SXSW Festival Rejects the U.S. Army

Plus, new Hillel rabbi calls Harvard leadership “too timid,” after anti-bias training attracts “zero attendees”

A performance at SXSW in 2023. Photo by Patrick Quiring courtesy SXSW.

If, as Andrew Breitbart used to say, politics is downstream from culture, the most significant news of the week may not relate to tonight’s presidential debate but rather may be the announcement by the Austin, Texas, SXSW music and tech festival that it will refuse sponsorship from the U.S. Army for the March 2025 festival.

“After careful consideration, we are revising our sponsorship model. As a result, the US Army, and companies who engage in weapons manufacturing, will not be sponsors of SXSW 2025,” a statement posted to the SXSW website says.

An article in Rolling Stone, which has common ownership with SXSW by Penske Media Corporation, links the decision to musician protests:

In March, acts like Kneecap, Scowl, Squirrel Flower, Eliza McLamb, Shalom, and Mamalarky all withdrew from SXSW due to the fest being in part sponsored by the U.S. Army. “I am pulling out specifically because of the fact that SXSW is platforming defense contractors including Raytheon subsidiaries as well as the US Army, a main sponsor of the festival,” Squirrel Flower’s Ella Williams wrote on Instagram at the time.

Wikipedia says Williams, 27, grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts, and attended Grinnell College. 

A retired admiral who was the supreme allied commander of NATO, James Stavridis, criticized the decision. “Short-sighted and foolish move by @SXSW. You can’t be a serious tech festival without including defense. DoD invented the internet, much of space tech, nuclear power, a thousand other tech innovations,” Stavridis, who is vice chair of The Carlyle Group, said in a social media post.

This is such an amazing and classic example of how the people who hate Israel also hate America. It’s not Israeli government sponsorship the festival is rejecting, which would be bad enough; it’s the U.S. Army. That’s the U.S. Army that is protecting America and our allies from dangerous enemies, and defending freedom and democracy, around the world. That’s the Army Army that is an engine of opportunity and upward mobility for so many soldiers and military families or all backgrounds. The Army that is protecting these musicians and the city of Austin Texas from being invaded and taken over by civilizations and societies that have far less tolerant views.

This is a real test for all the big tech, finance, and media companies whose presence helps support SXSW. If SXSW won’t take the Army’s money, or RTX’s money, will Apple, Meta, the New York Times, Disney, NPR, Goldman Sachs, and Microsoft still show up in force? Or will they say, justifiably, that SXSW is free to dishonor the U.S. military and our defense industrial base, but we’re going to choose to take our own marketing dollars and mindshare elsewhere, to institutions that aren’t hostile to American values? It’s a watershed moment.

Rabbi Wolpe on the anti-Israel mob: Rabbi David Wolpe has an article in the Jewish Journal about his experiences during a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School. He makes the point about the confluence of anti-Israel and anti-American beliefs:

For the zealots, hostility to the West was an animating force. In an unconscious echo of the leaders of Iran, some of the protesters would shout “down with America” with the same Che Gueveran gusto that they shouted “down with Israel.” The Mephistophelian pairing — little Satan and big Satan — is back, not from the Supreme Leader of a rogue nation in the Middle East, but from students, some of whom had grown up in the Middle East, and others of whom, it pains me inexpressibly to say, grew up in synagogues in Scarsdale.

The whole article is worth a look if you can stand it. Not much new in terms of the basics but some interesting detail, color, and texture.

New Harvard Hillel executive calls Harvard leadership “too timid”: Speaking of Harvard rabbis, the new executive director of Harvard Hillel, Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, is establishing himself with authority in his new role.

In a June 27, 2024 letter to Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, Rubenstein writes, “Harvard has a serious and recalcitrant antisemitism problem that, left unresolved, will further damage the campus roadmap for all students, faculty, and staff.”

“Senior administration remains too decentralized, too distracted, and too timid to take the decisive action that is needed,” the letter says,

The letter reports that an optional student training on antisemitism and anti-bias education that was offered this spring at Harvard attracted “zero attendees.” That demonstrates the need to make the training mandatory, the letter says.

“We asked in December for a single point of contact for these issues who could communicate and align efforts across schools and departments, but this was not done. As a result, the inevitably disjointed and uneven response to incidents has made students feel concerning lack of trust and perceive that the administration will not or cannot protect them,” says the letter, which was also signed by Hillel’s board co-chairs, Adina Astor and Lavea Brachman.

The letter identified two other substantive issues, admissions and security.

On admissions, it said, “Like the orchestra and athletic teams, Harvard needs a critical mass of students from diverse backgrounds to ensure a vibrant Jewish community on campus. We want to partner with Admissions to identify, attract, and matriculate these students,”

On security, the letter said Harvard Hillel spends $250,000 a year, or more than 10 percent of its annual fundraising, on security. “In contrast, Yale and Princeton provide for the vast majority of their Jewish community’s security costs, and Harvard should follow suit, protecting its Jewish students.”

In a separate letter, Rubenstein described the recommendations issued by a Harvard antisemitism task force as “incomplete.” 

A former student president of Harvard Hillel, Jacob Miller, described the task force recommendations as “anodyne, toothless, and timid. He said they “could’ve been written by ChatGPT” and noted that the task force “couldn’t even bring themselves to say the word ‘Zionist.’”

Leave it to Harvard to accomplish the formidable task of naming and staffing an antisemitism task force that manages to make the key Jews around the university unhappy. How clumsy can a university administration possibly be?

This was clear from the start with interim president Alan Garber’s poor decision to name Derek Penslar as a co-chairman of the task force and Garber’s equally poor decision to stick with Penslar rather than taking the reaction that it was a poor decision. The encouraging thing is that Harvard is blessed with Chabad and Hillel leaders with the clarity and judgment—”steely dedication,” as Rubenstein aptly put it—to hold Harvard accountable and demand improvement.

Chenault campaigns for Biden: Meanwhile, a Harvard Corporation member, Kenneth Chenault, tells the New Republic that he’s been telling other CEOs that Trump poses “an existential threat” to democracy. 

Former Harvard president Larry Summers tweeted that news out. That’s the same Ken Chenault who, with two other Harvard Corporation members, donated to the campaign of Trump-prosecuting Alvin Bragg for district attorney, the same Ken Chenault who visited the Biden White House on February 27, 2024.

Chenault might want to read Ruy Teixeira over at the The Liberal Patriot, in a piece headlined, “No, Democracy Is Not on the Ballot”: 

democracy does not appear to be the mega-salient issue the Biden campaign is envisioning. What makes the apparent drive to center the issue in the Biden campaign even less understandable is that the issue, as an issue, does not even cut very much in Biden’s direction unlike, say, abortion rights or health care. This is because preserving/defending democracy means different things to different voters; many voters don’t see the choice between Biden and Trump on the issue as blindingly obvious. They don’t, as the Democratic faithful would have it, believe Biden = democracy and Trump = fascism. Many see Trump as their paladin and view Biden and the Democrats as privileging the interests and preferences of their supporters, especially educated elites, in a distinctly non-democratic way…

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Biden and his campaign are unduly influenced by what they believe should be true rather than what is true. They see Trump as an unspeakably evil man who is an existential threat to democracy and can’t imagine why that view wouldn’t be everybody’s and drive their vote inexorably toward Biden. But it isn’t and the sooner they realize that, the better their chances of actually beating the Bad Orange Man.

Kinky Friedman: Speaking of politics being downstream of culture, and of Texas music, I was saddened to hear of the death of Kinky Friedman, the country singer and mystery novel writer whose work I enjoyed. He never took himself too seriously and he was a breath of creative fresh air against the stultifying conformity of political correctness. Among Friedman’s signature songs is “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore.”

He ran for governor of Texas in 2006; Matt Labash wrote about it for the Weekly Standard, describing Friedman as “politically incorrect” and quoting Friedman as saying, “I’m a dealer in hope.”

Labash also recounts how he proposed a “Five Mexican Generals border plan (paying Mexican generals to keep illegals on their side, withdrawing money from their accounts when illegals make it through). ‘It’s a joke,’ he says, ‘but a joke that’s a good idea.’”

Thank you: At The Editors, we’d happily accept sponsorship from the U.S. Army or any weapons manufacturers who are interested. Until such sponsorships materialize, we are supported by readers like you. Please become a paying subscriber and support our editorial independence and continued growth. Like the late Kinky Friedman, we are dealers in hope, and like Rabbi Rubenstein, we try to bring the steely dedication.