Now, many major federal grants that drive my university, UCLA—from the Fields Medal-winning mathematician Terence Tao and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), to (ironically) the genetics research of one of the most outspoken critics of the pro-Palestine protests on our campus—are all being “suspended” based on alternative facts (that is, falsehoods) that operate as the necessary factual pretext for an illegal extortion scheme by the federal government. The Trump team’s opening demand seems to be $1 billion, which I suppose reflects the fact that although Harvard and Columbia have much larger endowments than UCLA, the target of this new extortion is actually the people of the state of California, which (if considered on its own) would be the fourth largest economy in the world, having recently surpassed Japan. I mean, the additional amount Californians already pay the federal government, over and above what the federal government sends back to our state, is well over $1 billion each week. Trump must believe there’s more to take—and why use legal process, when extortion is right there?

The federal government is not even pretending to follow the necessary legal procedures to take away funds from a university on the basis of a civil rights violation. As Erwin Chemerinsky explains in an excellent op-ed today, they clearly would fail if they tried.  So the question of how much truth there is to the factual allegations ostensibly underlying the government’s attack on UCLA is hardly the most important issue regarding the government’s actions.  Still, there is ostensibly a specific civil rights claim underneath this racket. It’s easy to lose track of that in the general miasma of political grandstanding. And of course, often it’s difficult to be sure of exactly what happened in highly politicized environments in which a lot of people are making a lot of claims (and posting a lot of carefully-selected snippets of video). For instance, since I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t presume to say precisely what happened at Columbia University on any given day during the major campus protests they experienced in 2024, which became the ostensible factual basis of this administration’s extortion of that school. But UCLA is different for me. I was there, in person, during the events that are the subject of the government’s central allegation against UCLA. I saw some of the specific things described with my own eyes. This has given me a particular perspective on the facts on which the federal government is officially relying in “suspending” federal grants to my university. The rest of this long post is mostly a reflection on those specific events, what I saw, and then more speculatively, how we arrived at this strange place, where the federal government is demanding $1 billion from California—not via lawsuit, but through extralegal administrative extortion—on the basis of a falsehood that I strongly suspect would fall apart if it were ever actually litigated in court.

In its July 29 letter to UCLA, the administration makes clear that its central complaint is about “antisemitism,” and it is more specific. The letter explains that the core issue is “UCLA's response to the protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024” (p.1). The specific claim is that the university did not crack down hard enough on the pro-Palestinian protest encampment that some UCLA students set up on Royce Quad on April 25, 2024 and that police forcibly dismantled a week later, in the early morning hours of May 2, 2024. It would be understandable to lose track of the fact that the events of this one week are the crux of it. For one thing, as the administration extorts “settlements” from various other higher education institutions, the government lately has been making the breadth of its many grievances explicit: not enough conservatives on the faculty, that one transgender swimmer at Penn, making sure Columbia enrolls fewer international students (!). And yet when you read the letter to UCLA, it is clear that the facts that officially underlie this dispute almost exclusively come down to the events on Royce Quad during one week at the end of April 2024.

Royce Quad is a wide green area of grass between Royce Hall to the north and Powell Library to the south. Those two buildings are about 70 yards apart. Each has a wide paved path in front of it, and in between those paved paths is a large grassy area, which is where the protest encampment was. As it happens, those paved paths are part of the route by which either I, or my partner, walked my then-preschooler home in the afternoons. We thus walked past the student encampment each afternoon. (I also passed by the encampment by myself a couple of times at other times of day when crossing the campus.)

The encampment was surrounded by a big oval of crowd control fencing (looked like bike racks) set up by campus security in an attempt create a hard boundary around the encampment. Anyone could walk around freely outside that boundary. I mostly walked on the wide open paved path between the encampment and Royce Hall to the north; once I also walked on the other wide paved path on the south side of the encampment, between the encampment and Powell Library. That side of Powell Library was under construction, so what this meant was that on the south side of the quad, you had to walk along a path in between the Powell construction fencing and the bike-rack type fencing around the encampment. (As I’ll discuss below, shortly before the disastrous ending to this story, when the encampment was raided by vigilante thugs unaffiliated with UCLA, and the whole quad became a literal crime scene, there was a brief period during which campus police put up a second, larger circle of fencing, which enlarged the fenced-off area so that it covered the whole space between Powell and Royce. Both buildings remained accessible through other entrances, but during that period, the entrance of each building facing the quad was locked and everyone [including the protesters] had to go around to use another door.) However, for most of the encampment’s brief existence, both the north and south sides of the quad—along with all the entrances to both buildings—were open and unobstructed. I know this because I repeatedly walked along those paved paths.


I took this photo with my phone on the second day of the protest, April 26. Obviously I wish I had taken more photos; I certainly never expected to be writing about this topic. This photo, looking west, gives you an idea of what the security barrier looked like. Just after taking this photo, I walked along the paved path between Royce Hall (the iconic concert/lecture hall visible on the right side of the photo) and the fenced-off encampment area on the grass, to pick up my son from preschool. If you wanted to walk to the library (Powell), that’s the building on the left. In this photo you can see a little bit of the paved path on that side, between the encampment area and the library. As it happens, the day I happened to take this picture was also the day that a student began posting what became viral videos of his being blocked from entering the encampment. (Soon these videos were being retweeted by Harmeet Dhillon.)

In April 2024, my preschooler was at that energetic stage of reading where he basically liked reading any words he saw. The encampment was full of a lot of signs with words on them. So each afternoon as we walked by the encampment, we would stop awhile and read signs. What I saw was exactly what you’d expect: lots of signs full of political speech focused primarily on Gaza. One large sign was a Friday schedule that included Muslim Friday prayer, Jewish Shabbat services and a Shabbat dinner. I read many signs, as did my son. For what it’s worth, no sign that I saw, and no chant or slogan that I heard, struck me, personally, as antisemitic. To situate that point, I’m not the kind of person who thinks antisemitism looks exclusively like the Unite the Right rally; in my view there is also antisemitism to be found on the left, and it’s possible for it to get mixed up with pro-Palestine politics. I have seen that happen. But for what it’s worth, I didn’t see any of that when I walked by the actual encampment protest that week at UCLA. However, the highly contested question of exactly what counts as antisemitic is not what I’m interested in talking about in this post.

A sign I saw at the protest. Watermelon on the Seder plate, and maybe that’s supposed to be a pomegranate? My photo.	There were a variety of messages. I found this one interesting so I took this photo. Your call on whether you find this particular use of “from the river to the sea” antisemitic. Personally, I did not. Nor did I read this sign as genocidal toward the people of either North or South Korea.

I want to focus instead on something more basic. A subset of Jewish students at UCLA found the encampment deeply disturbing (even as a different subset of Jewish students at UCLA participated in it). Several Jewish students ultimately sued the university for its alleged failure to protect them from the antisemitism of, primarily, the encampment protest. They had very high-powered lawyers: Paul Clement and the Becket Fund. For these student plaintiffs, the central focus of their complaint, and by far the most politically explosive allegation in it, was (paragraph 6, and then reiterated throughout):

There are some other allegations in the complaint whose truthfulness I cannot personally assess. Since I was only passing by the encampment, and not staying especially long, I cannot speak to, for instance, what slogans someone yelled when I was not there, or what signs were there other than the ones I actually saw. However, I can say unequivocally based on direct observation that the language quoted above—the central allegation in the Becket Fund complaint—was false. There was no Jew Exclusion Zone. The claim that the encampment was “segregating Jewish students and preventing them from accessing the heart of campus, including classroom buildings [which must mean Royce] and the main undergraduate library [Powell],” as the Becket Fund complaint put it, is false.

The reason I say that with some certainty is that I, personally, never entered the fenced-off encampment area, and yet I walked freely around it, and could thereby reach entrances of all the surrounding campus buildings including the specific ones from which the complaint insists people were being excluded. I never passed through a protest “checkpoint,” nor was I asked about Israel or my views on it, the way the plaintiffs in the lawsuit describe in detail, for a simple reason: I was not attempting to enter the fenced-off encampment area. That action is what would have prompted questions about whether I actually intended to participate in the protest or was instead trying to disrupt it. (Given that there were a large number of people trying to do the latter, about which I’ll say more below, I can understand why the protesters were suspicious of anyone trying to enter the area that campus security had fenced off around them.)

In other words, I walked right through the alleged “Jew Exclusion Zone,” unimpeded, sometimes by myself and sometimes with a preschooler. Even at the end, during the brief period when campus security people added a second security barrier blocking off essentially the whole quad,[1] including the north side of Powell and the south side of Royce, the other doors to both buildings (east and north sides of Royce, and south side of Powell) remained open, and I would not have had any trouble entering either building if I’d wanted to. Bottom line, there was not an obstruction that actually kept people from entering any campus buildings, let alone one that operated on the basis of ideology—or even more tendentiously, religion.

So… what exactly is going on here? How did this claim arise that some people (specifically, Jews) were being “excluded” from “the heart of campus”? I suppose one could tendentiously define the specific part of the grass that happened to be in the middle of the protest encampment as “the heart of campus” and then complain that one was not being allowed into “the heart of campus” if one were not part of the protest. But that is ridiculous.

I have a small bit of firsthand evidence that that specific ridiculous thing is exactly what happened. Once when I was walking by the protest, on the paved path in front of Royce Hall, I got into a conversation with two people, neither of them UCLA students, who were incensed by the protest. As they worked on articulating their many grievances with the protest, which they viewed as antisemitic, one of them hit upon “They’re blocking me from accessing part of the campus!” I asked what part of the campus, and this person pointed into the middle of the encampment and said: “the center of the quad. I’m not allowed in!”

A series of stunts followed (and indeed surely began before the conversation I happened to be around for). Opponents of the protest tried in various ways to physically breach the barriers and enter the encampment, or to take video of themselves not being allowed in. Sometimes they said things like “let me through, I’m trying to enter the library,” which I assume they said for the benefit of those viewing the video online from places outside of UCLA, because a viewer of the video familiar with the geography of the campus could readily observe that they were not, in fact, being blocked from entering the library, but instead, were being blocked from entering a fenced area in the middle of a grassy quad. They were free to simply walk around that fenced area and enter any campus building they liked. The video did not make this especially obvious to someone unfamiliar with the campus.

The videos did their job though: They led to Fox News interviews, other credulous mainstream news stories, and a predictable—and in my view, entirely understandable—nationwide panic among mostly older Jews across the country that at UCLA, Jews were being excluded from accessing classrooms and other buildings on campus.

This panic was part of a story much larger than UCLA. The encampments which had suddenly become the protest tactic of choice for pro-Palestinian activists for a brief period in spring 2024 set off a complex national political battle; what was going on at UCLA was just one skirmish in it. The national battle was about how to frame what these protest encampments were about. The students doing the protesting argued that their focus was the immorality of Israel’s war in Gaza, which they called a genocide. They were seeking recognition for their claims about the war, and I think it’s fair to say that was the main goal of the protest, notwithstanding their various more specific, and to my mind frankly pretty remote, demands about divestment and so on directed at their actual universities. Those opposing the protest viewed the protesters instead as fundamentally antisemitic—hostile to Israel because of underlying hostility to Jews. Those opponents, too, were seeking recognition for their claims, and that was the main goal of the students who were showing up as counter-protesters. (I leave aside the violent outsiders, unaffiliated with UCLA, who it seems wanted mainly to try to beat up the protesters.) Both of the groups of students included some of our students at UCLA Law School. Indeed both groups included Jewish students at UCLA Law.

Just as the pro-Palestinian protesters picked up the tactic of “let’s set up tents in an encampment” from their counterparts at other schools who had done it first, the pro-Israel counter-protesters picked up the tactic of “let’s argue that Jews are being excluded from entering campus buildings” from their counterparts at other schools who had done it first. It’s straightforward to see why this was a useful tactic. In the usual campus protest narrative, it’s students against campus authorities and/or police authorities, a configuration that suits many protesters just fine, since they view crackdowns as indicative of a story they are trying to tell—in this case, a story about how pro-Palestinian voices have been silenced by various U.S. authorities. In contrast, the “Jew Exclusion Zone” narrative puts the pro-Israel counter-protesters themselves at the absolute center of the action, as victims, and makes the pro-Palestinian protesters seem obviously antisemitic. A real-life “Jew Exclusion Zone” would certainly be antisemitic—and really, would have little to do with the Palestinian cause these encampment protesters wanted their protest to be about, and would pretty obviously serve to undermine it. In that way, the “Jew Exclusion Zone” is quite effective politically as a counter-narrative. I’m certain that’s why the Becket Fund lawyers used the phrase “Jew Exclusion Zone” and why this narrative was irresistible both to them and to the Justice Department lawyers, and thus became the centerpiece of their respective complaints against UCLA, despite what must have been serious worries on the part of at least some of these lawyers (unless they were really drinking their own kool-aid) about whether they could actually sustain the fact claims in an adversarial trial.  

To justify an extraordinary action against a university, one needs to point to some extraordinary failure on the university’s part. The usual run-of-the-mill incidents of bias or offensive speech that any group may experience in nearly any setting are insufficient.  If you read the Becket Fund complaint carefully, it’s pretty clear that what these lawyers actually had was a case of some students finding the speech of other students offensive and distressing. The “Jew Exclusion Zone” narrative achieves the necessary alchemy, recasting that limited material into a major violation of the objecting students’ basic rights as students, such as the right to go to class or to go to the library.

One thing I should be clear about: It’s very possible that at some other school(s) where this claim of exclusion from campus buildings was being made, there was more truth to it. Not the religion-specific version of the claim (since I’d be pretty near certain that on every campus, there were Jews on both sides of these protests, as at UCLA). But leaving the religion-specific part out of it, I’m sure you can find universities where protesters were excluding non-protesters from entering campus buildings. After all, there were places where protesters (borrowing an older tactic from Black radicals half a century earlier, among others) occupied some campus buildings and shut down their usual functions. I am not going to opine about the nitty-gritty specifics of schools where I was not there in person. All I can say is that at UCLA, in that crucial week of April 25 – May 2, 2024, despite a bunch of people complaining to the university and making various videos to support their claim of a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” a claim which is now the central factual predicate for a $1 billion government shakedown, the claim is false.

The actual line being drawn at the encampment entrance—which I watched with my own eyes—was a line between “participants in this specific protest” and “everyone else.” That was not a line in any way dividing Jews from non-Jews. But leave that aside. The even more fundamental problem with the “Jew Exclusion Zone” narrative is geographic: As I repeatedly saw with my own eyes and as I demonstrated with my own feet, as well as those of my 4 year old, the boundaries of the encampment were well-defined, and didn’t block me or other passersby from entering any building, or any part of campus other than the encampment itself.

As an aside, despite a sustained and successful effort to create a media portrayal of the protest as somehow violent, the event was so obviously exclusively peaceful that my partner and I had absolutely zero concerns about walking by the encampment each day with our 4 year old and lingering awhile. And if we had ever wished to make a pit stop in any of the campus buildings mentioned in the lawsuit, nobody from the protest was blocking us—or any other person—from doing so.

It is true that the protesters were suspicious of people trying to come inside the security fencing, and became more so as the days went on. They had good reason to be—and campus security had good reasons for setting up that fencing and later expanding it. To put it simply, UCLA has a campus that is very open to the public, and a lot of people really did not like this encampment protest. So people from outside the university were constantly coming onto campus to harass, intimidate, and sometimes physically assault the protesters. This was not just yelling invective. Somebody released a bag of rats into the encampment. Opponents set up a ten-foot-tall jumbotron with loudspeakers, right outside the security fencing, which played on a loop, 24 hours a day, “footage of the 7 October attacks along with audio clips describing rape and sexual violence in explicit terms,” sometimes alternating with “a maddeningly repetitive children’s song that went viral…when IDF soldiers posted a video of themselves using it as a form of noise torture on captive Palestinians.” I personally saw people hostile to the encampment attempting to get inside—and I was there only very briefly. So, bottom line, it makes sense to me why the protesters in the encampment were suspicious of the intentions of others trying to come in, and it also makes sense to me why campus security wanted some degree of separation. Indeed, if only the campus police had policed their own barrier more adequately, a lot of UCLA students and faculty would not have needed to be hospitalized in the early morning hours of May 1, when a large violent mob of people unaffiliated with UCLA attacked the people in the encampment for hours, “armed with bear mace and other chemical irritants, hammers, knives, stink bombs, high grade fireworks, baseball bats, [and] metal and wooden rods,” physically beating UCLA students and inflicting some serious injuries, as campus police passively looked on.

For more about that night and the days leading up to it, you should read the contemporaneous account in the Forward by David Myers, Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at UCLA. Myers explains that the events in the early hours of May 1 were prefigured by smaller attacks in the preceding days by similar/overlapping groups of adults who came onto campus to disrupt or attack the protest. This is presumably why campus police decided to add more security fencing in the protest’s final days, enlarging the fenced-off area. On April 30, as the situation appeared increasingly combustible, UCLA decided to close both Powell and Royce. At that point, nobody could access the library, which I imagine was quite disruptive for lots of undergraduates, and I certainly sympathize with them. I’m sure people have differing opinions about which side is ultimately responsible for causing that closure, and I’m not going to try to adjudicate that. However, none of this constituted a “Jew Exclusion Zone.”

- - -

How do you give a false claim sufficient truthiness to function as the basis of a billion-dollar shakedown? In the case of the claim about the “Jew Exclusion Zone,” an early step, I think, was for the students opposed to the protest to take their demands for recognition to the university itself, which gave them a sympathetic ear. Students and faculty opposed to the protest (and, no doubt, alumni making angry complaints to the administration about it) must have focused on this particular claim about being excluded from buildings because they got results. UCLA’s then-President, Gene Block, responded to the demand for recognition by stating in an email to the entire campus that “students on their way to class have been physically blocked from accessing parts of the campus.” This quote was interestingly carefully worded. It did not say “Jewish students” and it did not say “buildings” (just “parts of the campus”), which might reflect some uncertainty around those two key details. But carefully worded or not, this statement quickly became the strongest go-to citation for the proposition that there really was a Jew Exclusion Zone—by media reports, by Paul Clement and the Becket Fund, and now most recently by the federal government.

In the aftermath of the disaster (I think both sides agree that UCLA’s handling of the encampment was a disaster; it’s just a question of whether the disaster was not cracking down hard enough on the pro-Palestinian students or whether it was, instead, UCLA’s failure to protect those students from the violent mob of adult outsiders who raided the encampment), UCLA did what universities do. It turned to not one but two faculty committees or “task forces” it had convened months earlier: one on “Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias,” the other on “Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism.”  The antisemitism task force heard the complaints of various Jewish and Israeli students and faculty (mostly those opposed to the protest, but also some with other views), in part through an anonymous survey, and produced a report that recounted them. This report included some claims of Jewish students who said they had been excluded from buildings on campus during the week of the encampment. The report was not the sort of document that would have been produced by a magistrate judge or by a legal body tasked with getting to the truth of things by hearing from both sides (here, those who supported and those who opposed the encampment protest) and evaluating the credibility of their competing claims. Instead it was a document that aimed to collect and summarize the complaints of students, faculty, and staff who felt that they were victims of antisemitism (and/or anti-Israeli bias) on campus. The report became material for the Becket Fund and DOJ complaints against UCLA. The DOJ letter linked above consists heavily of selective quotes from it.

The “Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism” task force, similarly, produced a report that aimed to collect and summarize the complaints of students, faculty, and staff who felt that they were victims of these forms of bias on campus. It too focused a lot on the encampment protest, recounting in some detail the racial slurs and repeated violent attacks by opponents of the protest, which the report situates in a longer arc of the university tolerating “violence against Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students and faculty, and anyone supporting Palestinian rights, including many Jewish students.” The report states that “no buildings were off limits and no classrooms were blocked” by the encampment (which is what I also observed), but states that “rumors circulated on social media about Jewish students being denied access to classrooms,” and that those rumors, along with the viral videos, “played a key role in fomenting the violent counter protest” (p. 9-10). The report notes that “one of the students featured in a viral video where he is asked to go around the encampment is seen in another video with bear spray on his hip. The students were familiar with him because he had participated in some of the nightly attacks on the encampment.” This report, too, was not the sort of document that would have been produced by an adjudicative body judging the credibility of competing accounts. The university had obviously concluded that rather than trying to reach one unified account of what happened at the encampment protest, which may well have been impossible, it would be better to let these two faculty task forces work separately and produce their own, sharply contrasting accounts, whose narratives and specifics reflected what different groups of students, faculty, and staff reported to them. This approach makes sense in terms of university politics, and it’s probably true that reaching a shared sense of reality regarding what happened that week is impossible. But in any event, the fact that the university commissioned these two separate reports was convenient for the Becket Fund—and now for DOJ. They could simply cite the bits of one report that best supported their claims and ignore the other report entirely.

One of the core functions of trial courts is to separate truth from falsehood. They are pretty good at this. But you can evade this function if you avoid or bypass adjudication in court. (Similarly, there are administrative procedures under Title VI that aim to get to the truth through court-like hearings, but the Trump administration has decided it can somehow just dispense with those statutorily required steps.) In the case of the Becket Fund lawsuit, because of the settlement there will not be any trial. It appears that the Becket Fund litigants were pushing on an open door. The university seems not to have done much, if anything, to investigate the allegations in the lawsuit—certainly not what one would expect a defendant to do if they anticipated a trial about the factual claims. I have no inside information, but I imagine the university counsel understood that given the larger political forces in play, and the immense pressure on the university from multiple internal and external sources to give recognition to the claims in the lawsuit, it was overwhelmingly likely that this lawsuit would settle.

However, there was one group of people who did not want to see a settlement in which UCLA paid out millions for “failing to protect” Jewish students by not cracking down harder on the protest: students and faculty who were part of the protest. Some of them have filed their own lawsuits against UCLA for the university’s failure to protect them. Five also moved to intervene in the Becket Fund lawsuit. The intervenors aimed, I think, to object to concessions the university would make in settling that lawsuit that would entrench the narrative that the encampment protest was exclusionary of Jews or antisemitic. According to the lawyer for those five intervenors: “I don’t think I can overstate how thin this case was. As soon as the 5 Proposed Intervenors—four of them Jewish—moved to intervene to defend against the false antisemitism claims and fight for free speech, the parties ran into a private room to settle.”

Cases like this are about much more than law. They are substantially, perhaps even primarily, about politics. If the Becket Fund’s lawsuit were exclusively a legal dispute, UCLA would have investigated the factual claims and I strongly suspect they would have found it relatively straightforward to contest the central allegation at trial. I mean, I’m just a faculty member who walked by a few times; there are many, many witnesses who saw what happened that week in April 2024 and could establish the specific geography of what was where, enough to show a judge that whatever else went on, the “Jew Exclusion Zone” claim at the center of the lawsuit is false. However, I’m not here to impugn UCLA’s decision to settle that lawsuit. The university no doubt wishes to rebuild its relationships with many groups on campus, including the Jewish students and faculty who were the most alarmed and alienated by a protest they believed was antisemitic. I imagine the university viewed the settlement in those terms. News reporting suggests that UC leadership also thought settling the private lawsuit would “buy them time,” and failed to anticipate that the settlement would so immediately add to the extreme peril the university now faces: Within hours of the settlement, the university became the target of a giant extortion scheme by the federal government, which claims to be based on the same facts as the lawsuit the university just paid $6.45 million to settle.

For my part, over the past year I’ve talked to people occasionally about the stuff in this post and I’ve had the odd experience of being told by people who were not there—people who were as far away as Israel at the time—that what I was saying I saw with my own eyes, and where I walked with my own feet, could not possibly be correct, because the person speaking to me has their own reliable and strong reasons to believe there was a “Jew Exclusion Zone” at UCLA in late April 2024. This has been interesting for me. It has caused me to think about some pretty basic epistemological questions. How do we think we know things? How has our system for thinking we know things broken down in this age of social media and viral video? How on earth are we going to survive the less-janky AI video of the future? How can so many people subscribe to the “those I agree with are telling the truth, those I disagree with are lying” school of epistemology?

Indeed, perhaps you, dear reader, are inclined to discount the narrative I have offered here, because you have already formed your own clear view about what happened at UCLA that week in April 2024, on the basis of sources you find reliable. Why should you believe me, over whatever good source you have for believing something else? I don’t have a specific answer, but I do think we all need to think about the answer or answers, as we get deeper into this morass of government actions based on falsehoods in a variety of spheres. You will have to judge my credibility for yourself. My hope in writing this post at such length and with such specific detail is that—not just here but in general—detailed accounts of firsthand experience should count for something. All I can really offer you is the fact that I walked through the supposed “Jew Exclusion Zone” repeatedly, walking right up to specific buildings that the Becket Fund lawsuit says I would have been asked to “disavow Israel” (their quote) in order to reach. I was not asked anything. Like zillions of other people on this campus, some of whom could surely testify if this dispute had ever gone to court—people with every different possible view about Israel—I was simply walking freely around the campus and not trying to bust my way into a protest that I wasn’t participating in.

Now the UC system faces the same accusations from an antagonist with much larger designs to reshape American higher education. The Becket Fund lawyers, I imagine, were happy with UCLA paying out $6.45 million, the vast bulk of which went to Jewish groups on campus and to attorneys’ fees. The federal government has grander ambitions. Its extortion of UCLA is an attack on the entire state of California—as Governor Newsom, to his credit, seems to recognize. What I have described in this post is far from the biggest problem with the government’s extortion scheme. One might begin with the federal government’s flagrant violations of the procedural and substantive requirements of Title VI. (An expanding class action lawsuit over the cancelled grants by UCLA researchers has won several early victories, but it remains to be seen to what extent legal process can catch up with extralegal federal-government extortion.) An equally large problem is the content of the federal government’s demands, at UCLA and elsewhere, many of which have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic of antisemitism, making it pretty obvious that “antisemitism” is a cynical pretext. Still, pretext or not, the events of that week at the end of April 2024 are what the government is offering publicly as its primary justification for its extraordinary actions. The government claims to be enforcing a civil rights complaint. And so I am left with this question, and it is a genuine question: How much, if at all, does it matter that the central factual allegation at the heart of that complaint is false?