Jamaal Bowman: Claudine Gay is ‘a brilliant & historic Black woman’ who was ‘bullied’ by ‘fascists’

Christopher Brunet and Christopher Rufo did much to uncover and publicize examples of Claudine Gay’s serial plagiarism, and had criticized her when, as Dean of the FAS, she had defended Professor Ryan Enos from charges of using fabricated datasets. Some have suggested that her investigation of sexual misconduct charges brought against Lawrence Fryer, a black professor of economics, and the punishment he endured — two years of unpaid leave — were motivated in part by personal animus, for Fryer’s work directly contradicted her own. Brunet wrote in October 2022:

I can’t stress enough how much of a tragedy a Claudine Gay presidency would be — this mustn’t be allowed to come to pass. She will ruin Harvard. She’s an intellectual lightweight (her entire body of critical race theory “research” is flawed and/or fake), a far-far-far-left DEI activist, and corrupt as hell.

She became president of Harvard, in what many believe was a clear example of race-conscious hiring by the Harvard Corporation, and during the six months of her tenure she has brought the university to a state of disarray that will continue even after she packs up at Massachusetts Hall and returns to her job as a Professor of Government and of African and African-American studies, as the faculty, and students, will continue to be split on Gay’s resignation. While a beneficiary of affirmative action herself, she has been especially harsh in dealing with black male faculty members.

Meanwhile, those who believe Gay did nothing wrong, but was a victim of “white racism,” have predictably declared themselves outraged at the injustice. Never mind her morally obtuse reply to a Congresswoman, who asked if she considered threats of genocide directed at Jews to have violated Harvard’s Code of Conduct, and Gay could only answer “it depends on the context.” Never mind the fact that extensive evidence of her serial plagiarism exists, not only in parts of her doctoral dissertation, but in 7 of the 11 articles she has published in the last 26 years. None of that matters. She is black; she felt compelled to resign; the only conceivable reason is “white racism.”

Here, for example, is that inimitable race-baiter and flim-flam man Al Sharpton, who expressed outrage at Claudine Gay’s resignation in a statement on Tuesday, January 2: “President Gay’s resignation is about more than a person or a single incident. This is an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling,” he said.

It’s an attack on “every black woman”? But Gay’s severest critic, on the subject of her plagiarism, is one of those she lifted material from: Professor Emerita Carol M. Swain, who — take note, Al Sharpton — is a black woman.

Ibram X. Kendi is another academic entrepreneur. He set up his very own Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, where he ran it as a personal fiefdom, managing to attract $30 million in donors’ funding, but it now appears that the Center went through all that money in three years, it appears, with little — no book, no “trailblazing” research — to show for it. This year, Kendi fired 19 of the 36 staff members, who were deeply dismayed by Kendi’s high-handed ways at the Center, and alarmed at the mysterious disappearance of so much money.

Kendi has just offered his view on X (formerly known as Twitter) — for which the world has no doubt been waiting — of the true meaning of the Claudine Gay scandal: “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence posed 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.”

And a congressman, Jamaal Bowman, a camp-follower of The Squad, has also had his say about the real reason for the resignation of the victimized Claudine Gay:

This isn’t about plagiarism or antisemitism. This is about racism and intimidation. This makes no one safer. The only winners are fascists who bullied a brilliant & historic Black woman into resignation. 2024 will be a battle for truth, democracy and our shared humanity.

So all those who think that a college president, discovered to be a serial plagiarist, with nearly 50 examples of such unattributed lifting in 7 of the 11 papers she has published in the last 26 years, should resign, must surely be “fascists.” Yes, I can hear those Stormtroopers now, singing the Horst Wessel Song as they march menacingly through Harvard Yard, making a circuit from Massachusetts Hall to the Carpenter Center to the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and then back, only to repeat the march again, and yet again. These “fascist white racists “ have “bullied a brilliant and historic black woman.”