Claudine Gay: I Did Nothing Wrong. Racist People Hunted Me Because They Couldn't Stand to See a DEI Success Story Like Mine.

The Bee:

The Racist Left continues defending the indefensible, because all they care about putting power into their own racist hands.

Noted victim-of-Russian-hacking Joy Reid:

JOY REID: I do just want to pivot to another thing. Because there's another thing happening, Jelani. There- there is this sort of open war on Black progress, Black history. Um- Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, at least up until she resigned, is now the latest casualty of that. Christopher Rufo, who is out there touting and, you know, high fiving and claiming the scalp of Claudine Gay, telegraphed that this was what they were going to do. They were going to associate these DEI professors of colleges with BLM and decolonization and Hamas in the public mind and get rid of them. He's now claiming victory. He telegraphed that this was the campaign. Why are these elite colleges capitulating to it and essentially making it so uncomfortable for these women leaders that they have to step down to be replaced by white men? Because that is the goal of Christopher Rufo and his gang.

The racist Claudine Gay herself wrote an op-ed, not apologizing for any of her many, many cases of plagiarism, but playing the victim and hoisting the flag of black entitlement:

Chris Brunet @realChrisBrunet

NEW: Claudine Gay writes a goodbye essay in the NYT

''My critics found instances where some material duplicated other scholars' language ... When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals.''

FACT CHECK: FALSE

When Claudine Gay ''learned of these errors'', she sat on them for months while threatening to sue the New York Post in an attempt to suppress them

Gay went on in her op-ed to do the expected. Namely, claim that the real reason she was targeted is because she's just too darn diverse.

It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation's oldest university.

She's the Kamala Harris of Fake Academics. Someone failed to position her for academic success.

John Sexton quotes from a writer at The Atlantic -- presumably a liberal or neoliberal, because The Atlantic only posts articles from liberals and neoliberals.

While the rest of the left fumes that the "right-wing" Chris Rufo brought Gay down on plagiarism charges, this writer points out that the reason Rufo was able to bring her down on plagiarism charges was because she was "clearly" guilt of plagiarism.

And the worst part, the writer says, isn't that Gay is a serial plagiarist.

It's that almost everyone on the left, including all journalists and academics, were eager to lie about her plagiarism in order to save her.

Conservatives have long seen Gay as the "diversity hire" avatar of their DEI bogeymen. They wanted an excuse to force her out, so they went looking for skeletons. The problem, for progressives, is that the conservatives found a closet full of bones. As The Intercept's Ryan Grim put it, "The right launched a witch hunt against Gay but instead found a plagiarist." Although the initial examples of plagiarism were weak--easy enough to excuse as shoddy paraphrasing and forgotten quotation marks--a series of subsequent investigations by the conservative outlet The Washington Free Beacon found more damning cases. As Rufo predicted, the plagiarism story soon broke into the mainstream, thanks to sustained coverage in outlets such as The Boston Globe and The New York Times. A fair-minded but bracing December 21 Times op-ed by John McWhorter, simply titled "Why Claudine Gay Should Go," was a nail that struck especially loudly against the coffin wood.

Those who rushed to characterize her resignation as the outcome of a "bullying" campaign designed to oust Harvard's first Black president omit an inconvenient detail: She was clearly guilty. The bullying worked because the facts were too difficult to massage. That didn't stop many of my fellow academics from trying.

...

The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay's boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak--"duplicative language" and academic "sloppiness" and "technical attribution issues"--in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar's work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn't plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it's merely a technicality. Or that we all do it. (Soon after Rufo and Brunet made their initial accusations last month, Gay issued a statement saying, "I stand by the integrity of my scholarship." She did not address those or subsequent plagiarism allegations in her resignation letter.)

Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn't have to give it to him.

They're not journalists nor academics. They are Marxist propgandists who have "borrowed in" to once non-propgandistic institutions.

Christopher Rufo is amazingly candid about his intentions and his actions: He straight-up says his mission was to force the leftwing propaganda institutions to cover the story, because that would then make the left squirm enough that some leftists would be forced to admit this was plagiarism and that Gay therefore must resign.

Again quoted by Sexton, Politico is A S T O N I S H E D that Rufo is honest and candid about his agenda and his intentions. A belwildered Politico "journalist" asks, basically, why don't you just lie about your motives like we in the "Real Media" do?

Why do you think you can be so open about your strategy and still have it work? Why don't you feel like you need to be covert about it?

First, and most simply, because I'm telling the truth -- and the truth has an inherent and innate power. I believe that if it's propagated correctly, it has the power to defeat lies.

You tell me that Politico is doing anything but admit their own strategy of obfuscation and deceit in pretending they have no motives except "delivering the truth."

Meanwhile,

Former Harvard mega-donor Bill Ackman blames Gay's devotion to DEI for the explosion of open antisemitism at Harvard.

This is a 4,000 word long tweet; I'm just excerpting some of it.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign -- it was the "canary in the coal mine" -- despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one's upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI's own methodology.

LOL. You just learned that last month?

Billionaires aren't very smart, we're learning.

Under DEI, one's degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being "not racist."

Under DEI's ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI's ideology.

Again: You just found this out?

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.

After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one's employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.

The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, "justice" will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.

The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called "microaggressions" are treated like hate speech. "Trigger warnings" are required to protect students. "Safe spaces" are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students' newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.

These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard's having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.

When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.

There's a lot more at the tweet, but that's the longish nutshell of it.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:20 PM

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