Unrequited Elephants and Public Faith

Harvard President Claudine Gay finally resigned this week. Not, as her peer Penn President Liz Magill did, over her grotesque failure to denounce antisemitism in Congressional testimony, but for an accrual of instances of plagiarism too great to be ignored.

That she was defenestrated not for her great sin, but for a lesser evil, leaves a bit of a sour taste.

It also reminds me of NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's ignominious resignation. Cuomo, whose bogglingly stupid policies killed thousands of senior citizens during the COVID pandemic, never got his just deserts for mass grannycide. Instead, he got flounced for being a serial creeper. It was MeToo, not piles of bodies, that pushed him out of office.

Neither Cuomo nor Gay showed an ounce of remorse in their resignations. Gay blamed racism and farcically avowed "commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor" in her resignation letter. No surprise, that racism bit. I'm not the first to suggest that she was a DEI hire, and if everything is racist, then everything is racist.

Cuomo "apologized" to the women he admitted offending while vigorously denying that his behavior was sexual harassment. Seriously, read the speech. Textbook sorry-not-sorry, finger-pointing, and "I'm the victim" audacity.

Gay is keeping her $900K per annum salary. Cuomo got to keep the profits from his book about how awesomely he handled COVID, and is now aspiring to make a political comeback as NYC's next mayor. Cuomo still has admirers, including women who dubbed themselves "Cuomosexuals" and attacked his accusers, and I'm sure that a peek into his brainpan will reveal a man who regrets only one thing - allowing himself to be pushed out of the Governor's mansion. Similarly, I bet Gay still hasn't learned a thing.

Al Capone, who per Google was "directly or indirectly responsible for over 200 murders, including the St. Valentine's Day Massacre that gave rise to the first national infringement of the Second Amendment (the National Firearms Act), was convicted not of those murders but of tax evasion. Sentenced to eleven years, he served seven, and was paroled because syphilis had turned his brain to pudding. He was never punished for those murders, and the families of his victims, while likely taking some solace in his imprisonment and mental degradation, never got true justice.

So it feels with Cuomo and Gay. And with the Jeffrey Epstein saga. And with Sam Bankman-Fried. And with the lack of punishment for any of those whose actions precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

And, for that matter, with Kamala Harris. Woefully underreported by our sycophantic press corps is her reprehensible behavior as California Attorney General, including widespread abuses of power and disregarding or burying of exculpatory evidence.

Most of you can likely name many other powerful public figures who avoided accountability for their transgressions. The current President certainly qualifies. The system is still chewing on the current GOP front-runner so only time will tell, though in his case we have the matter of putting him in the dock for stuff he didn't do.

Now, tack on the systematic and systemic lying. We know all politicians lie, but when the habit of lying infiltrated the institutions that aren't supposed to be political or partisan, things went to the next level. I speak of the CDC, the FBI, the DoJ, the DoT, and others.

All these have combined to bring the nation's trust in government to historic lows.

Our system of government was built from a perspective of distrust. Division of powers, enumerated powers that limit and define what government is allowed to do, a tripartite government structure with a bicameral legislature, and both implicit and explicit "thou shalt not" strictures written into the nation's governing document all point at the premise that government should be treated with suspicion. But, the necessity of government means that we also have to put some trust into its institutions. Those institutions need to validate that trust by behaving in as exemplary a fashion as they can.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the Best-and-Brightest decided that "public service" meant "public management," and so the arrogance, dismissiveness, secrecy, and outright lies became the norm.

This norm either originated in or extended to other hallowed institutions, including the nation's top universities.

Its exemplar turned out to be the aforementioned DEI hire, Claudine Gay.

Turns out, Gay's arrogance could not abide her ouster from Harvard, even with the "sorry-not-sorry" resignation. She dropped a post-resignation pile of steaming [redacted] onto the NY Times op ed page, reiterating her accusations of racism and coughing up this colossally self-unaware hairball:

The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.

Holy mother of pearl!!

Dr. Gay, you are the unraveler of public faith. You undermined public trust, and you have sown seeds of further division in our society. Your serial plagiarism affirms the suspicions of many that you were a DEI hire, that you got to your lofty position because of identity politics rather than merit. Tragically, this casts a cloud of suspicion across the entire landscape, by putting doubts as to other women's and blacks' achievements. Your most obvious transgression - the stunning hypocrisy of your views on antisemitism vs other forms of bigotry - has further convinced millions that the "pillars of American society" that are the Ivies are rotten to their core.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Want to restore public faith? First, clean your own house. Harvard, your institution needs a massive power washing. All this divisive garbage, including DEI, Woke, cancel culture, safe spaces, POC-only gatherings and classes and dorms and the like, and the rest of the neoprogressive ideology, needs to go. Get back to teaching rather than inculcating, make sure that open and vigorous debate are held sacred, and clamp down on those who'd obstruct or suppress it.

As for the government side? Same story - first, clean your own house. Come clean about the lies and shenanigans, fire the offenders, drop the weight of government on those transgressors who’ve been getting the kid-glove treatment, and make it clear that public service - service - is paramount.

The public faith has been broken. Getting it back will be very difficult. But, there is no other choice if the nation is to remain "of by and for the people." Otherwise, we will continue down the road to autocracy.

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A post-script. Claudine Gay serves as yet another example of the “selective diversity” I recently discussed. Wealthy parents, elite private school education, et cetera. Certainly not of the socioeconomic ranks the Left claims to champion via its affirmative action and other “leg up” efforts. Keep that in mind when people talk about helping the disadvantaged. Gay’s combination of 1%er upbringing and intersectionality puts her squarely in the “advantaged” column, and therefore doubly undeserving of a pass for her plagiarisms.