Reasserting White Privilege

Claudine Gay, Ex-President of Harvard: A Hit Job By Three White Men

This was not about congressional testimony or plagiarism; this was powerful white men getting their way… just because they can

Three white mice. They are not blind mice. They are certainly not blind to race. They are men who look in the mirror each day and smile, knowing they are masters of the universe because of what they see in the mirror: a white face.

Claudine Gay, a Black woman, resigned as President of Harvard after just six months on the job. Why? The answer to that question is not the simplistic one you heard, allegations of insensitivity to antisemitism plus allegations of plagiarism. No, that is not why she is out.

White men with money and influence said she had to go. So, she is gone.

Why didn’t she stick around and put up more of a fight against the openly orchestrated hit-job against her?

I suspect the fact she also was being harassed with doxxing trucks parked outside her home, receiving death threats such that her home had to be watched by police 24/7, and being called the N-word may have played a role in her decision.

A Black woman in a powerful position has to not only be better than everyone else at everything — and don’t you dare neglect to put quotation marks around a quote like white academicians get away with — but she also has to face accusations that she only got her job because she is a Black woman (i.e. “reverse racism” against whites) and didn’t really earn it.

In an opinion piece she wrote for the New York Times, Claudine Gay said:

My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.

In her resignation letter, she said:

… it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

She is being polite.

Rest assured, I am not inclined to be so polite.

The originator of BS about CRT strikes again

Christopher Rufo was the political activist who single-handedly launched the crusade against “CRT” being taught in K-12. He was not stupid. He was quite the little genius white mouse.

Rufo knew that a large swath of white Americans had no idea what “critical race theory” was — they still don’t — and therefore, he could define his boogeyman in whatever way he pleased. He defined it as a monstrous construct of lies that was part of a grand liberal conspiracy to indoctrinate children, all of it meant to make white people “look bad.”

Hey Chris, white people like you are doing plenty good enough job of making white people “look bad.”

With such grand success through his mischaracterization of CRT, using it as a gateway to ban books and criminalize any teaching of any versions of Black history that certain white mice didn’t like, he has moved on to his next alphabet soup play: DEI.

“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” is an obvious good thing, by its very definition. So, Rufo was going to need some help going after this one.

Enter a very wealthy white mouse to back him up.

DEI and the bogus cry of “reverse racism!”

Bill Ackman is a billionaire hedge fund manager, or to put it another way, an entitled white man who is very attached to his white privilege. He is a major donor to Harvard, and since money talks in America, he perhaps played the biggest role of the three in pressuring Harvard to pressure Claudine Gay to resign.

I am going to provide a link to a Tweet — or an X-marks-the-crap or whatever the hell you are supposed to call it — from Bill Ackman. It is lengthy. It is full of mischaracterizations of DEI, including comparing DEI to McCarthyism — the irony would be funny if it weren’t so idiotic. However, I always cite my sources — ahem, unlike Bill Ackman’s white wife in her doctoral dissertation, but more on that later — so I provide the link even though it is a link to propagandistic double-speak garbage. You are welcome to peruse his ramblings if you like.

Here is the link. I want to quote a couple of things from it. Ackman says:

DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out).

I have a big problem with complaints of “reverse racism” against white people because it is intellectually dishonest. Can people be prejudiced against white people? Of course. You can be prejudiced against a ham sandwich if you like. “Racism,” however, is about power dynamics: who has power and who does not.

The white billionaire Bill Ackman had power and exercised it. The Black woman Claudin Gay did not have power.

See how that works?

So, stop whining about this myth of reverse racism — something that never has and never will bite you in your billionaire white-privileged derriere Ackman, because it doesn’t exist!

Also, by the way, stop holding up as a hero a white kid who shot people protesting against Black people being shot, because that does kinda sound like racism! Ackman called Rittenhouse “a civic-minded patriot.” Oh, your unbearable whiteness of being is showing there, Ackman.

I digress. Back to DEI.

Ackman said this:

Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged.

Spoken like a white mouse who has not walked one goddamn day in my shoes, let alone Claudine Gay’s shoes.

Money buys being held to account for “plagiarism” … or not, depending on …

Does the name Paul Singer ring any bells for you? Is that a name that you think to yourself, “I know I’ve heard that name before, but…”

I stumbled upon him in the context of this story quite unexpectedly.

You see, this whole plagiarism thing intrigued me. Initially, I fell for it like many liberals; we heard that Claudine Gay had committed plagiarism, and so, being the “play-by-the-rules” folk that we are, many of us jumped ship and abandoned her.

Still, it nagged at me. Something didn’t add up. After all, doesn’t Harvard check for that sort of thing?

Who found the plagiarism and publicized it coincidentally just in time to be extra public pressure to force her out of her job?

Answer: Free Beacon. Yeah, I know, you probably never heard of it (at least not if you read my stuff, i.e., are likely a liberal). It is an ultra-conservative online news site. It was the first to break the story of her plagiarism.

The primary funder of Free Beacon is billionaire Paul Singer.

Do you know what else Paul Singer is famous for? He was the billionaire who supplied Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito with the private jet flight to a luxury fishing trip to Alaska. According to the article in ProPublica, in 2014, SCOTUS weighed in on a case involving Singer’s hedge fund and Alito did not recuse himself from the case. SCOTUS ruled in Singer’s favor in that case. As a result of the ruling, his hedge fund was paid $2.4 billion.

Damn, but it must be nice to be a powerful white man, hanging out with other powerful men, as y’all rule the world, eh?

So, Paul Singer’s Free Beacon publicized the “plagiarism” that ultimately brought down Claudine Gay.

That is a tough word, plagiarism. It calls up terrible dishonesty in your mind, doesn’t it?

Just like condoning antisemitism sounds pretty terrible too, doesn’t it?

The ability to have an intellectual discussion that requires nuance is dead in the American media ecosystem. In her congressional testimony, Ms. Gay did not condone antisemitism but rather made an academic argument regarding issues of freedom of expression on campus and the pitfalls that could arise in attempts to police speech at protests. That made her an easy target for Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik to secure a dumbed-down gotcha sound bite.

Likewise, plagiarism is not a simple thing. A fascinating article by Andrew Lawrence in the Guardian explores this. In his article it is noted:

It was through AI that the inconsistencies in Gay’s scholarship were found. In some works, Gay credits a source in the wrong sentence. In others, she borrows language that even those who were ostensibly plagiarized accept as common phrasing within their field of study. “I am not at all concerned about the passages,” said the political science professor David Canon, whose work the Washington Free Beacon accused Gay of plagiarizing. “This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.” (emphasis added)

Susan Blum, a professor of linguistic anthropology at Notre Dame…

… takes exception to what she calls “plagiarism fundamentalism”, the idea that every thought should be completely original — which runs counter to a human nature to mimic.

While I initially frowned at the news that Claudine had engaged in “plagiarism,” it turns out she did what all academic types do at some point or another, whether it is improper citation, or failure to place quotation marks or any number of other errors that creep in that do not have anything to do with stealing ideas.

Claudine Gay did not steal any ideas and pretend they were her own.

She was just a Black woman in power who failed to be perfect, and for that, a Black woman gets taken down.

What if you are a white man who is less than perfect? That article in the Guardian also noted this interesting bit of info:

… the Harvard Law alum Neil Gorsuch… was exposed for lifting sections of his 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia from a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal.

And what if you are a white woman? Better yet, a white woman married to a white billionaire? An article in Business Insider revealed that Bill Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her doctoral dissertation in 2010. She became a tenured professor at MIT in 2017.

Bill Ackman is now demanding Claudine Gay (Black woman) be removed from the faculty of Harvard because of her plagiarism. Naturally, he is not calling for the removal of his wife (white woman) from the faculty of MIT.

Oh, and by the way, Bill Ackman is now going after Business Insider for going after his wife, wielding the hefty weight of his very white money, white influence, and white power.

Who has power and who does not

I had initially shrugged my shoulders at the Claudine Gay story.

I had rolled my eyes at her not being smart enough to realize that the congressional hearing on antisemitism on campuses was just baiting a trap, and she rather stupidly walked right into that trap.

Then there was talk of plagiarism, and I accepted it at face value as true.

So, I wrote her off. Many liberals did.

Then I heard about Christopher Rufo bragging — openly — about the hit job he had orchestrated against Claudine Gay.

In an interview with Politico, Rufo said this:

The reason that I announced my strategy in advance is both to demoralize my opponents — and it certainly does a good job at that — but also to teach my potential friends and allies how the game works. Machiavelli wrote The Prince not to teach people who already knew the principles of how power works, but to teach people who need to know … So I tried to publicly narrate what I’m doing in order to teach my friends how to do it themselves. I think that this is a big service — with the added benefit that it demoralizes and deranges my enemies. (emphasis added)

He is pleased about how well he “demoralizes and deranges” his enemies.

Who are “his enemies?”

You and me, of course: liberals, women, Blacks, gays, and anyone who supports our efforts to secure a seat at the table, which is all that DEI involves.

Don’t be demoralized or deranged by these white mice.

Most especially, don’t let a white mouse with a crappy toupee and orange skin scream back into the White House.