The panel describes itself on its website as “promoting access to high-quality education for students” and opposing “one-size-fits-all government-run schools.”
During an explosive Dec. 5 committee hearing on antisemitism, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faced pressure after giving evasive responses to whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” was a violation of student conduct rules, including saying in their answers that it depended on “context.” Presidents and school administrators facing elected officials since then have fared better on similar questions.
Block will be joined by the leaders of Northwestern and Rutgers universities, where presidents recently signed off on agreements with protesters to end encampments but did not agree to their main demands: to divest from weapons companies and ties to Israel and to boycott academic partnerships with Israeli universities. Block has not made any agreements with pro-Palestinian activists.
The presidents of Yale and Michigan, who were previously slated to testify alongside Block at the hearing, titled “Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos,” will be called to appear for transcribed interviews. The head of the Berkeley public school district testified earlier this month in during a similar hearing aimed at K-12 schools.
Foxx has admonished UCLA and the other universities for making what she sees as “shocking concessions to the unlawful antisemitic encampments on their campuses” and criticized UCLA leadership for failing to have police prepared to intervene April 30 when the mob attacked the pro-Palestinian camp.
UC released a statement Tuesday describing UCLA’s free speech and anti-discrimination policies.
“While free speech is protected on UCLA’s campus — and at all other public universities — that right is not absolute. We also have legal obligations under the federal law to protect students from discrimination and harassment,” said Charles F. Robinson, general counsel and senior vice president. “Our policies do not allow for anyone to intimidate, harass or stop someone from moving freely about our campus. UCLA follows the University of California’s Anti-Discrimination Policy, which prohibits harassment and discrimination based on an individual’s actual or perceived protected category. The protected categories include religion and national origin [shared Jewish ancestry].”
Critics say the hearings are an attempt by House Republicans to use campus unrest for political gain during an election year. They also point out that while reports of campus antisemitic incidents have grown significantly since Oct. 7, there have been no similar hearings on the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hatred that has also shot up.
A spokesman for the committee did not respond to a request to interview Foxx. A UCLA spokesman also did not respond to a request to interview Block.
Foxx previously directed Block, UC President Michael V. Drake and Rich Leib, chair of the UC Board of Regents, to produce all documents, communications and security videos related to alleged antisemitic incidents at UCLA since Oct. 7. She gave them until Tuesday afternoon to share those documents, as well as texts and other communications from staff, police and the regents.
In a letter last week demanding the documents, Foxx described what she saw as an antisemitic trope: an image of Block, who is Jewish, displayed at the encampment that “featured him with horns and red eyes.”
Before the protests began, Block was widely praised for expanding enrollment, diversity, philanthropy and research funding to get the university through a financial crisis and the global pandemic. The last controversy Block faced was in 2019 when The Times revealed that years earlier, UCLA had been aware of allegations of parents pledging donations to its athletic programs in exchange for their children being admitted to the university.
But after the encampment attack overnight on April 30 and a hours-long delay in the police response to quell the melee, he has faced condemnation from some elected officials, faculty, students and staff. While his biggest critics at UCLA have been from the left, he’s more likely to face opposition at the hearing from the right, following a pattern in previous hearings.
Pro-Palestinian UCLA faculty have expressed frustration that their chancellor has flown to Washington, D.C., while the campus remains unsettled.
“UCLA is the center of the fire across American universities, yet he’s focusing on the hearing,” said Yogita Goyal, a professor of English and African American studies and a voting member of the Academic Senate who said she opposes Block’s leadership. “Congress should not dictate what happens on our campus.”
Graeme Blair, an associate professor of political science who is part of UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine, said he hoped Block would use the hearing to “push back against the narrative of the committee, which is focused on antisemitism to the exclusion of anti-Palestinian hate … the dominant force on our campus leading to violent harm to our students.”
“UCLA’s response to the encampment on campus failed to protect students against anti-Palestinian violence, but it has a chance now to come clean and start to make changes,” Blair said.
Inna Faliks, a professor of piano who is Jewish, said she “hoped the hearing would help” but that it was “hard to tell” if previous ones had made a dent.
Faliks, a voting member of the Academic Senate who opposed the recent ballots against Block, charged the UCLA encampment with being “pro-Hamas” because of its slogans and checkpoints that would not let Zionists through, saying they “made Jewish faculty and staff feel horrible.”
Judea Pearl, an Israeli American professor of computer science, said that he, too, felt the sting of antisemitism on campus but thought the issue was too often brushed aside by activists who described themselves as anti-Zionist but not antisemitic.
“There is a zionophobia on campus. But Zionism is not a bad thing,” said Pearl. “It is good to partner with Israeli universities, for example. We need their research because it’s good research.”
Pearl disapproved of Block’s handling of the encampment, he said, because it was not cleared more quickly after going up April 25. He also said that a tense pro-Israel counter-protest before the attack has been overshadowed by the night of violence.
“Unfortunately, this hearing is being done by Republicans. I wish it was done by Democrats who actually care about higher education,” Pearl said. “But it’s better than doing nothing.”
In addition to the hearing, UCLA is preparing for a possible strike by graduate student workers. The union representing such workers across the University of California’s 10 campuses voted last week to authorize a strike in response to the arrests and use of force in dismantling the pro-Palestinian encampments at UCLA and elsewhere. The strike began Monday at UC Santa Cruz.
Gene McAdoo, a doctoral student in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies who is part of the union and joined the pro-Palestinian encampment, said he thought Block would “get it really bad.”
“I don’t think he will come out of that in one piece,” McAdoo said. “He’s been getting pressure from the left to resign, but after this it might be coming from all sides.”
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The House has officially shipped a colossal bipartisan housing package to President Donald Trump, and lawmakers are hoping that, at the very least, he doesn’t veto it.
Trump was supposed to sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act last week, but his last-minute decision to ghost the signing ceremony with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., put into question whether the bill was dead.
His refusal to sign the bill, which passed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support in both chambers, was to leverage the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which doesn’t currently have the votes to succeed in the Senate.
WARREN TELLS TRUMP TO ‘SIGN THE DAMN BILL’ AS BIPARTISAN HOUSING PACKAGE REMAINS STALLED IN WASHINGTON
Trump has refused to sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. (Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Trump appears to be in no hurry to sign the bill, despite Republicans who are hungry for a win in the affordability fight ahead of the midterm elections.
“It’s so unimportant … compared to the SAVE America Act,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “I think the SAVE America Act is exactly what it says. It’s saving America from crooked elections.”
“Here’s what I would like to sign, much more than a bill that — big deal, it’s a yawn,” he continued. “Some people say it’s wonderful. To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”
GOP INFIGHTING OVER TRUMP’S VOTER ID BILL ERUPTS AS TOP SENATOR CALLS STRATEGY ‘FANTASY’
It’s legislation that is loaded with nearly 60 provisions from both sides of the aisle in both chambers that’s designed to make it easier for homes to be built and for younger Americans to buy their first home. It also includes a ban on hedge funds buying up housing stock that Trump pushed Congress to include during the State of the Union earlier this year.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., one of the architects behind the bill in the upper chamber alongside Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., charged that Congress handed the bill to Trump “on a silver platter.”
“When you ask me what happens next, if he cared about the American people, he’d have already signed the damned thing, and we’d be underway,” Warren said on WCVB’s “On the Record” on Sunday.
But Trump doesn’t have to put his signature on the bill for it to become law.
IRATE REPUBLICANS ACCUSE TRUMP OF HANDING DEMOCRATS A WIN AFTER BLOWING UP HOUSING PACKAGE
The Senate advanced a massive, Trump-backed housing package geared toward lowering the costs of homes and supercharging the housing supply. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., pitched it as legislation to prevent America from becoming a “nation of renters.” (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Protect Borrowers; Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The Constitution grants presidents the ability to veto a bill within 10 days of it being transferred over to the White House. In that scenario, Congress could override a veto of the housing package.
It’s happened before under the Trump administration. In early 2021, Congress overrode Trump’s veto of the annual National Defense Authorization Act — a massive Pentagon funding authorization package that some House Republicans are trying to use as a vehicle to pass the SAVE America Act.
But during that 10-day period, if Trump doesn’t sign the bill, it would automatically become law. That’s unless Congress completely adjourns, in which case a “pocket veto” could happen. The Senate is currently in recess and the House is scheduled to leave town by week’s end, but neither count as a full adjournment.
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Johnson, who spent the last few days meeting with Trump at the White House about the housing bill and the SAVE America Act, said: “I hope he does sign it.”
“If he doesn’t, it’s still law,” Johnson said. “We’ll still celebrate it, but he’s trying to make a point, and I think he’s making it very effectively. And the fact that you all ask me every three steps down the hallway illustrates that he has achieved the desired objective, and that is to make SAVE America the number one thing, because if we don’t get that right, everybody’s concerned about what happens next.”
Britain’s culture minister may challenge Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery — presenting a potential speed-bump to David Ellison’s plan to wrap up his $111-billion deal by September.
Earlier this month, Paramount secured the U.S. Justice Department’s blessing to buy the Warner assets, which include CNN, HBO, Cartoon Network, Animal Planet and the Warner Bros. film and TV studios in Burbank.
Paramount also must win the approval of British and European regulators, who are known for drilling deeply into media matters because of their influence on society.
Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority took a preliminary step this month by opening an investigation into Ellison’s proposed merger.
On Tuesday, Lisa Nandy, Britain’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, notified Parliament that she was inclined to intervene in the blockbuster deal.
In a written statement, Nandy cited her ability to weigh in on “public interest grounds,” due to concerns about maintaining a competitive media market in Britain.
“The UK’s move to intervene in the Paramount–WBD deal confirms what we’ve been saying for months. The real regulatory risk was never in the US — it’s in Europe,” Forrester VP Research Director Mike Proulx said Tuesday in a statement.
While Nandy cautioned she has not made “a final decision on intervention at this stage,” she has invited Paramount and Warner Bros. to respond to her concerns by July 6.
June 2026 photo of Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Lisa Nandy arriving at Downing Street for the weekly Government cabinet meeting in London.
(Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images)
Paramount did not offer immediate comment.
The company owns CBS News, children’s channel Nickelodeon and Channel 5, one of the largest over-the-air television broadcasters in the United Kingdom.
Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, Cartoon Network and TNT Sports, which broadcasts the Olympics, Champions League and Premier League soccer matches.
“I am conscious that the proposed acquisition is global in nature,” Nandy wrote in her statement. “In reaching this decision, my focus has been, and will remain, on the UK public interest and the range of services available to UK audiences, including Channel 5, TNT Sports, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and CNN International, as well as Paramount+ and HBO Max.”
If Nandy decides to intervene, the Office of Communications, known as Ofcom, would launch an assessment of the deal. Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority also would determine how the merger might reshape the competitive landscape.
Teams from the two companies have been huddling for months to plan for the melding of the two operations as soon as Paramount receives all of its regulatory approvals.
Australia, New Zealand, China, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Serbia, France and Italy have already given their approvals to the deal.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is planning to contribute $10 billion to help the billionaire Ellison family pull off the merger, which would make the Saudi royal family a significant, although passive, equity owner. In addition, the royal families of Qatar and Abu Dhabi have agreed to each contribute $7 billion in equity financing.
The Federal Communications Commission must evaluate the foreign ownership stakes due to Paramount’s holding of CBS broadcast licenses. U.S. antitrust regulators already have concluded the combination would not violate federal anticompetition laws.
Approval had been expected because President Trump — who has friendly ties with Ellison and his father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison — favors the deal.
Trump has been eager for changes at CNN.
The U.S. government stopped short of asking Paramount to make concessions or divestitures. Many expect that Paramount may have to reconfigure its children’s television holdings abroad due to the proposed combination of two large players — Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network.
Nandy suggested that Britain also should scrutinize the impact of combining two major streaming services HBO Max, a Warner property, with Paramount+.
HBO programming, including “Game of Thrones,” “Boardwalk Empire,” and “Succession,” has long been popular in Britain.
A coalition of state attorneys general, led by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, also is expected to challenge the deal, in part, due to concerns about news media consolidation. Bonta’s office has said the matter remains under review.
Opposition to the deal has been building in the U.S. for months. A group of Hollywood activists — led by actors Jane Fonda and Mark Ruffalo — have spearheaded a “block the merger” campaign that now has support from more than 5,000 entertainment workers.
The group’s open letter calls on Bonta to take action to thwart the Ellison expansion effort. Paramount’s Chief Legal Officer Makan Delrahim has blasted the campaign, calling it “fear-mongering” and a partisan distortion of antitrust law.
Forrester’s Proulx noted differences in attitudes toward the deal among the various constituencies.
“For US consumers, this merger has become a proxy fight about political influence and control of media,” Proulx said. “In the UK, it’s being treated as a structural competition issue where regulators, not consumers, will decide how this deal plays out and how long it takes.”
Politics
Fetterman unleashes on ‘dirtbag’ wing of Dems after far-left victories: ‘Orgy of socialism’
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Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., unloaded on his own party on Sunday evening, blasting a series of victories for progressives he called “anti-America.”
“Big night for the dirtbag left,” Fetterman said, referring to New York’s recent primaries, where two members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won primaries.
“I’ve said the party is becoming an orgy of socialism. Clearly anti-America, anti-Western Civilization,” Fetterman said.
Fetterman’s striking calls give a rare look at how some moderates may view the developments on their far-left flank that have dominated the party’s momentum in recent months, sparking concern that their high visibility is dragging the party further and further left.
FETTERMAN WARNS DEMOCRATS ‘DRIFTING FIRMLY INTO COMMUNISM’ AFTER SOCIALIST PRIMARY WINS
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., speaks to reporters outside the Senate Chamber during votes on Nov. 10, 2025, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
His comments come on the heels of a handful of key progressive victories.
In Maine, Graham Platner, a controversial Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, has attracted controversy for denying knowledge of the meaning behind a Nazi-linked tattoo, for off-color comments about race and calling himself a “communist” in a deleted Reddit post.
In New York, one DSA member, Claire Valdez, won a primary on a platform of abolishing ICE and a Green New Deal-style approach to climate change. Similarly, Darializa Avila-Chevalier, another DSA candidate, beat out incumbent Rep. Adriano Espillat, D-N.Y., a high-ranking Democrat and the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
WINNERS AND LOSERS EMERGE AFTER SOCIALIST EARTHQUAKE ROCKS NYC PRIMARIES
Graham Platner, Democratic Senate candidate for Maine, speaks at a primary election night event at the Blue Hill YMCA in Blue Hill, Maine, on June 9, 2026. Platner won the party’s Senate primary after a campaign marked by accusations of past misbehavior and voter concerns. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Both Chevalier and Valdez had the backing of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, himself a socialist.
The wins have captured national attention and drawn criticisms from Republicans who have pointed to their success as emblematic of the direction of the Democratic Party.
Fetterman, who has not shied away from confrontations, has been one of the few Democrats to express alarm about the kind of candidates carrying the party’s banner.
“I mean, you look at some of the things that people have said. Abolish prison, abolish the border, abolish ICE, I mean these crazy people — I have colleagues in my caucus that refuse to even call this out,” Fetterman said.
FETTERMAN REACTS TO MAMDANI’S REFUSAL TO ACCEPT SUPREME COURT’S IMMIGRATION RULING
U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., walks through the Senate Subway during the Senate War Powers vote on April 22, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
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“Between P-hustle in Maine and some of the other winners in New York, they should form their own party and run on all the things that they’ve had to delete on social media,” Fetterman said, referring to Platner.
“That’s where our party has moved,” he added.
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