In a recent essay, Victor David Hanson concisely summarizes why the Left’s angry narrative that Claudine Gay was forced out as Harvard’s president because of racial discrimination is untenable and self-damning. He wrote in part,

…In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal. Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop antisemitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism. Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons. One, Gay’s meager publication record — a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own — had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.

Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant antisemitism on their campuses. Instead, both pleaded “free speech” and “context” considerations.

Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities — except apparently white males and Jews. Yet Magill was immediately forced to resign, and Gay was not. Also noteworthy was Magill’s far more impressive and extensive administrative experience, along with a more prestigious scholarship that was free of even a suggestion of plagiarism.

Academia’s immediate firing of a white woman while trying desperately to save the career of a less qualified and ethically challenged Black woman will be seen not as a case of racial bias but more likely of racial preference.

And yet one after another of the prominent pundits, journalists and commentators immediately worked hard to spread the “Gay was a victim of systemic racism” narrative. In so doing, they discredited themselves and the ideology that warps their judgment and ethics.

Presidential candidate Cornel West, a former Harvard professor, wrote, “How sad but predictable that the same figures and forces enabling the ethnic cleansing and genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza – Ackman, Blum, Summers and others – push out the first Black woman president of Harvard! This racism against both Palestinians and Black people is undeniable and despicable! I have experienced similar attacks from the same forces in academia with too many of my colleagues remaining silent! When big money dictates university policy and raw power dictates foreign policy, the moral bankruptcy of American education and democracy looms large! But we shall remain strong in our fight for Truth Justice Love!”

Al Sharpton told his MSNBC audience that the Harvard president’s resignation is an “attack” on “every Black woman” in US.

Mara Gay, one of several NYT’s race-baiters, told MSNBC that”This is really an attack on academic freedom … This is an attack on diversity. This is an attack on multiculturalism, & … I don’t have to say that they’re racist, because you can hear and see the racism in the attacks”

Daily Beast’s race-obsessed pundit Wajahat Ali tweeted, “Chris Rufo and bad faith right wing actors win again.”

Jemele Hill, another Times racist, wrote, “When white people are hired in any position, the automatic assumption is they were the best person. When Black people are hired, it’s assumed we got there because of affirmative action — which by the way doesn’t mean under-qualified. If affirmative action never existed, a lot of white people would still believe deeply in their own superiority because that is what they’ve been taught. Considering there have been 30 presidents at Harvard and Claudine Gay was the only Black one in history, she had to be extremely qualified to even be in that position. But don’t let me interfere with your racism. Go off.”

Arguably the worst of MSNBC’s hosts, Joy Reid, said, “There is this sort of open war on Black progress, Black history. Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, at least up until she resigned, is now the latest casualty of that. Christopher Rufo, who is out there touting and, you know, high fiving and claiming the scalp of Claudine Gay, telegraphed that this was what they were going to do. They were going to associate these DEI professors of colleges with BLM and decolonization and Hamas in the public mind and get rid of them. He’s now claiming victory. He telegraphed that this was the campaign. Why are these elite colleges capitulating to it and essentially making it so uncomfortable for these women leaders that they have to step down to be replaced by white men?”

[ADDED] On MSNBC, “1619 Project” fantasist Nikole Hannah-Jones said, “My heart is really with Dr. Gay. This is a woman who has had a stellar academic career, and has had her reputation sullied strictly for political reasons. I know exactly what that’s like. This is not about plagiarism. This is not about anti-Semitism. This is about….an extremely well organized propaganda campaign from the right to make anyone black in a high position of power to seem like a diversity hire, an unqualified affirmative action hire. This is the next iteration of the anti-Critical Race Theory campaign that led to the banning of books and curricula that’s now trying to target people of color in leadership positions and do a great deal of damage to the racial progress that has been made.”

Ibram X. Kendri: “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism. What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to conflicts and clicks.”

In a head-exploding op-ed for the Times, its senior anti-white racist, Charles M. Blow, classified Gay’s fall as a both racist and sexist, writing in part,

But the campaign against [Gay]was never truly about her testimony or accusations of plagiarism. It was a political attack on a symbol. It was a campaign of abrogation. It was and is a project of displacement and defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress….

At a time when Black women are ascendant in the culture, they have become, for some, the emblems of unwelcome change; their presence in positions of power represents a threat to the power traditionally clustered in the hands of a few.

As such, Black women see their credentials relentlessly attacked, their characters impugned, their lives scoured. The issue is not that the bar is lowered for them to succeed but rather raised so that any imperfection can be inflated into a fundamental flaw.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press, in a report that it had to change after the criticism of its bias became overwhelming, spun the whole episode as an example of right-wing character assassins “weaponizing” plagiarism as a new way to “target” progressive academics. The story prominently quoted Walter M. Kimbrough, the former president of the historically Black Dillard University, who said what unfolded at Harvard reminded him of an adage from his mother, a Black graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1950s. As a Black person in academia, “you always have to be twice, three times as good,” he said. “There are going to be people, particularly if they have any inkling that the person of color is not the most qualified, who will label them a ‘DEI hire,’ like they tried to label her. If you want to lead an institution like (Harvard) … there are going to be people who are looking to disqualify you.”

In this same vein, the Times had another head-exploding op-ed this week exonerating Gay while completely distorting her culpability for her fate. Black opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom, in her piece titled “The Claudine Gay Debacle Was Never About Merit,” represented the entire episode as right-wing opponents of diversity in American society targeting Gay because, as a black woman, she was unqualified for her job in their bigoted persepctive. In the entire essay, it is never mentioned that Gay embarrassed herself and the university by her atrocious answers in the Congressional hearing, or that Gay was shown to have engaged in the kind of academic misconduct that Harvard’s students may not. Plagiarism is never mentioned.

Some on the left have had the integrity to tell the truth. Like Hanson, Bates College Professor Tyler Austin Harper, unlike Davis a typical academic progressive, wrote that the attacks on Gay’s critics were disingenuous and in opposition to reality. In The Atlantic, Harper fingers what is so telling about the scandal: Gay’s defenders denied the undeniable in order to protect one of their own who was guilty as chargedand who deserved her fate. They chose to do this because they could not accept that conservatives were, in this case, 100% right.

The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it. (Soon after Rufo and Brunet made their initial accusations last month, Gay issued a statement saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.” She did not address those or subsequent plagiarism allegations in her resignation letter.) Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn’t have to give it to him…

He’s wrong about that last part, however, and I wonder how long it will take free thinkers on the Left to recognize this. It did have to happen this way because the people Harper listens to, generally agrees with and works with every day have become unacceptably corrupt, even if he is not.

What does this tell you, professor? Might it suggest that you need to readjust some of your beliefs?