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Jan. 3, 2024 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
15:17
Gay Ops
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So, as of about an hour ago, Claudine Gay, who was the president of Harvard, I guess that was her title.
Yes, President Claudine Gay.
She has resigned, and it's the shortest tenure ever.
I think she was even appointed.
Wasn't she appointed last September or something?
It was very, very quick.
So, there has been an unrelenting attack.
From the Washington Free Beacon, etc., that to some degree seems to originate from Chris Ruffo, who's the guy who got all of these conservatives hopped up on critical race theory and going to their school boards and demanding that critical race theory not be taught to first graders and all this kind of stuff.
They're at it again.
Now, Claudine remained longer than others.
The Penn president resigned during their testimony to Congress.
This is all about basically dissent against Israel on campus, including protest, etc.
Now, we don't have to revisit everything that they said.
We talked about that when it happened back in, was it November or something like that?
I would just say, as a reiteration, their testimony before Congress was completely sound.
And I actually don't have any criticisms over what they said.
They effectively did the Brandenburg test.
With the First Amendment as a model for what discourse should be on campus.
So you should not punish anyone for free speech.
And you should obviously punish someone for what is harassment, you know, getting in someone's face, preventing them from going about their day, needlessly isolating an individual, death threats.
Those are just simply crimes.
But other than that, free speech should be promoted, in fact, and facilitated.
And that includes bold statements like, from the river to the sea.
It might even include an extremely bold statement like, I think we should wipe Israel off the map.
Because... That does pass the Brandenburg test in the sense that it is an outrageous declaration, but it's something that is not a direct threat.
You could call it venting or boasting or whatever.
But you should not fire people for the fact that they went a bit too far in their rhetoric.
You can obviously fire them if they are engaging in what is harassment or threats, direct threats to an individual, directing violence.
This is how the First Amendment is understood in the second half of the 20th century, basically.
And everything that they said was completely sound.
Now, these women were, and they were all women, were remarkably inarticulate and...
Maybe inarticulate is not the right word.
They were articulate, but they were remarkably uncharismatic, and they were remarkably robotic and boring in the way that they articulated this ideal.
And they aren't the kind of image we might have of a Harvard president who's a...
Dazzling intellectual, but also a kind of avuncular character.
He comes in smoking a pipe and wearing tweed and is humorous and making various literary allusions, etc.
I think if someone were like that, they probably could have gotten away with sustaining free speech on...
Ivy League campuses.
But instead, we have these midwit social climbers like Claudine Gay, who were robotically, boringly, lifelessly articulating.
What is the standard of free speech in this country?
And maybe for that, they almost deserve their firing or shouldn't complain.
But Claudine Gay was a little bit worse.
She has engaged in what I can tell is a lot of lazy plagiarism.
I think it's safe to say that Gladien Gay is not a terribly interesting scholar.
She's obviously a product of affirmative action and just the kind of hopes and dreams of white liberals for what they want to see academia become.
She is clearly just lifting sentences from other people's work.
Now, and without citing them.
And I think, again, I would almost describe it as lazy more than anything.
Because she even plagiarized a preface to a book or something in which she was thanking people.
She's just lifting turns of phrases from other people's works.
So she's acting like chat GPT in a way.
And I think that's probably telling.
Like, she is a human chat GPT who's...
Paraphrasing, summarizing, and in some cases just outright lifting sentences from other people's work, but kind of melding it together into something fairly new.
we're all lazy to some degree.
We certainly all engage in paraphrasing.
We're not the best in terms of, you know, putting forth an idea without citing it, without giving credit to someone.
That is a sort of ethical crime.
This was worse.
And so I understand it, but I don't know.
I, in a way, feel sorry for her because, I mean, I hate to sound overly racist here, but why are we putting these people in a position that they're not going to succeed, where they're not going to succeed?
In the sense of, why are we promoting these diversity hires and just putting them in a place where they don't...
I mean, they're going to act like chat GPT because that's how they think about academia.
Like, you dot your I's and cross your T's, and they promote you because you're black.
And you go with the flow of general academic opinion, and then you get invited to conferences where you can spout bromides and paraphrase other people's data.
I mean, it's...
She was good in the...
I mean, it's a...
maybe I'm being overly sympathetic.
There's a certain degree of tragedy of this kind of thing where well-wishing white people throw her out there and she's never going to be able to succeed because she doesn't have the
of a scholar in which you do engage in original thinking and you do engage in original interpretation and you do engage in a quest for truth in which you're breaking
through the walls.
You're not being confined with what has happened before you.
I don't think someone like this, as a midwit, and also, to be brutally frank as someone with a great deal of African ancestry, this is just not how she's going to succeed in life.
And it's just cruel to put these people in this position.
But anyway, just to sum up my position on this, I don't think she's a great scholar.
I do think she's a diversity hire.
But the only reason why this is happening is because she is allowing, soundly allowing, criticism of Israel.
And so this notion that the DEI regime has been dismantled and conservatives are now welcome on campus or whatever, that is just bullshit.
This is solely about preventing any criticism of Israel.
And understandably, if I were the next president of Harvard, a wonderful thought, Probably not going to happen.
But if I were the next president of Harvard, and I wanted to keep my job, and I wasn't as principled as some others, I would crack down on criticism of Israel.
And I would hire more pro-Israeli scholars just so we could have a bit of more hegemony on campus if I wanted to keep my job.
And so it's like...
This is entirely what this situation is about.
Entirely. No one cared about her lazy scholarship until she not even criticized Israel, but allowed, hypothetically allowed, the criticism of Israel to exist.
So, I don't see this as a win at all.
In the short term, very bad.
Maybe you could say, and I Actually tend to agree with this.
In the long term, it might be good.
Because when it's just very clear that there are overt penalties to reasonable criticism of the Jewish state, people start to wonder.
It's a sign of losing legitimacy and hegemony on that issue.
So, there it is.
Yeah, plagiarism seems to be a kind of...
It's a little bit of a cliche when it comes to the Black academic, right?
I mean, we even have the example of Martin Luther King who's accused of plagiarism and committed plagiarism, as far as anyone can tell.
And, of course, he's one of the important luminaries of Black intellectual thought.
I mean, of course, he was primarily a political activist, but his influence in academia when it comes to...
You know, the sort of Black perspective, the Black intellectual perspective, obviously, is pretty enormous.
And he was a plagiarist.
Oh, yeah.
A bad plagiarist.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, wholesale lifting.
Yeah, and to your point, it comes down to laziness to some extent.
So it's really kind of an embarrassing thing to occur for, you know, the president of Harvard.
You know, an intellectual at this level, a black intellectual at this level, to be engaged in plagiarism.
I mean, it's just kind of inexcusable.
Also, Mark, don't you think it almost also comes down to arrogance?
Because, and I mean this seriously in the sense that, I mean arrogant in a good way.
If you're a real scholar or a writer, you don't think that someone else can phrase it as well as you can.
You don't want to plagiarize because you're smarter than everyone else.
You know what I mean?
There's a certain mentality of the intellectual where you want to make it new and break through the walls.
You can be inspired by other people and obviously, but your truth is so powerful and only you can deliver it and you just want to sign your name to it.
That kind of bombastic arrogance or narcissism that is a quality of almost every great intellectual or artist.
And the fact that she just does this petty crap kind of indicates to me that not only is she lazy, but she's just kind of a little social climber at the end of the day.
You know?
You want to say the right things.
You don't want to rock the boat.
You want to not offend, etc.
Great scholars want to offend.
I mean, Nietzsche blew up his entire academic career.
Extremely promising academic career.
He was the youngest.
He blew it to smithereens with the birth of tragedy.
There are some limitations to the birth of tragedy.
Whatever criticism we might have, needless to say, Nietzsche gets the last laugh.
Outside of Burkhardt or something, not a lot of his critics are being read and discussed to this day.
That's what you want an intellectual who's such a narcissist that he or she would never conceivably plagiarize.
But she's a midwit.
Yeah, I don't disagree.
I mean, why would you even be involved in intellectual pursuits if you're not trying to contribute something that's novel or new or look at it from a new angle, make a new discovery and so forth, right?
I really do.
I mean, I think it's kind of telling of how you react to this.
It's a bit of a Rorschach test.
But again, I don't respect Claudine Gay, but...
I really have a lot of just hatred for these hacks, Chris Rufo, etc., who will stoop to these levels to defend Israel.
You know, the allegations are there, and they're real, but I just don't get on board with them.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to fall in love with either side, obviously, so it's hard to, you know what I mean?
Looking at this Caducean conflict, it's right.
You don't really feel like you have a dog in the race or a dog in the fight.
I agree with that.
I mean, I guess the only thing that we can say positive is that she was stumping to some extent for free speech against Israeli pressure on campus.
So we're in favor of that as well, of course, right?
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