The AP's Idiotic Defense of Claudine Gay
I would love to be so oppressed systemically that I would only have to put in a fraction of my colleagues’s efforts, steal other people’s work, and still keep my six-figure pay day.
I would love to be so oppressed systemically that I would only have to put in a fraction of my colleagues’s efforts, steal other people’s work, and still keep my six-figure pay day. But we all aren’t Claudine Gay.
Gay isn’t leaving Harvard, she isn’t losing money or sleep, either. She’s staying in the poli-sci department and making the same bank she made before she was caught plagiarizing a lot of other people’s work. She wasn’t without defenders, with the Associated Press the most ridiculous among them:
The left thinks that plagiarism didn't exist before this past week when it was entirely created by people on "the right" for use as a "weapon" against a college president whose blatant, repeated, unattributed theft of others's work should be excused because she's a woman and black.
The AP began stealth-editing their story, beginning with the headline.
The left’s insistence on calling this a “conservative attack” is, in part, designed to excuse their negligence in vetting their own collegiate president. It also reinforces their narrative that the halls of academia still foster free and uncorrupted thought — meaning that only ideas which reinforce progressive narratives are consecrated as such.
And then there’s this graph from the AP’s embarrassing piece:
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort against Gay, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans and also used by some tribes against their enemies.
This reads like a dumb white progressive wrote it. Indigenous American warriors in the United States took as trophies the scalps of other indigenous enemies long before Europeans migrated here and they scalped white European settlers, too. European migrants caught on and returned the violence with the introduction of scalp bounties. It’s just insane to pretend that American Indian nations were strictly peaceful, kitten and sunshine hippies all peyote’d out on the plains only until the big bad Euro trash movement swept the continent.
The only thing I don’t like about using the “scalp” reference here is that it’s not really a scalp, this is a somewhat hollow victory because Gay is still there, still getting paid, with no real acknowledgement of offense.
Conservatives zeroed in on Gay amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.
Gay has a Ph.D. and doesn’t know how to properly attribute sources — something universities literally make you take a course in while an undergrad — and we’re supposed to believe that she was qualified for her position beyond identity politics?
A final point that was made on today’s radio show — the people so insistent on calling the January 6th riot an “insurrection” have a problem with calling “copying other people’s writings without attribution” actual plagiarism.
Accountability = attack, just as invasion = immigration. However the only punishment seems to be the exposure of their shame. Psalm 53.
Also, love the pic.
Black Privilege