Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘CLAUDINE GAY’

Mike Gonzalez Op-ed: The Left Feels Threatened by Those Who Tell the Truth


Mike Gonzalez / @Gundisalvus / January 17, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/17/the-left-feels-threatened-by-those-who-tell-the-truth/

A belief in man’s power to deconstruct reality produces an ideological morass that prevented Harvard’s Claudine Gay from rejecting genocide categorically at a catastrophic congressional hearing. Pictured: Gay, left, then president of Harvard, testifies Dec. 5 about on-campus antisemitism before the House Education and Workforce Committee in Washington. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator, and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He served in the George W. Bush administration, first at the Securities and Exchange Commission and then at the State Department, and is the author of the book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.” Read his research.

Are conservatives plotting to subvert American institutions?

This bold assertion was tucked inside the op-ed that Claudine Gay published in The New York Times the day after she stepped down as Harvard University’s president. Gay made the accusation twice in her op-ed, so it was not a passing fancy. She devoted a full paragraph to the idea, which deserves quoting in full:

The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types—from public health agencies to news organizations—will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.

Further on in the op-ed, Gay added that courage was needed “to stand up to those who seek to undermine what makes universities unique in American life.”

This contention is at first blush paradoxical. Many people, especially those in the center and the center- Left, are belatedly coming around to agree that our cultural institutions have made a gigantic mistake in enforcing the view that all of life must be seen through the power dynamic of the “oppressed vs. the oppressor.”

But those of us who have been writing about this for years have made the case that to get power over these institutions, the Left first had to undermine American norms and institutions. This is the heart of what is known as “cultural Marxism.” It is not always possible to settle economic scores and overthrow regimes through violent and bloody revolutions as Karl Marx wanted (and the bloodier they were, the more Marx liked them), so a better approach is to infiltrate the institutions and indoctrinate the population, especially the young.

In the lingo of the cultural revolutionaries, this is called replacing the existing “cultural hegemony” with a “counterhegemony,” or engaging in “consciousness raising” with those who have “false consciousness” because they, wrongly in this view, identify with the oppressor class.

Your average woke professor may call false consciousness being “white adjacent” because our present-day cultural Marxists have racialized cultural Marxism. If you have ever taken a graduate seminar or debated one of these pinheads, you are sure to have heard these phrases. But what is known as the Left’s “March Through the Institutions” (their term) has been so successful that Gay and the rest of the cultural Marxist Left are now putting us on notice that they are the new hegemony and we unwashed are running a subversion that wants to impose a counterhegemony.

Some might call it a quiet insurrection, though let’s not give them any ideas.

We saw an element of this exactly a year ago when an NHL player born in Russia, Ivan Provorov, refused to wear an LGBT “pride” jersey during warmups, citing his Christian Orthodox religious beliefs. An ESPN commentator, E.J. Hradek, said that if Provorov couldn’t “assimilate” to American ways, he should go back to Russia.

“If this is that much of a problem for him, to maybe assimilate into his group of teammates, and in the community and here in this country, that’s OK,” Hradek said. “Listen, you can feel any way you want. But the beauty is if it bothers you that much, there’s always a chance to leave, go back to where you feel more comfortable.”

Except that the immense changes the cultural Left has wrought (and yes, they have been immense) have been accomplished in a very few years. There is still more than folk memory of how things used to be.

Although many people have come to accept gay marriage, for example, the Supreme Court only judged it constitutional less than a decade ago. Many other people continue to see marriage as society recognizing the species’ reproductive strategy and government’s sanction of it based solely on its interest in regeneration. And there’s even less consensus on the T in LGBTQ, especially concerning grotesque medical procedures on minors. 

What is truly un-American is demanding that anybody affirm anything against their belief system or leave the country.

It is ludicrous therefore for Hradek to claim that Provorov is not assimilating “in the community and here in this country,” just as it is for Gay to claim that conservatives are undermining “pillars of society” and “expertise” because these tools enable society to see through propaganda. This is true only if you accept the cultural Marxist charge that reality is not real, that man’s perception of the natural world cannot be relied upon because it is comprehended only through a conceptual superstructure that can be built, torn down, or replaced.

This canonical belief in man’s power to deconstruct reality only produces the ideological morass that prevented Gay from rejecting genocide categorically at a catastrophic congressional testimony Dec. 5. Her “expertise” consists only in the ability to speak this lingo—to share, as she so self-incriminatingly put it at one point, “her truth.”

This new hegemony is thus unmoored from reality, from natural law, from eternal truth, and the shaky institutions built on them engender their own cynicism. All critics have to do is tell the plain truth to undermine it.

This commentary originally was published by the Washington Examiner

Category:

Opinion, Political

Tagged with:

‘Diversity’ And ‘Academic Freedom’ Are Just Left-Wing Buzzwords


BY: SEAN DAVIS | JANUARY 03, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/03/diversity-and-academic-freedom-are-just-left-wing-buzzwords/

Harvard students at commencement

“Academic freedom” in American universities is nonexistent. There is zero freedom to be anything other than a leftist, which is why nonleftists are an endangered species in academia. Universities only use “academic freedom” to defend their left-wing fellow travelers from criticism and accountability.

There is zero desire for critical independent thought in modern American academia, because modern American academia is little more than a Marxist madrassa used to train and indoctrinate the next generation of left-wing shock troops. Academia uses “academic freedom” in the same way it uses “diversity” — as a way to exclude anyone who rejects left-wing identity ideology. Universities want ideological diversity in the same way bacteria crave bleach. They want actual academic freedom in the same way cockroaches want sunlight.

Never forget that to leftists, words have no fixed meaning. Words are weapons. Nothing more, and nothing less. “Diversity” means they get to hire left-wing, dead-eyed, purple-haired, barely literate white freaks who hate Jews, and black conservatives will just have to suck it. “Academic freedom” means they get to hire low-IQ, left-wing plagiarists whose entire livelihoods depend on the success of the left-wing machine, not brilliant analysts whose research rejects global warming or Covid alarmism nonsense.

Every single left-wing institution has the same rules and the same hiring practices.

At the Pentagon, delusional and drug-addled male perverts who think putting on a skirt and ladyface is the pinnacle of valor get promoted, while decorated combat veterans who reject heart attack juice in the guise of a fake vaccine get fired. On Wall Street, throwing other people’s money at failed global warming plays that will never be economically sustainable will get you promoted much faster than successfully investing in technologies viewed to be a threat by the regime. In Hollywood, a script trashing America as racist and evil will get greenlit faster than Alec Baldwin drawing down on a camera crew. But if you want to make a film praising the American founding? Good luck with that.

And in government, there’s no surer guarantee of lifelong employment for midwit morons than pledging allegiance to whatever delusion the regime is peddling on any given day, because the left-wing machine will defend anyone from anything, no matter how horrific, as long as that person marches to the beat of the regime’s drum.

This is the modern state of America, and it is true across every industry and major institution of power. One election will not fix it. One resignation will not fix it. Removing the rot that’s compromising the entire foundation of this country will require ruthlessly tearing down, fumigating, and rebuilding every single institution that has been infiltrated by the left.

This won’t be accomplished by politicians, or journalists, or celebrities, or hedge fund managers. It can only be accomplished by you demanding it and refusing to give in until the rot has been eliminated. Are you up for it? I hope so. Because if you’re not, this country doesn’t stand a chance.

Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.

Author Sean Davis profile

SEAN DAVIS

VISIT ON TWITTER@SEANMDAV

MORE ARTICLES

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Harvard President Gay Resigns


Tuesday, 02 January 2024 02:53 PM EST

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/headline/harvard-antisemitism-claudine-gay/2024/01/02/id/1147929/

Harvard President Gay Resigns

Harvard President Claudine Gay said she would resign from her position on Tuesday, after her first months in the role were rocked by her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus and allegations of plagiarism.

Gay had faced pressure to resign from Harvard’s Jewish community and some members of Congress over her comments at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing, and she has also faced several allegations of plagiarism for her academic work in recent months.

In a letter to the Harvard community, Gay said her decision to step down had been “difficult beyond words.”

“After consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”

The Harvard Corporation, the university’s 11-member governing body, said in an email to the community that its members had accepted Gay’s resignation “with sorrow.”

Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Dec. 5 about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.

The trio declined to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik’s question as to whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to balance it against free speech protections.

More than 70 U.S. lawmakers signed a letter demanding that the governing boards of the three universities remove the presidents, citing dissatisfaction with their testimony.

Magill resigned after receiving backlash for her comments.

“Harvard knows that this long overdue forced resignation of the antisemitic plagiarist president is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history,” Representative Stefanik said in a statement on Tuesday.

‘RACIST VITRIOL’

Despite the controversy ensnaring Gay, the Harvard Corporation last month reaffirmed its confidence that she could lead the school through a period of high tension over the war in the Middle East. It also said an independent review of Gay’s academic work found she had not committed research misconduct. She has submitted several corrections for citation errors in recent weeks.

Gay, who became the university’s first Black president six months ago, and the members of the Harvard Corporation said in their letters to the community on Tuesday that she had been subject to racist attacks.

Some of Gay’s critics, including billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, have argued that she was chosen for the role as part of the school’s effort to promote diversity rather than for her qualifications.

Ackman could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday. He reposted the Harvard Crimson’s story about Gay’s resignation on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

“It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” Gay said in her statement.

The Harvard Corporation wrote that she had been subjected to “deeply personal and sustained attacks” that included “racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls.”

© 2024 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

DEI Is Welfare for People Like Claudine Gay Who Couldn’t Get a Job Without Identity Politics


BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | DECEMBER 13, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/13/dei-is-welfare-for-people-like-claudine-gay-who-couldnt-get-a-job-without-identity-politics/

Claudine Gay

Author Tristan Justice profile

TRISTAN JUSTICE

VISIT ON TWITTER@JUSTICETRISTAN

MORE ARTICLES

The board of Harvard unanimously voted to retain the university’s president Claudine Gay despite her public refusal to say that calls for genocide of Jewish students would contradict Harvard’s code of conduct — and subsequent allegations of past plagiarism.

“Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the Harvard Corporation announced in a statement on Tuesday.

Gay kept her position despite both credible allegations of plagiarism and an abysmal performance alongside other university presidents before the House Education and the Workforce Committee. On Capitol Hill last week, Gay along with the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania refused to testify that calls for Jewish genocide violate student codes of conduct — despite their schools’ histories of punishing students for conservative speech.

“We embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful,” Gay said. “It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment, intimidation.”

[RELATED: The Problem With Elite Complaints About Elite Schools]

Gay’s peers offered lawmakers similar answers when it came to confronting students who called for the genocide of Jews at their respective schools. University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill resigned from her role on Saturday after donors responded to her disastrous testimony by pulling contributions. Ross Stevens, a hedge fund manager who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, threatened to withdraw a $100 million donation from his alma mater — and he was only one donor to threaten to pull funding.

Investor and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman claimed that Gay’s poor performance had cost Harvard more than a billion dollars. But somehow Gay survived both poor reactions from donors and allegations of plagiarism, a chief sin in academia — and it was likely not a coincidence.

Gay is the first black woman to run the university that is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious institutions in higher education.

“She assumed leadership with high expectations, but her tenure, which began this summer, has been mired in scandal,” Chris Rufo reported Monday in City Journal. “As dean and then as president, Gay has been accused of bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech, overseeing a racist admissions program, and, following the Hamas terror campaign against Israel, failing to stand up to rampant anti-Semitism on campus.” She landed the top job at Harvard despite having only authored 11 peer-reviewed articles, four of which have now come under allegations of plagiarism.

Gay, however, is among one of the most protected classes according to the left’s hierarchy of victimhood. Firing not just a woman but a black woman would be blasphemous against the religion of identity politics.

“A white male would probably already be gone,” observed Carol Swain, a retired professor from Vanderbilt and Princeton whose work was apparently plagiarized by Gay.

Swain, who is black, told Fox News that “obviously” Harvard “did not have the courage to fire its first black president.”

The New York Post reported Monday night that Harvard University even threatened the paper months ago over the Post’s own probe into Gay’s allegations of plagiarism. Yet, as dean, Gay reportedly forced “dozens” of students to leave campus over violations of academic integrity codes.

So-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives such as the programs endorsed by Gay, however, have begun to replace merit-based standards in academia, government, and business, with physical characteristics becoming a factor in employment eligibility. The vice president and a Supreme Court justice were both explicitly chosen based on their sex and skin color.

In the Soviet Union, residents needed a party card to guarantee their employment and other benefits unavailable to the rest of the country. In America today, special perks are now afforded to those who meet the criteria of preferred classes, from race to sexual orientation.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

Category:

Education

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud