More than a year ago, in October of 2022, a Substack blogger named Chris Brunet published an article warning Harvard not to name Claudine Gay the president of the university. Here’s what he wrote. “I can’t stress enough how much of a tragedy a Claudine Gay presidency would be — this must not be allowed to come to pass. She will ruin Harvard. She’s an intellectual lightweight (her entire body of critical race theory ‘research’ is flawed and/or fake), a far-far-Left DEI activist, and corrupt as hell.”
You might point out that it’s a little too late for anyone to ruin Harvard. Harvard’s credibility hit an iceberg and sank into the icy depths a long time ago. You cannot destroy that which is already lying in ruins at the bottom of the ocean. But even so, Brunet’s point was disregarded, along with all of his reporting about Claudine Gay’s misconduct. Instead, Harvard announced that Gay, who had never published a book in her life and only had a handful of publications, would become the university’s next president. She formally took over this past summer. But in December, everything began to unravel very quickly. First, Gay told Congress that it’s not clear whether a call for Jewish genocide would violate Harvard’s code of conduct. She said it depends on the circumstances. You can’t condemn genocide in principle, she claimed. It really depends on the context and the nuances of the genocide, you see.
Then, shortly afterwards, Chris Brunet and Chris Rufo published evidence that Claudine Gay had plagiarized significant portions of her dissertation:
EXCLUSIVE: @RealChrisBrunet and I have obtained documentation demonstrating that Harvard President Claudine Gay plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, violating Harvard's policies on academic integrity.
This is a bombshell. 🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023
Within 48 hours, the Washington Free Beacon followed up with many more examples of Gay’s plagiarism, including entire paragraphs she lifted for some of her peer-reviewed publications. Yesterday, Claudine Gay resigned.
Those are the very broad outlines of the story, which you’ve probably heard.
What you haven’t heard is an explanation for how a blogger on Substack with a few hundred subscribers could possibly have more insight into Claudine Gay than Harvard’s board, which spent months interviewing hundreds of candidates before promoting Gay. How could a blogger — someone without any affiliation to Harvard whatsoever — understand that the university was going to destroy its own reputation — what’s left of it — in a matter of months? Is he some kind of Nostradamus, or was something else going on here?
The truth is that, regardless of what you may have heard, what happened to Claudine Gay over the past few weeks was not shocking or unforeseeable. It wasn’t even unique, really. It was, in fact, extremely predictable. Chris over at Substack was able to post about Claudine Gay’s corruption not because he had any special insight, but because he was one of the only people who were brave enough to publish what hundreds of academics have been saying in private, for years.
If you’re a conservative wondering when our national DEI fever dream is going to end, this is what makes the Claudine Gay story interesting. Beneath all the Ivy League trappings, this is yet another manifestation of a phenomenon we’ve seen repeatedly in just the past year. Once again, it’s a prominent brand that’s tarnished in a predictable fashion that, for some reason, the powers that be decided to ignore until it was too late. Target’s brand collapse was predictable, too. So was the collapse of Disney and Bud Light and Fox News. In every one of these cases, major brands have decided to ruin their own reputations in obviously preventable ways.
All Bud Light had to do was talk to a single normal person before signing Dylan Mulvaney. All Target had to do was refuse to sell satanic merchandise and perverse clothing to minors. Disney could have simply continued doing what it did for generations, which is make cartoons that don’t sexualize kids or teach them to hate this country. Fox News could have decided to treat its viewers with some respect, instead of promoting Pride Month and shutting down the shows people actually watched. But they didn’t. In all of these cases, corporations decided to self-sabotage.
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Now we can add Harvard and its governing body, the Harvard Corporation, to the list. All they had to do was listen to the warnings about Claudine Gay, or look at her resume, and go with a qualified candidate. Instead, they walked directly into this debacle. The question is why we keep seeing this happen, over and over again.
If you look deeper into the timeline of Claudine Gay’s removal, you start to see what Harvard was thinking. Put simply, as we saw in the case of all those other Left-wing corporations, it was hubris. They thought they could protect Claudine Gay. They knew she was a fake scholar long before Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet and the Washington Free Beacon published a single story about her. But they also believed they had enough power and influence to power through this scandal. That’s why in October, Harvard threatened to sue the New York Post, which was working on the Gay plagiarism story. Specifically, Harvard’s lawyers told the Post that it was “demonstrably false” to say that Gay had plagiarized anything. The lawyers claimed that Harvard had conducted a comprehensive review into all of Gay’s writings and cleared her. They went on to promise that they would sue the Post for “immense” damages if they went ahead with the story.
The Post relented. They didn’t publish the story. And for a while it appeared that Harvard’s strategy had worked. It wasn’t until mid-December, two months later, that Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet did what the New York Post was too afraid to do. They circumvented the usual media channels and published the story themselves. They obtained documents from a source (probably a professor at Harvard or a similar university) who had meticulously documented several clear instances of Gay’s plagiarism, and they released that document on X.
And then — and this is the key part — they didn’t stop there. They kept up relentless pressure on Harvard. Even after Harvard’s board put out a statement saying that they had cleared Claudine Gay of any wrongdoing, and stood with her 100%, Rufo and Brunet did not back down. Neither did the Washington Free Beacon and the New York Post, now that they felt emboldened enough to actually report the story. I checked, and these outlets published a new story on Claudine Gay pretty much every day from mid-December until now. They found new instances of plagiarism, or they spoke to some Nobel Prize winner who thought she had to resign, or they spoke to the black women that Claudine Gay had plagiarized. Whatever it took, they kept the story alive.
This is what Harvard wasn’t anticipating. They thought that if people like Barack Obama lobbied on behalf of Claudine Gay, and he did, then the story would die off in a few days. What they weren’t taking into account is the lesson that conservative activists have learned over the past year, which is that it takes relentless and consistent pressure to hold anyone accountable when they are protected by the system. Harvard and the media tried to circle the wagons around Gay until so many examples of her plagiarism piled up that it became unsustainable. By the same token, Bud Light thought they could make their crisis go away by sponsoring the UFC and hiring Peyton Manning to shoot some ads. But this kind of strategy doesn’t work anymore. It convinces no one. It just highlights how inauthentic and desperate they are.
In the case of Harvard, keeping the pressure on is important because the longer these frauds have to defend their position, the more obviously indefensible it becomes to every sane and reasonable person in the country. Here for example was a CNN expert’s effort to defend Claudine Gay today:
Bonkers explanation from CNN reporter Matt Egan on the Harvard plagiarism scandal:
"We should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone's ideas in any of her writings. She has been accused of sort of more like copying other peoples writings without… pic.twitter.com/ONArO75NLE
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 2, 2024
So Claudine Gay didn’t steal “ideas,” she just stole paragraphs of other peoples’ work. She didn’t plagiarize, she simply just plagiarized. High school students know how absurd this all sounds. But they’re trying to pass this off to adults watching CNN, as the standard that should apply to the president of Harvard University. Again, it’s unsustainable. The more they have to explain their position, the more this is dragged out, the more ludicrous they sound.
Not to be outdone, over at NPR, Eric Deggans had this observation. “The intimidation is the point. Will the next president at Harvard stand for diversity? Will that person be female? Will that person be Black? If not, they have forced several steps back. And everyone across the school gets the message.”
The intimidation is the point. Will the next president at Harvard stand for diversity? Will that person be female? Will that person be Black? If not, they have forced several steps back. And everyone across the school gets the message. https://t.co/faMBUkja6p
— Eric Deggans at NPR (@Deggans) January 2, 2024
It’s not even worth addressing what Deggans said there, but it is worthwhile to take a quick look at his bio. It turns out he’s an adjunct professor at Duke University, which makes you wonder about Duke’s academic standards. Deggans is also the author of a book entitled, “Race-Baiter: How Media Wield Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation.” That’s actually what his book is called. You know that saying about writing what you know? Deggans took that advice as literally as possible.
We saw many other examples of this obvious desperation. In her resignation letter, Claudine Gay never apologized for her plagiarism. Instead, she claimed that she was the victim of racism. The Harvard board put out a statement basically agreeing with her. That’s especially galling, by the way, given that Harvard hosts events with titles like, “Disrupting whiteness in the classroom.” The racism is coming from inside the house.
For their part, the state propagandists at NPR complained that Gay had been targeted by extreme Right-wingers. Marc Lamont Hill demanded that, “The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman.” Never mind the fact that Marc Lamont Hill can’t tell you what a woman is, or explain why it’s so important that the next president be a woman. He’s just making incoherent demands at maximum volume because he’s confused and agitated. This is what happens when the Right refuses to relent. The more these race hustlers are forced to explain themselves, the more they discredit all of their social engineering. They fall back on crude non-arguments that amount to racism and screaming into the void. They can’t defend anything that Claudine Gay actually did. All they can do is lash out at people based on their skin color.
That’s what Henry Rogers, a.k.a. Ibram X. Kendi did. He wrote that, “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism. What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to conflicts and clicks.” So if you’re upset about the president of Harvard plagiarizing 50 separate times, or discriminating against whites and Asians in admissions, then you’re the racist. The word for this is projection. They always accuse you of precisely what they’re doing.
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All that said, there was one moment of truth in what these DEI pushers said yesterday. Al Sharpton called Gay’s removal, “an assault on the health, strength and future of diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Well, yes. That’s exactly what this moment represents.
If the conservative movement follows through, this could be the beginning of the end of DEI, which by definition punishes certain Americans based on their skin color while rewarding others. Will that happen? Let’s see. According to the New York Post, Harvard’s current plan is to keep Claudine Gay on the faculty and pay her a salary of around $900,000 a year. I didn’t add a zero in there; that’s actually what they’re planning on paying her, even after she’s been outed as a fraud. That’s a pretty clear sign that they don’t actually plan to change anything. Harvard’s hoping the Right will celebrate this victory and then forget all about the broader war on DEI.
That would’ve been a safe assumption a few years ago. Thankfully for everyone who cares about merit and morality, and unfortunately for frauds like Claudine Gay, it’s not a safe assumption anymore.