New York Times Kneels In Front Of Chris Rufo, Screams 'Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?'

Christ, have some dignity.

Right-wing activist and perennial shithead Chris Rufo will periodically announce his intention to cause a moral panic over an obscure issue, then start said panic, then watch as the media trips over its own dick as it rushes to treat whatever the issue is as if it wasn’t just made up by a guy who sounds like Snidely Whiplash after getting Clockwork Orange-d with days and days of Prager University videos.

Rufo’s latest handiwork involves Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard. Gay got some attention recently for being one of three Ivy League presidents to fumble through a congressional hearing on antisemitism, mostly because they apparently thought the hearing would be a good-faith academic discussion and not a public relations exercise for the likes of Elise Stefanik to get her snarling mug all over CNN. The hearing eventually resulted in the University of Pennsylvania’s president resigning.

Having scalped one Ivy League elitist already, the Right went after Gay over her not-actually-antisemitism. But Harvard, after publicly letting her twist in the wind for a day or two, announced that it would stand behind Gay.

So the Right changed tack and went after Gay over plagiarism allegations. How do we know this? Because Chris Rufo announced on Twitter that that’s exactly what he was fucking doing:

“We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”

In other words, this isn’t really about potential plagiarism. This is a coordinated strike in the right’s ongoing war against the Marxism that has allegedly taken over American institutions, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs (Gay is both Black and a woman) on college campuses, elitists at one of the nation’s most elite universities, and whatever other angry bats are screeching in Rufo’s belfry.

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Or, as Don Moynihan, a Georgetown professor, put it on BlueSky: “A member of Congress who supported white nationalism tried to get a Black university president fired by accusing her of anti-semitism. When that failed other white nationalists accused her of plagiarism, but needed mainstream media to treat it as a big story.”

Of course. Because otherwise, who gives a rat’s ass about plagiarism in obscure, decades-old academic writing, even at so illustrious an institution as Harvard? Besides The New York Times, apparently, whose writers waited until the 34^th goddamn paragraph of this story to note that these allegations might not be on the up-and-up:

For some faculty members, and not just liberal ones, the details of the charges and Harvard’s procedures were less important than the context in which the charges were being lobbed.

“It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”

“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people.”

Charles Fried was Reagan’s Solicitor General. He testified in favor of Sam Alito’s Supreme Court nomination. We’re not exactly talking about Allen Ginsberg here, and even he thinks this is dumb.

In the 18^th graf of the Times story – in other words, 16 grafs before we get the quotes from Fried – the writers, presumably in the name of balance, went to Carol friggin’ Swain for a quote:

Carol Swain, a political scientist who retired from Vanderbilt University in 2017, said that she was “livid,” both at Dr. Gay’s use of her work and Harvard’s defense of her.

Swain is a right-winger who called Obama’s re-election in 2012 “a very scary situation” and willingly appeared in a Dinesh D’Souza movie. Make of that what you will.

Swain also published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal criticizing Gay. Tellingly, she didn’t actually point out what passages Harvard’s president is accused of stealing from her. According to the Times:

In the dissertation, Mr. Rufo said in his newsletter, Dr. Gay used Dr. Swain’s work at least twice with no citation. In one example, Dr. Gay wrote, “Since the 1950s, the re-election rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%.” In an earlier book, Dr. Swain had written, “Since the 1950s the re-election rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90%.”

An academic will produce thousands of pages of writing in a career. She might miss or forget some citations in that time. She might lift a quote and forget the quote marks. The amount of times this has happened in dissertations is probably approaching infinity.

But for Swain, it’s an excuse to get in some more global attacks on Gay. Like so:

Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality; her work displays none. In a world where the privilege of diversity is king, Ms. Gay was able to parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class university.

Ah ha, it’s not just that the president of Harvard might have plagiarized some work! She’s in general one of those dreaded diversity hires that Journal readers have been conditioned to all but stone to death.

Imagine if the Times had framed this story as “right-wing activists continue bad-faith crusade against Harvard president as part of larger attack on institutions it claims, incoherently, have been overtaken by Marxists” instead of giving it the exact frame that its assignment editor Chris Rufo told them to. That would have been neat.

[New York Times / Wall Street Journal]