Columbia University’s billionaire donors are divided on whether they should continue funneling money into the Ivy League school.

Ultra-wealthy benefactors like New York Patriots owner Robert Kraft announced he is pulling financial support to his alma mater over the anti-Israel protests that are unfolding on campus. Kraft also started the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (FCAS). Kraft’s net worth is over $11 billion, as tracked by Forbes. 

Another graduate, billionaire industrialist Len Blavatnik, who also has a history of giving significant amounts of money to philanthropy, told FOX Business that the school’s “leadership must take immediate steps to ensure that Jewish students are protected from threats and intimidation, and that those who violate their policies are held to account.” Blavatnik has a net worth of over $31 billion, as tracked by Forbes. 

Blavatnik didn’t confirm if he was suspending his giving. However, sources told The New York Post he might also consider pulling back on his donations.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MOVES TO HYBRID LEARNING ON MAIN CAMPUS AMID ANTISEMITIC PROTESTS

The school started losing donors shortly after the war kicked off in early October after Hamas terrorists stormed Gaza in a surprise attack, killing over 1,100 Israelis and kidnapping over 200, some of whom remain hostages.  

During an interview with Liz Claman on “The Claman Countdown” on Oct. 26, 2023, Columbia University graduate, billionaire investor and Omega Advisors CEO Leon Cooperman pledged to suspend his giving.

“I think these kids at the colleges have sh*t for brains” Cooperman told Claman. “I’ve given to Columbia probably about $50 million over many years,” he continued. “And I’m going to suspend my giving. I’ll give my giving to other organizations.” 

This week, he told CNBC, he was “uncomfortable” with what is going on at the school but declined to elaborate on future donations. He did say he plans to support Columbia’s business school “when they solicit” him. 

Cooperman’s net worth neared $3 billion, per Forbes. 

In recent weeks and months, there has been an onslaught of anti-war protests not only at Columbia but other college campuses, including New York University, University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor and Yale, as tensions over the war in the Middle East continue to rise.

Pro-Palestinian students around the nation are condemning the assault on Gaza, which has resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths. But some Jewish students say there has been a rise in antisemitism. Some students at Columbia have recently told FOX News that they no longer feel physically safe. 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT ORDERS VIRTUAL CLASSES AS ANTI-ISRAEL PROTESTS TAKE OVER: ‘WE NEED A RESET’

At Columbia’s New York City campus, there has been “too many examples of intimidating and harassing behavior” including antisemitic language, the school– which was forced to switch to hybrid learning for the rest of the semester — said in a statement.

 Protestors initially formed an encampment — setting up tents and refusing to leave— on the campus last week. More than 100 demonstrators who had been camped out on the campus were arrested, according to The Associated Press. 

The protesters marched in and around the campus demanding the school lose affiliations with groups that support Israel.

“There is a terrible conflict raging in the Middle East with devastating human consequences. I understand that many are experiencing deep moral distress and want Columbia to help alleviate this by taking action. We should be having serious conversations about how Columbia can contribute,” the school wrote in a statement. 

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

However, the school continued, saying that there are many views and “we cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view.”

FOX Business’ Greg Norman contributed to this report. 

Read More 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is preparing to vote Thursday on reinstating net neutrality regulations for the internet, which a new report warns could cause a slowdown in the pace of internet speed increases and price improvements seen in the years since net neutrality’s repeal.

The FCC, which currently has a majority of Democrat appointees under the Biden administration, is planning to bring back net neutrality rules that allow the agency to regulate broadband internet access as a telecommunications service. That would return the FCC’s framework for regulating the internet to what the Obama administration put in place in 2015, which was later rolled back by the Trump administration in 2017 under a framework that classified the internet as an information service.

A Committee to Unleash Prosperity report notes the gains in internet speed and cost decreases that occurred in the wake of the Trump-era deregulation as well as the increased investment by internet service providers. 

“If the Biden administration can look at the experience of broadband in the last seven years and declare it a bad thing, something that needs to be reversed, there’s really no regulation that they would ever dislike and no deregulation that they would ever like, because this is about the most stunning success possible, and yet they’re going to reverse it,” Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, told FOX Business.

FORMER FCC HEAD AJIT PAI BLASTS NET NEUTRALITY VOTE AS ‘COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME’

The report found that median internet download speeds for wired internet connections increased by a factor of 5.8 between 2017 and 2023, while wireless speeds increased by a factor of 8.7. 

Although the report acknowledges that download speeds would have improved over time even under the net neutrality regulatory framework, the U.S. rose in speedtest.net’s average national download speed rankings from 45th in the world in 2017 to 16th in 2022, while the median speed ranking for the U.S. improved from 22nd to 15th between 2022 and 2023.

It also analyzed price changes for wired broadband and wireless internet, which declined by about 15% and 28%, respectively, from 2016 to 2022. For comparison, from 2010, when the Obama administration first proposed regulating the internet as a utility, to 2016, wired broadband prices declined 9% and wireless declined 22%.

NEW FCC RULES REQUIRE ‘NUTRITION LABELS’ FOR HIGH-SPEED INTERNET PLANS

The report noted that those positive results ran counter to the narrative advanced by net neutrality’s proponents as the Trump-era FCC moved to undo that regulation. 

“The predictions that were made when the deregulation was proposed in the beginning of the Trump administration where [that] this was going to be some kind of an apocalypse and the ‘end of the internet as we know it,’ things were going to load one word at a time,” Kerpen said.

“We don’t have to hypothesize or guess about what will happen because we’ve run the experiment now the last seven years, and if it was the end of the internet as we knew it, it was only because it got so much faster and so much cheaper – basically the opposite of everything that they said would happen,” he added.

FCC COMMISSIONER SAYS TIKTOK A ‘CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER’ TO US NATIONAL SECURITY

Kerpen also took issue with the FCC’s assertion in advancing its reinstatement of net neutrality rules that any disincentives for private investment by internet companies caused by the return of that regulatory framework will be offset by a $65 billion subsidy program from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

“This is just kind of an insane way to think about things. I mean if you’re going to subsidize something with taxpayer money, you want to get the most for that money that you possibly can,” he said. “You want the incentives to be strong for private money to come in as well.”

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

“The investment effect will certainly be negative, and I think that’s a big part of why we saw what we did,” Kerpen added. “When you get deregulation and incentives for a strong, competitive market, you get investments in higher speeds. I don’t think we would’ve seen the [five-times] jump in wired speeds and [eight-times] jump in wireless speeds if we hadn’t had the deregulation.”

Read More 

Electric vehicles are often touted as the green alternative to gas-powered vehicles, but one expert believes that if people knew the truth about EVs, they would think twice before purchasing one. 

Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA operations officer and host of the podcast “The Wright Report,” told Fox News Digital that electric vehicles pose environmental problems, national security issues and compromise the safety of drivers, making them a less than desirable alternative to gas-powered vehicles.

Wright said that one of the most important things to consider when buying an electric vehicle is whether they are actually green. It is his belief that they are actually quite “dirty.” Starting with their batteries, he explained that thousands of pounds of minerals, including cobalt, lithium and nickel from all around the world have to first be extracted.

The Congo is the source of 70% of the world’s cobalt. Of that, about a third come from miners who are “mostly kids,” Wright said.

CAR DEALERS THROW COLD WATER ON ELECTRIC VEHICLES VERSUS GAS OPTIONS: ‘I WOULDN’T FEEL SAFE’

“That is a horrific thing, imagining these child miners pulling this stuff out of the ground to make our green cars go, but that is true,” he said. “Also, we know about the 19 cobalt mines in the Congo, 15 of them are controlled by the Chinese government or a Chinese entity.”

Lithium mostly comes from Australia, but a large amount also comes from the Atacama Desert in South America, also known as the lithium triangle, Wright said. The lithium mining process is problematic for the region because the land is extraordinarily dry, but the lithium extraction requires large amounts of water, requiring about 500,000 gallons needed to produce a single ton, he explained. 

Because water is such a coveted resource in the region, Wright said it has caused tension in the region between governments, mining companies, and local, especially indigenous people, about how the water should be used. 

“We are removing the one critical resource by a lot of those indigenous folks down there, so we can have our green and clean car,” he said.

Nickel, which is also vital to EV battery production, primarily comes from Indonesia and is extracted using sulfuric acid, but he said the way the metal is mined poses environmental problems.

There are two different approaches to mining nickel, one involves an energy-intensive process that requires coal-fired furnaces, which he said is damaging to the Indonesian environment and its people and the second is through chemical extraction using sulphuric acid. Once you’ve finished mining for nickel, it needs to be disposed of either in tailing ponds or dried and stacked both of which pose environmental problems. 

Just through the extraction process, he explained, there is the exploitation of child labor and environmental damage. But then, the minerals are sent to China, where about 80% of the batteries’ raw materials are refined.

“But that’s just the beginning,” Wright said. “We haven’t even gotten into the car to start to drive.”

“So imagining we get into that car, we have a few different concerns,” he continued. “First, we’ve got a national security concern, that car is basically a computer on wheels. So as that thing drives, it’s going to both get things downloaded to it or you’re going to upload stuff to whatever your car manufacturer might be. That opens up a major vector to be hacked or otherwise controlled.”

While Wright said that might sound impossible or unlikely, he pointed to a move by Ford Motor Company last March when the company filed for a patent that would use self-driving capabilities to repossess a vehicle if an owner becomes delinquent on their loan. He warned that in the future, people might not actually be in control of their vehicle, leaving them at the mercy of hackers or their car company.

Wright also said China owns the EV industry and the “dirty green world.”

“We know that they own a lot of the mines — whether it be nickel or cobalt in places like Africa, India, Indonesia — they control about 80% of the refining of those minerals for the batteries,” he said. 

APPEALS COURT CLEARS THE WAY FOR CALIFORNIA TO SET ITS OWN ZERO EMISSION STANDARDS

“But then if you start looking at the manufacturing, what Beijing has done is they are subsidizing the companies that create these vehicles,” and “because they’ve got those subsidies, they can create really, really cheap cars,” he added. 

Wright said the Chinese Communist Party is subsidizing the EV companies because they’re trying to de-industrialize Europe and the United States.

“They’re trying to crash our economies by flooding the market with very, very cheap products so that we can’t compete, whether that be because of our labor costs or environmental rules or otherwise,” he said. “We are already seeing this, as a lot of Chinese companies are now moving their production to Mexico to try to then flood the North American market.”

Wright said the U.S. is going to lose some of its own manufacturing plants if the government doesn’t either impose tariffs on Chinese EVs or block them from entering the U.S. market through Mexico. 

“It is just one more reason why it’s crazy to allow China to engage in the world economy in the way that we do,” he said. “China absolutely is dominating this industry, and they will continue from batteries to solar panels to these EVs, and you will watch factories in this country shut down because of it.”

Wright also said coal powers EV production in China and pointed out that the nation uses slave labor in regions like Xinjiang and elsewhere.

“You’ve got people who are living in concentration camps forced to build out the infrastructure for these EVs,” he said. “We should stand up and say that it’s wrong. We should block this stuff from ever coming into the United States.”

“We need to be pointing out the hypocrisy of, gosh, we’re creating dirty green EVs using coal or cobalt from the Congo and child labor, but it’s also true that they’re using concentration camp labor,” he said. “All of this has to be a part of the conversation for when people walk into that dealership. What am I really buying?”

HYBRID VEHICLE SALES REVVING UP AS EV DEMAND SPUTTERS

In addition to the fact that EVs are a national security concern, Wright said they have also proven to be less safe on the road and more expensive to maintain when compared to their gas-powered counterparts. 

“Now we’re driving down the road, nobody’s hacked us yet, and we have a couple of other concerns to think about,” he said. “One, this [EV] car is very heavy. Much, much heavier than a traditional vehicle and that means that your tires are gonna wear down about 20% faster than a gas-powered vehicle. That’s going to cause more damage, obviously, for your pocketbook as you have to replace your tires. It’s also going to cause a lot more damage for the roads and the bridges.”

Wright also said EVs are a lot more dangerous than a gas-powered vehicle or diesel-powered vehicle, simply because of the weight of the batteries. He explained that EVs are so much heavier than gas-powered cars, that there is up to a 47% higher chance of a driver dying if they crash an EV or are hit by an EV, according to data from the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Despite increasing EV criticism, the Biden White House has continually touted electric vehicles as the way forward, releasing a fact sheet on Wednesday that announced public and private commitments to support America’s historic transition to electric vehicles. President Biden plans to have 50% of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030. The administration states the commitment by the government and private companies will “spur domestic manufacturing, strengthen supply chains, boost U.S. competitiveness and create good-paying jobs.”

But, Wright believes the U.S. should be wary of EVs and the national security risk they pose if China is allowed to dominate the industry.

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

“At the end of the day, EVs are not just about the environment, it’s about national security, and if we allow China to dominate this industry, as we have, and then allow them to flood our markets … this is going to not just be a problem about climate change, this is going to be an economic disaster, and we need to be honest and talk about it,” he said. “So I sure hope that that’s why folks understand why I’m so interested in it, why I’m so passionate about it.”

“As a former CIA officer, I care about national security and this is one of those vectors where Beijing is using it to try to weaken us and ultimately destroy us, and while we can be agnostic, like it or not, in terms of the EV infrastructure or the cars themselves, there is a national security component to this, and we need to talk about that,” he said.

Read More