Americans are watching in horror as thousands of real students led like sheep by “students” who happen to be professional organizers of protest demonstrations take over campuses, issue endless demands to intimidate spineless administrators, plant tent cities and create the kind of hate-filled environment not seen since Hitler’s Brown Shirts.
But how much more horrified would Americans be if they all knew how much of their hard-earned tax dollars are going to the elite colleges like Columbia, Harvard, and Yale where the anti-semitic gangs are most visible?
Thanks to Adam Andrzejewski and Open the Books, the facts are front and center, including the reality that the total amount in checks written by the U.S. Treasury and sent to these elite campuses exceeds the income the schools receive in tuition payments. Andrzejewski laid it all out in an April 19 interview on The National Desk that you can watch here.
If you aren’t already familiar with Open the Books, you are missing one of the crown jewels of the transparency in government movement that began way back in 1966 with passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and which shifted into high gear with the advent of the Internet.
A big reason for that shift into high gear was passage of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, co-sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). The FFATA required the federal government to create an internet site — now known as USASpending.gov — that would make available to every citizen with access to the Internet an abundance of details of most federal spending.
But as valuable as the FOIA and USASpending.gov have proven to be, they are far from perfect. The biggest flaw with the FOIA is the fact no federal employee has ever gone to jail for violating that law. And because USASpending is managed by federal politicians and bureaucrats, it is subject to political manipulation, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reported, including simply not making spending data available that the law says must be public.
These are just two of the biggest reasons why Open the Books is the most important development ever in the continuing campaign to, as Andrzejewski’s non-profit puts it, make “every dime online in real-time.” To that end, Open the Books maintains a federal spending database that captures trillions of dollars going out the door, plus state and local government spending and mountains of data on public pensions across the country.
No wonder it was Open the Books that first told America Columbia University, which has seemed like ground-zero of the anti-semitic Pro-Palestinian riots and demonstrations, has received $5.8 billion from the federal government since 2018. Included in that total was a $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to “de-colonize” the earth sciences.
And oh by the way, Columbia’s endowment went from $10.5 billion to $13.3 billion during the same period.
Rather than take the obvious measures of physically removing the protestors tents, expelling every genuine student participating in demonstrations calling for the destruction of Israel and the death of Jews, and pressing criminal trespassing charges against the protest organizers, Columbia University administrators have cancelled regular classes and convened virtual ones through the end of the semester.
The same administrators continue to engage in laughable “negotiations” with these fanatics, more than a few of whom openly espouse Hamas, the terrorist group that massacred more than 1,200 Israeli men, women and children on October 7,, 2023.
Other elite schools allowing these hatefests against Jews are also recipients of massive cash flows courtesy of the taxpayers, according to the data made public by Open the Books. Yale got $3.1 billion and Harvard $2.7 billion since 2018. Pretty much any of the top schools, public and private, you can think of got big bucks from the taxpayers and most are turning out legions of students who know nothing but critical theory agit-prop.
One more thing: Guess who is funding the professional agitators leading these anti-semitic hatefests? The George Soros-funded Students for Justice in Palestine is the leading source, according to the New York Post.