Austin Franco, the Cornell University junior who went viral for antisemitic remarks, now claims he is a campus celebrity despite widespread ostracism from fellow students.
Franco, who hails from Virginia, told The Post this week that his semester has been “pleasant” and that he has “been asked for my autograph and made new friends.” He even claimed students have called him “hot,” “cute” and “giga based,” styling himself as a sex symbol on the upstate New York campus.
The 21-year-old senior Ezra Galperin offered a starkly different account of Franco’s social standing. “It’s pretty clear that everyone’s turned against him,” Galperin said. Galperin, who penned an Aug. 28 op-ed for The Cornell Daily Sun titled “Austin Franco and Us,” also wrote that “this isn’t a case of some kid saying something stupid for attention.” In his piece, Galperin noted that Franco “had multiple opportunities to apologize” but instead “invoked physiognomy, which is widely considered a pseudoscience” and “defended his remarks before millions of people on ‘Piers Morgan Uncensored.'”
The Cornell Daily Sun editorial board itself slammed Franco in a Tuesday op-ed called “Franco’s Run Around the Media,” calling him a “grifter” who is “profiting off of performative outrage.” The piece declared that “hate favors hate” and that “grifter culture — profiting off of performative outrage — feeds off hate,” adding that “Cornell has become a flash point for grift.”
Franco’s recent online activity has continued to generate controversy. On Aug. 17, he posted a black and white photo of American school children doing the Bellamy salute in 1941 during the Pledge of Allegiance, a gesture abandoned because it mirrors the Nazi salute. “Bring back the Bellamy salute,” Franco wrote. On Sept. 8, he posted another rant declaring that “White men need to organize outside the system and build their own fraternities.” He claimed that “Cornell Admissions, not accounting for Jews and legacies, accepts around 3% straight White men at best (I have only met one in my entire time at Cornell). Most of the so-called Whites all have crypto-Jew last names or are mixed blood.” Franco later said he derived the 3% figure from his own calculations using publicly disclosed Ivy League demographics.
One student, speaking anonymously to The Post, described Franco sitting alone in class and receiving “dirty looks” since returning for his junior year.
Sofia Eliasi, an 18-year-old sophomore, connected Franco’s presence on campus to broader institutional questions. “I think his enrollment at Cornell raises a much larger question about how universities are responding to antisemitism,” she said. “When someone repeatedly makes and then defends and doubles down upon antisemitic statements and subsequently returns to that community, I think that there’s no question that students will have concerns about the standards that the community purports to uphold.”
Franco’s notoriety originated from his refusal to work for a startup founded by Jewish brothers Aiden and Gabe Einhorn. When offered a position at their real estate platform VyrfID, which has since relaunched as Nessoo, Franco declared he was “not interested in working for a Jew.” The remark ignited a media firestorm and made Franco a national figure in debates over campus antisemitism.
Amid the fallout, Franco has faced significant personal consequences. He was recently removed from his parents’ $1.75 million Virginia home. Yet he has also monetized his infamy, collecting nearly $40,000 across two separate GiveSendGo fundraisers.
The Einhorn brothers have largely shifted focus back to their business. “The hate was for a couple of days, but the amount of people that reached out wanting to support us, introduce us to landlords, brokers, and property managers has been very positive,” Gabe Einhorn said.