There’s a documentary called “Behind the Curve” in which a group of people who think the Earth is flat decided to test their hypothesis. They spend something like $20,000 on a laser gyroscope, and run some tests, and lo and behold, they learn that the Earth, contrary to their assumptions, is in fact round. Their response was exactly what you’d expect. At first they didn’t want to believe it, they started rationalizing away the experiment. “We were taken aback by that,” one of the men said. He added: “We obviously were not willing to accept that.”
That documentary came out a few years ago. It was an interesting look at human psychology and how people respond when their own actions debunk their whole worldview (literally their worldview, in the case of the flat-earthers). It’s not an easy thing to experience. It’s one thing for someone else to prove you wrong. It’s something else entirely to disprove your own ideology, and to reveal how bankrupt and nonsensical it is.
It’s easy to point and laugh at flat-earthers, but this is a phenomenon we’re seeing more often these days. In fact, it’s been playing out for the whole country over the past few weeks, as proponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, have witnessed the complete implosion of the president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay.
This is a woman who personifies everything DEI stands for. She came from an extremely wealthy background; her family runs the largest concrete plant in Haiti. She became the first black president of Harvard University, despite publishing only a handful of academic papers. She did it all based on three factors: her skin color, her gender, and her willingness to smear and destroy all of her ideological enemies along the way. And in just a couple of weeks, she’s been outed as a complete moron and fraud. She proved she’s incapable of answering extremely basic questions in Congress. She also demonstrated that she’s incapable of writing anything without ripping off dozens of other papers.
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Given all this, the cognitive dissonance for the DEI crowd has to be overwhelming right now. After all, one of the holiest figures in their entire cult has just crashed and burned. She’s provided irrefutable evidence that DEI rewards mediocrity and destroys every institution that embraces it. That’s difficult for these people to accept, as you can imagine. That’s why, in the wake of Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard, there hasn’t really been a debate over the merits of DEI, or anything approaching a reasonable conversation. The word “debate” suggests that two sides are presenting their arguments in a clear and rational way. In this case, what’s happening is that the anti-DEI side is making coherent arguments, while the pro-DEI faction can do nothing but perform and posture and vomit its emotions all over the place. They’re actually a lot less respectable and coherent than the flat-earthers. At least the flat-earth proponents have arguments, as flimsy as they may be. But that’s still more than can be said for the DEI defenders.
The spectacle that aired on CNN over the weekend perfectly captures the dynamic. It features two D.E.I. advocates — Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Kara Swisher — speaking with two sane male counterparts, Reihan Salam and Jonah Goldberg. In this debate, Goldberg and Salam explain why DEI is a scam used to smuggle leftist ideology under the guise of diversity. The women on the other side of the discussion can only scowl and huff and repeatedly declare how “infuriated” they are. Lulu Garcia-Navarro also interrupts constantly while demanding that the two men on the other side stop interrupting her (which they never did).
Salam makes the reasonable case against DEI and remains logical, level-headed, and perfectly coherent throughout. But once the other side starts interjecting, it all goes downhill.
Our discussion of DEI on The Chris Wallace Show. pic.twitter.com/3OqZXs5Xr7
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) January 6, 2024
The whole segment goes on like this. The women just keep shouting about how horrible it is to assume that Claudine Gay was a DEI hire, even though Harvard’s policy — for generations now — has been to elevate mediocre candidates on the basis of their skin color. And then, when it’s pointed out that Gay plagiarized more than half of her academic writings, their response is to attack the motivations of the people who uncovered this plagiarism. They have no response but to screech incoherently.
As with so many other debates on so many other issues, if you knew nothing about the issue, and you saw this discussion, you would immediately know the women on the Left are full of crap. They bring nothing but their emotions to the table. All they have is their indignation and their feelings. If you ask them for evidence to prove their assertions, they’ll say something about “books that have been written about this.” This is why these people get in trouble for plagiarizing so often. They don’t know how to provide citations. “Books” are not a citation. And, again, all of this would be clear to any observer who had no background knowledge about the subject. If you do have background knowledge, then it’s even more obvious that the women on the Left are full of crap.
On this issue, like most others, the Left has no intellectual leg to stand on. If there was any sort of substantive argument to be made for DEI, they would make it. They would produce evidence, for example, that institutions become more effective as they become more diverse and inclusive. They wouldn’t just assert this fact — as they always do — they would show it. But they can’t. Instead they simply insist that their position must be true, and even if it isn’t true, only a bigot would point it out. After all, pointing things out — noticing things — is the cardinal sin on the Left. That appears to be their entire argument when it comes to the entire Gay controversy. They won’t try to claim that Gay didn’t plagiarize. It’s clear she did, repeatedly. Instead they appear to be arguing that it was our responsibility to not notice the plagiarism, or to ignore it once we did, because she’s a black woman.
This is the total intellectual bankruptcy of the Left. And since the Left controls all of our powerful institutions, this intellectual bankruptcy lies at the core of all of them. This is the larger problem underlying the Gay debacle. The real problem with Gay’s plagiarized papers isn’t that they were plagiarized. It’s the fact that, even if they were original thoughts, they were vapid and dumb and pointless. It used to be that Harvard presidents conducted original research on important topics like biochemistry. Now they write useless garbage for a nonexistent audience, solely to advance themselves.
This is the part of the whole Claudine Gay story you don’t hear much about, but it’s far more important than the fact she lifted several paragraphs from other authors. It turns out that, even if she hadn’t plagiarized a word of her academic writings, Claudine Gay would still be a total fraud.
First of all, let’s just look at the topics of all of her publications. Every single one of them is about black people or equity in some fashion. That’s not an exaggeration. That was Gay’s obsession. Her papers have titles like, “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation,” and “The Impact of Gender and Race on the Politics of Black Women,” and “The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes Toward Latinos.” This is what passes for research on “diversity.” It’s the least diverse resume you can possibly imagine. It’s like paging through a random author bio on Salon.com. With a sole, exclusive focus on black issues, Gay shouldn’t have been in the running for any job anywhere but, perhaps, a historically black college. And even there, she would have been totally unqualified.
Now to be fair to Gay — in and of itself, this resume isn’t necessarily disqualifying. If Gay had been writing truly groundbreaking stuff about gender and race and the politics of black women or whatever, then you might be inclined to give her a pass on this singular obsession she has on skin color. But the deeper you dig, the worse it gets. It turns out that Gay wasn’t just a race-obsessed grifter who plagiarized whole paragraphs every now and then. In fact, the data behind Gay’s papers — the information she was passing off as new and important — was also garbage.
Let’s zero in on one of the papers I mentioned a few seconds ago. It’s called “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation.” This paper was published in the American Political Science Review all the way back in 2001. It’s an important paper, because it’s one of the handful of publications that somehow got Gay tenure at Stanford University, before she moved on to Harvard. The basic idea of this paper is that when black people get elected to Congress, they make white people want to vote less. Somehow, this thesis made sense to Gay and everyone who peer-reviewed this document. To that end, the paper contains all kinds of tables which point to data that supposedly prove this point — that whites just hate voting when black people are on the ballot. That’s the kind of discovery that would confirm white supremacy is real, and white people are bad, and so of course both Stanford and Harvard loved it. It was too good to check.
The problem is that a few decades later, a researcher named Jonatan Pallesen decided to look into the claim anyway. And he found that Gay’s data contradicts itself. At one point, Gay’s data tables show that Missouri Congressman Bill Clay’s presence on the ballot didn’t have much impact on voter turnout. But elsewhere Gay’s tables show that Bill Clay had a very significant effect on voter turnout — close to a 17% reduction in turnout, in fact. Put aside the fact that it’s absurd to claim that Bill Clay, simply because he’s black, would make white voters want to stay home on Election Day. The question remains: Why do Claudine Gay’s tables contradict themselves?
There’s no clear answer to that question. Pallesen couldn’t come up with an explanation. Claudine Gay certainly hasn’t offered one. And here’s the really incriminating detail: Every time researchers have tried to look into this, Gay refused to provide the underlying data that she used to generate the tables in her papers. In 2002, two professors — Michael Herron of Dartmouth and Kenneth Schotts of Stanford — presented a paper that effectively debunked Gay’s entire methodology. They included this footnote: “We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us.”
That’s pretty incriminating. But here’s the really amazing thing. That footnote was removed from the final version of Michael Herron and Kenneth Schott’s paper. If you try to find and download the paper online now, you won’t find any mention of Claudine Gay. It’s been scrubbed completely. Instead, if you find the paper, you’ll find that Herron and Schott debunk a “hypothetical” methodology, without using Claudine Gay’s name at all. It’s almost like someone wanted to protect her for some reason. But, writing for Jordan Schachtel’s Substack, Chris Brunet got his hands on the first version of Herron and Schott’s takedown — the one that hasn’t been censored or redacted in any way. The full, uncensored footnote calls Gay’s conclusions “logically inconsistent.” It repeatedly calls out Claudine Gay by name. And it includes a lot of technical details which no one — including Claudine Gay — has refuted.
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This is a far bigger scandal than Claudine Gay lifting some paragraphs here and there. The fact is, her ideas and the data underlying those ideas were useless and fraudulent. Her publications were race-based screeds that were only ever cited by a handful of academics — and those handful of academics very quickly proved they were complete garbage. And yet, Gay somehow became president of Harvard. Documents criticizing the substance of her “scholarship” were scrubbed. Even now, she’s still making around $900,000 as a professor. This is the state of Harvard University and American academia in general. And this is the key point.
Yes, our intellectual elites are often thieves and plagiarists. That certainly matters. But what matters more is that they are just as intellectually bankrupt as they are morally bankrupt. They are charlatans. Their power and influence is crumbling by the day. And based on their panic over the past few weeks, we can be pretty sure they’re aware of it.