As usual, Chris uses facts to make his case rather than simple opinions. I want elaborate on, and place some emphasis on, Ms. Gay's academic "accomplishments." They are so slim as to not merit tenure at any even mildly decent research university, much less Harvard. You don't have to simply believe me (or Chris), look for yourself on Google Scholar. Of course, university presidents need not be great academics but she has no compensating business or government experience. So what happens when, seemingly, the only criterion to lead a university is "identity". Well, issues like hard work, merit and classical liberal values are meaningless. It chills and kills incentives for truth seeking - the purpose of the university in the first place!
100%. Identity is everything. Hard work, merit, classical liberal values are "white" and must be disparaged and removed as positive individual attributes to make way for the more . . . uh . . . laid back approach to life and work.
In the bigger picture, classical liberal values, especially individual autonomy, limited government and economic regulation, and unrestricted freedom of speech are under assault from the left, allegedly to end their asinine version of "racism" and to eliminate all hierarchies in the name of "equity." The drive to succeed must be eliminated when there are no more material signs of success left to anyone but those with (now) relatively great wealth. Buying a house, for example, and raising a family are now beyond the means of most, so we've got to crimp the desire for these "white" ambitions that will only end in frustration, maybe even frustration sufficient to begin some sort of popular drive for reform. We see the beginnings of this in Trump and the desperate attempt by the establishment to demonize him and his supporters and populism in general.
By and large universities have abandoned their old missions for neo-Marxist social justice. If we're due for a pendulum swing to the right, it ought to be a doozy. I say let it come down.
I don't hold with narratives about political "pendulum swings"- a pendulum swing is a phenomenon of physics consisting of a path that's preordained to reach equidistant extremes, only slowing under the influence of inertia, under which influence it eventually reaches terminal stasis at a midpoint.
There's no analogy to be had there. The popularity of the metaphor mystifies me: the only thing that it has going for it is that it's simple and easily visualized- and hence serves the dubious purpose of providing an easy answer in lieu of more well-considered thought. As an allegory applied to human affairs, the "pendulum swing" is both a terrible theoretical model and one that's demonstrably falsifiable in practice. The workings of societies and polities are not captive to that sort of overarching physical determinism, the way that the motion of a pendulum is ordained by the workings of gravity. Humans are capable of thinking outside of those constraints. The world would not end if the "pendulum model of ideological shift" was to be discarded.
I just want sanity restored. Temperance. Elementary fairness, not arcane servo mechanisms and futile exercises at river-pushing justified only by rhetorical obfuscation and grandiloquence. Worthy goals are not justified by deceptive means, no matter how nobly stated the intentions.
I use the pendulum-swinging metaphor without the sophisticated knowledge of physics that you evidently have. In general, once things go long enough in one direction, there is an inevitable return to the former condition. In politics, the fuckery of one faction becomes destructive so the nation swings back to the opposing faction. My only problem with this definition is that nothing is inevitable in my view.
If you want to get literal about it, the political pendulum is not subject to the laws of physics because the return swing in the opposite direction may exceed the degree of chaos or insanity or repressiveness present when the change, the movement in the opposite direction, began.
it isn't a "theoretical model," it's a metaphor, a rhetorical device. And it's not an "allegory" either. As far as I know, there is no story to go along with the pendulum metaphor, and I'm unaware of when it was first used. Maybe I'll bust out the etymological dictionary later.
I don't think we are at odds politically, but I don't understand why my reference to a pendulum swing activates your almonds so severely.
There's no need to take it personally. My objection is to the ubiquitous resort to the phrase. I have the same objections, no matter who uses it. Understand, I've heard it for decades. I still hear it all the time. I got fed up. Your use of the phrase just happened to be the nearest target of opportunity for my ire. I've since extracted the comment to post in my Substack, without any reference to how it was initially prompted.
"In general, once things go long enough in one direction, there is an inevitable return to the former condition. In politics, the fuckery of one faction becomes destructive so the nation swings back to the opposing faction."
There's a much less ambitious statement that I can agree with entirely. In a democracy, if things aren't working that way, something is wrong. The dynamics of correction are imperative, otherwise things turn inertial, continuing in the same direction despite evidence that conditions have changed.
To refer to the post topic at hand, that's a problem afflicting many social activist groups- they don't know how to take victory when they get it. After all, that would mean disbanding and returning to the post-success world, where there's now less drama and crisis to keep things interesting. Instead, the tendency is to press the advantage beyond the bounds of elementary fairness. An ego trip. Sniffing their own fumes. Cosplay, nostalgic for the bad old days that no longer exist. (At least not to anywhere near the extent that they used to be. Not even close. The evidence is obvious, and the course of integrity requires being honest about it. )
Issue activism done correctly is temp work. On any given issue, the goal should be to achieve success- and hence to work yourself out of the gig, not to continue on an endless make-work hunt to correct ever more insignificant- or even imaginary- problems. I mean, we see what's happened with the performative exercise of DEI. "Activism" has been transformed into a career sinecure. The shadow side of that situation is that "injustice" requires being transformed into a problem so intractable that it's held to be a permanent feature, rather than a matter of few occasional bugs arising in the context of a situation that's already been reformed, for all practical purposes. That last part is not just some cheap excuse, it's reality. Legacies of injustice are real, but there's no effective way to reform the past. I mean, if only. There just isn't. It's no less impossible in the case of social injustice than it is in the case of past tragedies resulting from a lack of medical knowledge. When justice is substantially achieved in a given arena, take the win and face forward. For those bent on social reform as a profession, isn't as if there are no other problems that require urgent attention. Real serious problems, requiring more diligence and effort than DEI bureaucracy planning sessions about how to shift deck chairs on the Titanic, or demanding ever more elaborate efforts by government to save people from the consequences of their own reckless personal decisions (and then complaining about their lack of effectiveness.)
"My only problem with this definition is that nothing is inevitable in my view."
That's a big part of my problem with the pendulum explanation of democratic politics, too. But another implication of accepting the statement is that an overcorrection to one extreme can only be remedied by a swing to the opposite extreme. And that the extremes are somehow required, that we're captive to some process of momentum beyond anyone's control.
"It isn't a "theoretical model," it's a metaphor, a rhetorical device."
Actually, it's all those things. It's a theoretical model misappropriated as a metaphor that sucks, for use as a rhetorical device that's lazy and implicitly misleading. And yeah, I do want to get literal about it. Because when partisan extremists exploit the fakeness of the bad metaphor, they're out to win all the marbles and keep them. And when I hear the metaphor from people who aren't partisan extremists, all too often it's maundering apologism from careerist politicos that implies their helplessness to do anything to affect the supposed workings of an awesome force as powerful and predetermined as ocean tides.
Mostly, though, it's merely about default to common usage as verbal currency. However, in this case the currency happens to be counterfeit. So the default includes an absence of examination that perpetuates unclear thinking. Because metaphors are important, and rotten ones lead the social conversation to continue in rote unproductive ways, on the basis of shoddy framings.
Incidentally, I first learned about pendulums in my (public) junior high school. In the 1960s and 70s, that material wasn't considered high-level stuff taught only to science nerds. Although I did my level best to go along with the all-American social pressure to not be one, by earning a gentleman's D in 10th grade (non-AP) introductory physics. I hadn't even started smoking pot at that point. Unlike the two aces in that class- one the son of an NCO and direct descendant of a Hessian deserter, the other the son of an Air Force officer who just happened to be black as the ace of spades. Acid-droppers, both of them...
Just a little story there. Sorry about the digression.
Harvard, along with many other “universities” chose this path out of their own free will. They were given a choice at a critical moment in time to use judiciousness and ethics to determine the just path forward, and they failed.
They chose the anti-intellectual, anti-truth, anti-ethical path because it was the most convenient. Nothing more needs to be said, they are frauds and charlatans, and atop this illiberal, racist Panderverse sits Mean girl, but who else better to divide and conquer, it’s her special talent to make everything in life bow to her will. She’s been taught that that is her role from the moment she was born, so to anyone with eyes wide open, this is no surprise, but the natural consequence of what Society has created?! A lot of things need to be called into question, whether they will or not is anyone’s guess, kudos to Rufo again for showing us what leadership should be!
I hope recent graduates and those thereafter meet hurdles in future hiring processes. Bringing these indoctrinated minds full of hateful and unjust attitudes into their workplaces will be a disaster. Harvard needs to be financially starved and cancelled of its former prestige.
In the 'The Diversity Delusion' Heather Mac Donald takes the words from your mouth when she asks “are there any grown-ups left on campus, at least in the administrative offices?” She makes a convincing case that this multi-billion campus bureaucracy is likely to have harmed the interests of as many students of colour as it has helped. A study in 2004 found that, by pushing black student with relatively low SAT scores into the most elite law schools, affirmative action actually had the effect of reducing the number of qualified black lawyers. “As such findings mount, the conclusion will become inescapable: College leaders who embrace affirmative action do so simply to flatter their own egos so that they can gaze upon their ‘diverse’ realm and bask in their noblesse oblige.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Gay is a POS and so are all those that think like her. Angry bitter nasty racist communists determined to destroy this country along with all Western countries.
Well, you have an entire generation, GenZ, and whatever generation is following it who have been schooled in this nonsensical way of thinking. They are the White House interns penning an open letter to Biden on the Israel - Hamas War, they are the idiots who attend and have attended Harvard and other Ivies for the past 10 years. Their minds have been filled with mush (as Limbaugh used to say). so, yes, they are this dumb.
You have to be filled with a lot of hate to hate your country, most of your country's population, and judge your opposition by their inability to create a utopia. That's the far-left in a nutshell.
"Nor is she a competent administrator, having botched the response to rampant anti-Semitism on campus and, by one estimate, lost the university more than $1 billion in donations."
Sadly Harvard's endowment makes this not quite the massive amount it would be elsewhere.
Many of those portraits of white men in question were presidents of Harvard. My great-uncle, Bernard Keyes, painted several of those portraits hanging in that hall, and he was in awe of them.
People like Gay have problems with themselves. They know they are not anywhere near parity with the "straight white men" who established and maintained these institutions for centuries. Since their problem is with themselves, no amount of genuflection by idiot liberals will "fix" anything.
The envy and rage will continue unabated until people like her wreck what was previously a functioning multi-ethnic society. Stay strapped.
I'm not a white nationalist... Not because I don't think it's justified at this point, but because if you go down that road, it's not going to stop, and it would wind up killing people I care about.
That said, if the left continues allowing substandard degenerates like Gay to wreck all our institutions, that's what we're going to wind up with.
"White Nationalist" is one of those terms like "Election Denier" and "Conspiracy Theorist" and "Anti-Vaxxer" and a host of other monikers that the lunatic Left and the corporate globalists use to denigrate us and thereby prevent the sheeple from researching topics for themselves. Please try reading the content there and especially watching the videos there before you let others decide the quality of the content for you.
I've watched him before on several occasions. White identity politics is not really appealing to me.
That said, the further this goes, and the more I'm asked to grant decency towards people with brown skin in exchange for an obviously bloody future for my kids and grandkids, the more compelling he sounds.
Jared Taylor's American Renaissance is not just about protecting whites from the increasingly blatant anti-white biases (what you might call "white identity politics"): it's about our survival as a society and likely even your personal survival. The denial of racial aptitude differences drives most of the Democrats' policy agenda: If there are indeed no racial or gender differences in aptitudes and preferences, then all discrepancies between hiring vs. population demographics must be due to systemic racism and sexism. This in turn suggests that our aptitude tests that select job applicants are mostly just racist and sexist filters that must be eliminated in order to force job title demographis to match population demographics. Would you, for example, imagine that the FAA has already scrapped a spatial aptitude test entirely because it fails "too many" non-white people, and replaced it with a "biographical assessment" that filters out otherwise qualified whites, thereby producing a dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers? Would you imagine that the Biden administration would nominate an FAA director who is not a pilot and appears to know absolutely nothing about flying airplanes? Are you thinking about getting on an airplane soon? Maybe you should think again: https://www.amren.com/videos/2023/11/think-twice-before-you-fly/
I get it, and agree, but so would someone like Stephen Pinker, and he's just a realist, not an identarian.
But... Moderates like him have been fighting this sort of thing unsuccessfully for decades until people like Taylor (and to a much lesser degree, Trump) showed up.
So, I'm not criticizing Jared Taylor. He's needed. Nice words and reason don't work by themselves, clearly.
TBH, I think this has a lot more to do with spoiled women in consequence-free positions of authority than it does minorities. They push identity politics so hard because they can't recognize competence, productive activity, or rational decision making, so they can't make sense of disparate outcomes and just go to appearance because they're so vapid and idiotic.
That site is part of the inevitable backlash against anti-white racism in our institutions and the propagation in universities of the concept of "whiteness" that has nothing to do with race at all. Fuck with the bull you get the horn.
"Race realism" indeed. Let the cultural critique of blackness proceed and let the chips fall.
Here's the famous record of an oppressed black woman handing it to her oppressor in a convivial bull session typical of contemporary higher ed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IEFD_JVYd0
The clip is 8 years old already, but It epitomizes the sophisticated dialog on race we expect from the Ivies.
Great post, Rufo - your work is invaluable. So what you are saying is that... Since our 'leaders' sent all of our work overseas in the last 30 years we have too many people who are worthless; mostly bureaucrats who invent issues? I agree.
The saddest thing in all of this? Gay merely justifies concerns about hiring people of her racial persuasion. She and others like her -- and there are MANY -- undermine the institutions that treated them better than they treat people of other racial persuasions. There are too many stories out there of black people, in particular, creating chaos in the institutions, breeding resentment and divisiveness. Honestly, until they start displaying out group objectivity (let 'em sign a statement on THAT) they should be thrown to the wolves.
Excellent research and spot-on analysis by Rufo. Glad that he is exposing, with specific examples, the effects of this hateful, racist (and ultimately violent) social justice ideology and “decolonization” movement that have completely seized control of Harvard. Rufo demonstrates how DEI is revising history, vilifying important historical figures, and even creating its own lexicon - all based solely on race and identity. The plagiarism angle shows how easily Harvard can dismiss even its own academic standards in favor of DEI. Sadly, it’s the tip of the iceberg and it’s pervasive throughout higher education.
Please include her treatment of Roland Fryer in your writing. Fryer, a black economist was pur on unpaid leave, his education research program was shut down, all because of her vindictiveness. He published research that didn't fit her narrative. VTW, Gay came from a wealthy background, attended all the right schools. Fryer came out of a broken family.
The entire Democratic Party platform is based on a fixation with bogus "social justice" causes that are heavily obsessed with race, so you won't be seeing a reduced focus any time soon.
The banality of the banal. The Free Press reported earlier this year on elite college graduates who would go on to jobs after surfing through undergrad getting easy As in worthless classes. When they were confronted with something they didn’t know in their new jobs, they would just watch a YouTube video and move on to the task at hand. I do think essentially YouTube and the like can replace much of what passes for undergraduate education these days. One hopes that, someday soon, this will bring pricing discipline to education and see to the end of useless degrees and, frankly, useless colleges. The less President Gay and her cohorts matter, the better.
As usual, Chris uses facts to make his case rather than simple opinions. I want elaborate on, and place some emphasis on, Ms. Gay's academic "accomplishments." They are so slim as to not merit tenure at any even mildly decent research university, much less Harvard. You don't have to simply believe me (or Chris), look for yourself on Google Scholar. Of course, university presidents need not be great academics but she has no compensating business or government experience. So what happens when, seemingly, the only criterion to lead a university is "identity". Well, issues like hard work, merit and classical liberal values are meaningless. It chills and kills incentives for truth seeking - the purpose of the university in the first place!
Thanks!
The Harvard Corporation board hired her and refuses to fire her. They are complicit because they are just as demoralized and compromised as she is. I expose them here: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-get-into-harvard-gay-bobo-corporation
100%. Identity is everything. Hard work, merit, classical liberal values are "white" and must be disparaged and removed as positive individual attributes to make way for the more . . . uh . . . laid back approach to life and work.
In the bigger picture, classical liberal values, especially individual autonomy, limited government and economic regulation, and unrestricted freedom of speech are under assault from the left, allegedly to end their asinine version of "racism" and to eliminate all hierarchies in the name of "equity." The drive to succeed must be eliminated when there are no more material signs of success left to anyone but those with (now) relatively great wealth. Buying a house, for example, and raising a family are now beyond the means of most, so we've got to crimp the desire for these "white" ambitions that will only end in frustration, maybe even frustration sufficient to begin some sort of popular drive for reform. We see the beginnings of this in Trump and the desperate attempt by the establishment to demonize him and his supporters and populism in general.
By and large universities have abandoned their old missions for neo-Marxist social justice. If we're due for a pendulum swing to the right, it ought to be a doozy. I say let it come down.
I hope its such a doozy that we will need helmets. Bring it on!
And this is how the greatest nation on Earth falls - not with a bang, but a whimper.
I don't hold with narratives about political "pendulum swings"- a pendulum swing is a phenomenon of physics consisting of a path that's preordained to reach equidistant extremes, only slowing under the influence of inertia, under which influence it eventually reaches terminal stasis at a midpoint.
There's no analogy to be had there. The popularity of the metaphor mystifies me: the only thing that it has going for it is that it's simple and easily visualized- and hence serves the dubious purpose of providing an easy answer in lieu of more well-considered thought. As an allegory applied to human affairs, the "pendulum swing" is both a terrible theoretical model and one that's demonstrably falsifiable in practice. The workings of societies and polities are not captive to that sort of overarching physical determinism, the way that the motion of a pendulum is ordained by the workings of gravity. Humans are capable of thinking outside of those constraints. The world would not end if the "pendulum model of ideological shift" was to be discarded.
I just want sanity restored. Temperance. Elementary fairness, not arcane servo mechanisms and futile exercises at river-pushing justified only by rhetorical obfuscation and grandiloquence. Worthy goals are not justified by deceptive means, no matter how nobly stated the intentions.
I use the pendulum-swinging metaphor without the sophisticated knowledge of physics that you evidently have. In general, once things go long enough in one direction, there is an inevitable return to the former condition. In politics, the fuckery of one faction becomes destructive so the nation swings back to the opposing faction. My only problem with this definition is that nothing is inevitable in my view.
If you want to get literal about it, the political pendulum is not subject to the laws of physics because the return swing in the opposite direction may exceed the degree of chaos or insanity or repressiveness present when the change, the movement in the opposite direction, began.
it isn't a "theoretical model," it's a metaphor, a rhetorical device. And it's not an "allegory" either. As far as I know, there is no story to go along with the pendulum metaphor, and I'm unaware of when it was first used. Maybe I'll bust out the etymological dictionary later.
I don't think we are at odds politically, but I don't understand why my reference to a pendulum swing activates your almonds so severely.
There's no need to take it personally. My objection is to the ubiquitous resort to the phrase. I have the same objections, no matter who uses it. Understand, I've heard it for decades. I still hear it all the time. I got fed up. Your use of the phrase just happened to be the nearest target of opportunity for my ire. I've since extracted the comment to post in my Substack, without any reference to how it was initially prompted.
"In general, once things go long enough in one direction, there is an inevitable return to the former condition. In politics, the fuckery of one faction becomes destructive so the nation swings back to the opposing faction."
There's a much less ambitious statement that I can agree with entirely. In a democracy, if things aren't working that way, something is wrong. The dynamics of correction are imperative, otherwise things turn inertial, continuing in the same direction despite evidence that conditions have changed.
To refer to the post topic at hand, that's a problem afflicting many social activist groups- they don't know how to take victory when they get it. After all, that would mean disbanding and returning to the post-success world, where there's now less drama and crisis to keep things interesting. Instead, the tendency is to press the advantage beyond the bounds of elementary fairness. An ego trip. Sniffing their own fumes. Cosplay, nostalgic for the bad old days that no longer exist. (At least not to anywhere near the extent that they used to be. Not even close. The evidence is obvious, and the course of integrity requires being honest about it. )
Issue activism done correctly is temp work. On any given issue, the goal should be to achieve success- and hence to work yourself out of the gig, not to continue on an endless make-work hunt to correct ever more insignificant- or even imaginary- problems. I mean, we see what's happened with the performative exercise of DEI. "Activism" has been transformed into a career sinecure. The shadow side of that situation is that "injustice" requires being transformed into a problem so intractable that it's held to be a permanent feature, rather than a matter of few occasional bugs arising in the context of a situation that's already been reformed, for all practical purposes. That last part is not just some cheap excuse, it's reality. Legacies of injustice are real, but there's no effective way to reform the past. I mean, if only. There just isn't. It's no less impossible in the case of social injustice than it is in the case of past tragedies resulting from a lack of medical knowledge. When justice is substantially achieved in a given arena, take the win and face forward. For those bent on social reform as a profession, isn't as if there are no other problems that require urgent attention. Real serious problems, requiring more diligence and effort than DEI bureaucracy planning sessions about how to shift deck chairs on the Titanic, or demanding ever more elaborate efforts by government to save people from the consequences of their own reckless personal decisions (and then complaining about their lack of effectiveness.)
"My only problem with this definition is that nothing is inevitable in my view."
That's a big part of my problem with the pendulum explanation of democratic politics, too. But another implication of accepting the statement is that an overcorrection to one extreme can only be remedied by a swing to the opposite extreme. And that the extremes are somehow required, that we're captive to some process of momentum beyond anyone's control.
"It isn't a "theoretical model," it's a metaphor, a rhetorical device."
Actually, it's all those things. It's a theoretical model misappropriated as a metaphor that sucks, for use as a rhetorical device that's lazy and implicitly misleading. And yeah, I do want to get literal about it. Because when partisan extremists exploit the fakeness of the bad metaphor, they're out to win all the marbles and keep them. And when I hear the metaphor from people who aren't partisan extremists, all too often it's maundering apologism from careerist politicos that implies their helplessness to do anything to affect the supposed workings of an awesome force as powerful and predetermined as ocean tides.
Mostly, though, it's merely about default to common usage as verbal currency. However, in this case the currency happens to be counterfeit. So the default includes an absence of examination that perpetuates unclear thinking. Because metaphors are important, and rotten ones lead the social conversation to continue in rote unproductive ways, on the basis of shoddy framings.
Incidentally, I first learned about pendulums in my (public) junior high school. In the 1960s and 70s, that material wasn't considered high-level stuff taught only to science nerds. Although I did my level best to go along with the all-American social pressure to not be one, by earning a gentleman's D in 10th grade (non-AP) introductory physics. I hadn't even started smoking pot at that point. Unlike the two aces in that class- one the son of an NCO and direct descendant of a Hessian deserter, the other the son of an Air Force officer who just happened to be black as the ace of spades. Acid-droppers, both of them...
Just a little story there. Sorry about the digression.
Don’t confuse me with the facts!
Harvard, along with many other “universities” chose this path out of their own free will. They were given a choice at a critical moment in time to use judiciousness and ethics to determine the just path forward, and they failed.
They chose the anti-intellectual, anti-truth, anti-ethical path because it was the most convenient. Nothing more needs to be said, they are frauds and charlatans, and atop this illiberal, racist Panderverse sits Mean girl, but who else better to divide and conquer, it’s her special talent to make everything in life bow to her will. She’s been taught that that is her role from the moment she was born, so to anyone with eyes wide open, this is no surprise, but the natural consequence of what Society has created?! A lot of things need to be called into question, whether they will or not is anyone’s guess, kudos to Rufo again for showing us what leadership should be!
I hope recent graduates and those thereafter meet hurdles in future hiring processes. Bringing these indoctrinated minds full of hateful and unjust attitudes into their workplaces will be a disaster. Harvard needs to be financially starved and cancelled of its former prestige.
In the 'The Diversity Delusion' Heather Mac Donald takes the words from your mouth when she asks “are there any grown-ups left on campus, at least in the administrative offices?” She makes a convincing case that this multi-billion campus bureaucracy is likely to have harmed the interests of as many students of colour as it has helped. A study in 2004 found that, by pushing black student with relatively low SAT scores into the most elite law schools, affirmative action actually had the effect of reducing the number of qualified black lawyers. “As such findings mount, the conclusion will become inescapable: College leaders who embrace affirmative action do so simply to flatter their own egos so that they can gaze upon their ‘diverse’ realm and bask in their noblesse oblige.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Heather is a gem.
Terrific book, it should be required reading for every American citizen!
Gay is a POS and so are all those that think like her. Angry bitter nasty racist communists determined to destroy this country along with all Western countries.
The hypocrisy is obvious. Hard to believe Americans are too dumb to see the desecration of the country’s historical institutions.
Well, you have an entire generation, GenZ, and whatever generation is following it who have been schooled in this nonsensical way of thinking. They are the White House interns penning an open letter to Biden on the Israel - Hamas War, they are the idiots who attend and have attended Harvard and other Ivies for the past 10 years. Their minds have been filled with mush (as Limbaugh used to say). so, yes, they are this dumb.
JS.. Yep, I think hate is the word.
You have to be filled with a lot of hate to hate your country, most of your country's population, and judge your opposition by their inability to create a utopia. That's the far-left in a nutshell.
Miss GAY disgusts me as a human being, having no qualifications of being president in any institution but also lacking soul and spirit.
Nothing will be made better under her tenure but replacing education for revolution.
"Nor is she a competent administrator, having botched the response to rampant anti-Semitism on campus and, by one estimate, lost the university more than $1 billion in donations."
Sadly Harvard's endowment makes this not quite the massive amount it would be elsewhere.
Just thinking the same thing.
Many of those portraits of white men in question were presidents of Harvard. My great-uncle, Bernard Keyes, painted several of those portraits hanging in that hall, and he was in awe of them.
True, but still has an effect.
People like Gay have problems with themselves. They know they are not anywhere near parity with the "straight white men" who established and maintained these institutions for centuries. Since their problem is with themselves, no amount of genuflection by idiot liberals will "fix" anything.
The envy and rage will continue unabated until people like her wreck what was previously a functioning multi-ethnic society. Stay strapped.
You would enjoy Jared Taylor's "American Renaissance" web site.
I'm not a white nationalist... Not because I don't think it's justified at this point, but because if you go down that road, it's not going to stop, and it would wind up killing people I care about.
That said, if the left continues allowing substandard degenerates like Gay to wreck all our institutions, that's what we're going to wind up with.
"White Nationalist" is one of those terms like "Election Denier" and "Conspiracy Theorist" and "Anti-Vaxxer" and a host of other monikers that the lunatic Left and the corporate globalists use to denigrate us and thereby prevent the sheeple from researching topics for themselves. Please try reading the content there and especially watching the videos there before you let others decide the quality of the content for you.
I've watched him before on several occasions. White identity politics is not really appealing to me.
That said, the further this goes, and the more I'm asked to grant decency towards people with brown skin in exchange for an obviously bloody future for my kids and grandkids, the more compelling he sounds.
Jared Taylor's American Renaissance is not just about protecting whites from the increasingly blatant anti-white biases (what you might call "white identity politics"): it's about our survival as a society and likely even your personal survival. The denial of racial aptitude differences drives most of the Democrats' policy agenda: If there are indeed no racial or gender differences in aptitudes and preferences, then all discrepancies between hiring vs. population demographics must be due to systemic racism and sexism. This in turn suggests that our aptitude tests that select job applicants are mostly just racist and sexist filters that must be eliminated in order to force job title demographis to match population demographics. Would you, for example, imagine that the FAA has already scrapped a spatial aptitude test entirely because it fails "too many" non-white people, and replaced it with a "biographical assessment" that filters out otherwise qualified whites, thereby producing a dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers? Would you imagine that the Biden administration would nominate an FAA director who is not a pilot and appears to know absolutely nothing about flying airplanes? Are you thinking about getting on an airplane soon? Maybe you should think again: https://www.amren.com/videos/2023/11/think-twice-before-you-fly/
I get it, and agree, but so would someone like Stephen Pinker, and he's just a realist, not an identarian.
But... Moderates like him have been fighting this sort of thing unsuccessfully for decades until people like Taylor (and to a much lesser degree, Trump) showed up.
So, I'm not criticizing Jared Taylor. He's needed. Nice words and reason don't work by themselves, clearly.
TBH, I think this has a lot more to do with spoiled women in consequence-free positions of authority than it does minorities. They push identity politics so hard because they can't recognize competence, productive activity, or rational decision making, so they can't make sense of disparate outcomes and just go to appearance because they're so vapid and idiotic.
That site is part of the inevitable backlash against anti-white racism in our institutions and the propagation in universities of the concept of "whiteness" that has nothing to do with race at all. Fuck with the bull you get the horn.
"Race realism" indeed. Let the cultural critique of blackness proceed and let the chips fall.
Here's the famous record of an oppressed black woman handing it to her oppressor in a convivial bull session typical of contemporary higher ed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IEFD_JVYd0
The clip is 8 years old already, but It epitomizes the sophisticated dialog on race we expect from the Ivies.
Has that shrieking harpy ever been identified?
Not that I know of, but I'm sure she will find success as a black Yalie with the correct attitude.
Great post, Rufo - your work is invaluable. So what you are saying is that... Since our 'leaders' sent all of our work overseas in the last 30 years we have too many people who are worthless; mostly bureaucrats who invent issues? I agree.
Appreciate it.
The saddest thing in all of this? Gay merely justifies concerns about hiring people of her racial persuasion. She and others like her -- and there are MANY -- undermine the institutions that treated them better than they treat people of other racial persuasions. There are too many stories out there of black people, in particular, creating chaos in the institutions, breeding resentment and divisiveness. Honestly, until they start displaying out group objectivity (let 'em sign a statement on THAT) they should be thrown to the wolves.
Excellent research and spot-on analysis by Rufo. Glad that he is exposing, with specific examples, the effects of this hateful, racist (and ultimately violent) social justice ideology and “decolonization” movement that have completely seized control of Harvard. Rufo demonstrates how DEI is revising history, vilifying important historical figures, and even creating its own lexicon - all based solely on race and identity. The plagiarism angle shows how easily Harvard can dismiss even its own academic standards in favor of DEI. Sadly, it’s the tip of the iceberg and it’s pervasive throughout higher education.
Thanks!
Thank you for your clarity & persistence Chris.
Please include her treatment of Roland Fryer in your writing. Fryer, a black economist was pur on unpaid leave, his education research program was shut down, all because of her vindictiveness. He published research that didn't fit her narrative. VTW, Gay came from a wealthy background, attended all the right schools. Fryer came out of a broken family.
Fryer is great.
Until large amounts of money leave the institution, she and the bureaucracy will try to ride it out.
Call me crazy, but isn’t the way to reduce race based stress, to reduce focus on race???
The entire Democratic Party platform is based on a fixation with bogus "social justice" causes that are heavily obsessed with race, so you won't be seeing a reduced focus any time soon.
The banality of the banal. The Free Press reported earlier this year on elite college graduates who would go on to jobs after surfing through undergrad getting easy As in worthless classes. When they were confronted with something they didn’t know in their new jobs, they would just watch a YouTube video and move on to the task at hand. I do think essentially YouTube and the like can replace much of what passes for undergraduate education these days. One hopes that, someday soon, this will bring pricing discipline to education and see to the end of useless degrees and, frankly, useless colleges. The less President Gay and her cohorts matter, the better.
We need massive disruption to the higher ed system.
This possibly explains why those who wrap themselves in the cloak of academe are enthusiastic promoters of DEI propaganda:
“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”
— George Bernard Shaw