You’ve no doubt seen a lot of discussion of the fact that, despite her manifest lack of qualifications, Claudine Gay got the big job at Harvard because she checked all the boxes: black, female, dedicated heart and soul to the vileness of DEI.
And that’s all true. Claudine Gay got that job running Harvard on the strength of identity politics and identity politics alone. This is a woman who is now under suspicion for some 40 allegations of plagiarism. Far from being the “distinguished scholar” she was advertised as, Gay is essentially a serial academic rapist. And Harvard, for having installed her atop its hierarchy, deserves to be deposed from the ranks of elite, or even noteworthy, universities.
Harvard has been utterly corrupted and defiled. It’s now an institution without honor or quality. Its reputation has been exposed as a fraud.
That’s the effect Claudine Gay has already had on Harvard. The only potential fix for it is her immediate resignation, along with that of all of the people involved in hiring her.
And that won’t happen.
Why? Claudine Gay also checks another set of boxes, not coincidentally the ones set out in the very title of my new book: Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama.
Indeed, there is no more apt poster child for the America Obama left us than the pathetic Ms. Gay. In a time when not just race but adherence to noxious neo-Marxism govern hiring decisions everywhere from the campus to the “entertainment” world, (and, increasingly, Fortune 500 boardrooms), no one better exemplifies the ruinous legacy of our 44th president.
And ruinous by intention. This is only one facet of the “fundamental transformation” of America that Obama promised on the eve of his 2008 election. All the American people really wanted in electing Obama was to neutralize race as a persistent issue in politics and culture, thinking that taking a chance on a not-particularly-qualified politician as our president would prove we aren’t a racist country, and further, we’d be proving that we’d realized the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that men and women would be judged in America by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
What a vile bait-and-switch that was.
Barack Obama’s own academic qualifications were dubious. It’s still not particularly well-understood how he managed to secure admission to Columbia and Harvard with undistinguished grades or how he managed to serve as president of Harvard’s law review without authoring a single article in that publication.
He advanced based on the color of his skin and not his individual merit. Everyone understands that now. Obama then demonstrated at Harvard Law along with the bizarre racist professor Derrick Bell, the inventor of Critical Race Theory, when the latter demanded the university hire more black faculty simply because they were black. This after Obama was made president of the law review simply because he was black.
As Claudine Gay was made president of the university simply because she is black.
Harvard’s prestige now lies in ruins. And that isn’t enough for Obama. Last week, it’s said that he “privately lobbied” the Harvard Corporation, a secretive entity chaired by his former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, to back Gay amid the controversy.
And as damaging as the Gay scandal — which brewed up thanks to her inability to publicly condemn the pro-Hamas demonstrators making genocidal statements about Jews and Israel on her campus – has been, it’s nonetheless not a surprise that Obama would demand Pritzker and the rest of the Harvard governors hold the line.
Benjamin Weingarten, writing at the New York Post, got this right:
To fire her would be to acknowledge the evil hatred of the West at DEI’s core; admit DEI elevates politics over merit, given Gay has proven to be something of an academic fraud; and therefore delegitimize the movement as a whole given Gay’s and Harvard’s symbolic and substantive prominence in it.
The DEI project falling in the academy would be cataclysmic for the left given these institutions are pivotal for indoctrinating and credentialing the next generation of leftist leaders atop society’s commanding heights.
Elite schools are the left’s center of gravity, feeding power centers from Washington to Wall Street to Silicon Valley.
That Obama stepped in to support Gay suggests he believes it to be a political imperative of the highest order.
Presumably he thinks circling the wagons around the besieged Harvard president will cause this scandal, exposing the emperors of the Ivy league have no clothes, to blow over.
DEI, you must understand, is the constantly metastisizing tumor of the ugly racism and full-steam identitarianism that Barack Obama inflicted on America in a hundred ways (many of them described in Racism, Revenge and Ruin) through his own hires, executive actions, corrupt legal settlements, federal grants and other activities during his eight years in office. Now, with the Obama Redux administration of Joe Biden, it isn’t just in-your-face race-based pandering blowing apart our American meritocracy.
The DEI activism standing in for competence gives us people like Ketanji Brown Jackson, Karine Jean-Pierre, “Rachel” Levine and Sam Brinton. Nobody in America still equates the holding of a high-profile job with the possession of real qualifications for it — or the ability to do that job well.
Claudine Gay is a classic case of the institutional corruption Obama set loose in America. Her continued tenure at Harvard is a bright-line crucible for the survival of King’s dream.
It’s dying. So is Harvard. And so is the America we’ve pledged allegiance to. It’s Obama holding the murder weapon.
https://spectator.org/baracks-lieutenant-the-racism-revenge-and-ruin-of-claudine-gay/
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