During my senior year at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2009, someone arranged for the members of the Daily Tar Heel editorial board to meet with the university's top diversity consultant. This woman, presumably earning an executive salary well into the six figures, was going to teach us about things we might not think are racist but are actually very racist.
For example, if a black person turned up to a job interview wearing a hoodie and basketball shorts (like slob John Fetterman, the United States senator), it would be racist not to give them the job. That was one example. I don't remember the rest, because I immediately zoned out like I did during group struggle sessions in high school when Dr. Dina explained the difference between racist "cold pricklies" and not-racist "warm fuzzies."
That was almost 15 years ago—the dawn of the Obama era—in North Carolina. It is frightening to consider the extent to which this nonsense has proliferated since, at large public universities like UNC (Nikole Hannah-Jones, class of '03) but especially at the "elite" private schools in deep blue states. The sorts of places Jeffrey Epstein liked to hang out when he wasn't sex trafficking or hosting dinner parties for famous journalists or helping Democrats win elections.
Harvard, for example. The elite institution has groomed some of history's greatest monsters (Ted Kaczynski, Pete Buttigieg, the guy who planned the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor) and egregious perverts (Jeffrey Toobin, all the Kennedys). Harvard's elite president, Claudine Gay, resigned in disgrace this week after Aaron Sibarium and the Washington Free Beacon published what so-called professional journalists have described as "accusations" of plagiarism but was actually pretty straightforward "evidence" of plagiarism. (Not to mention her baffling remarks in congressional testimony about the propriety of promoting Jewish genocide.)
The manner in which mainstream journalists (and other mentally affected liberal activists) reacted to Gay's resigning raises a number of questions. Namely: what in the actual f— is wrong with these people?
Gay's supporters made a variety of fatuous arguments in her defense. She wasn't a plagiarist, insisted CNN reporter Matt Egan. She had merely "[copied] other people's writings without attribution." Is that so hard to understand? (O.J. Simpson didn't murder his wife; he just deliberately stopped her from living.) Even if Gay was guilty of the sort of "sloppy attribution" that would get a Harvard student promptly expelled, she deserved to keep her job because the people "accusing" her (with evidence) are bad people with wrong opinions drawing attention to things that don't matter.
If Gay's plagiarism actually mattered, real journalists would be writing the stories instead of the "racist mob" of "critics" at the Free Beacon. We are merely a "conservative online journal that has led a campaign against Dr. Gay in recent weeks," according to the New York Times, a left-wing media corporation, owned by a Mexican oligarch, that forced an editor to resign for publishing an op-ed that made some junior employees feel "unsafe."
Gay's resignation unleashed a torrent of liberal outrage and race-obsessed hysteria. "This is really an attack on academic freedom," said Times editorial board member Mara Gay. "I don't have to say that they're racist, because you can hear and see the racism in the attacks." NBC's in-house "disinformation" expert Ben Collins denounced the "racist harassment campaign" against Gay and dismissed the plagiarism charges as "something incredibly stupid screamed by a notorious cruel weirdo."
MSNBC's Joy Reid, a Harvard grad who was promoted after falsely accusing hackers of planting bigoted posts on her old blog, described Gay's resignation as a victory for conservatives waging "open war on black progress," part of a sinister plot to force "women leaders ... to step down to be replaced by white men." Reid's colleague, the notorious anti-Semitic agitator Al Sharpton, called Gay's resignation "an attack on every Black woman in this country."
Gay herself more or less agreed in a defiant op-ed in the Times (where else?) blasting her critics as "demagogues" and "opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions" who "trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults" and "recycled tired racial stereotypes about [b]lack talent and temperament."
Alas, the martyr lamented, Gay was "an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses," a prime target due to her prominence and the profundity of her (plagiarized) research, which she has refused to share with other scholars. Gay bragged of having "marshaled concrete evidence to show that when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers." Whatever that means.
Again the question must be asked: what in the actual f— is wrong with these people?
Their arrogance compels them to blame others for "driving cynicism about our institutions." They sound like Brian Stelter. The former media correspondent for CNN—the Michael Avenatti propaganda network that paid out a multimillion-dollar settlement for falsely accusing a child of racism—refuses to believe the polling about the American public's lack of trust in the media. Stelter, who once did an entire segment on former president Donald Trump's spelling errors, thinks Fox News is to blame.
Come on, man. Just look at how the purportedly neutral Associated Press covered Gay's resignation. The original version of the AP story warned that "plagiarism" had become "a new conservative weapon against colleges," and included a quote from a historian specializing in "race and higher education" who argued software used to detect plagiarism becomes dangerous when it "falls into the hands of those who argue that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors."
Doing what comes naturally, the AP reporters rather gratuitously accused Gay's detractors of condoning racist violence, if not full-scale genocide. Noting education activist Christopher Rufo's use of the word "scalped," the reporters were aghast. It was "as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists to eradicate Native Americans." Yes, you read that right. The story has since been revised (without explanation) to note that scalping was "also used by some [Native American] tribes against their enemies."
I don't have an Ivy League degree, but it seems pretty obvious that no one has done more to undermine the credibility of our elite institutions than the members of those elite institutions. For starters, they keep getting conned by criminal grifters. (Epstein, Avenatti, Elizabeth Holmes, Carlos Watson, Stacey Abrams, Black Lives Matter, Ibram X. Kendi, Sam Bankman-Fried, among others.) The way our so-called experts conducted themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic—suggesting it was reckless and unsafe to attend large public gatherings unless it was in support of an approved liberal cause such as defunding the police—ensured that no one will take them seriously next time.
To hell with these people.
Read more: What in the Actual F— Is Wrong with These People (Sam Bankman-Fried Edition)