Apparently the Neocons who control the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page have decided Harvard President Claudine Gay is a goner. Accordingly they are switching to damage control.

They are concerned that Gay’s demise be ascribed to the avalanche of evidence that she was an industrial-stage plagiarist in her academic work.

What they are worried about is that Gay’s destruction might possibly be seen as proof of the terrible power of the Zionist Lobby in America.

Not that Douglas Belkin and Arian Campo-Flores actually mention such an evil thought in Behind the Campaign to Take Down Harvard’s Claudine Gay, Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2023 [Archive link]. Instead they point out that:

For years people who identify themselves as academics have aired their resentments and grievances toward Gay on publicly accessible chat boards like the econjobrumors blog and Political Science Rumors. As Gay rose in prominence the posts about her became more frequent and negative—but they also held some truth.

Gay’s December 5th Congressional testimony just happened to trigger Chris Rufo for some reason:

After the outcry over Gay’s congressional testimony, Rufo decided to strike, publishing a report leveling his accusation that the president of Harvard was a serial plagiarist.

Subsequently, Rufo has posted an excellent analysis Claudine Gay’s DEI Empire, christopherrufo.com, December 19, 2023:

Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as the dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university’s racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional…

 in 2020, Gay commissioned a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, which released a series of recommendations the following year for engaging in the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.” The recommendations included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men”…

As president, Gay leads a sprawling DEI bureaucracy … Harvard’s DEI administrators encourage students to internalize the basic narrative of critical race theory: America is a nation defined by “systemic racism,” “police brutality,” “white supremacist violence,” and the “weaponization of whiteness.” In another resource, students were invited to “unpack” their “white privilege” and “male privilege…”

However, these atrocities are of little interest to the WSJ writers who fleetingly mention:

Critics… took issue with her performance as dean of faculty, which began in 2018, with some saying she lowered Harvard’s standards by indulging a political agenda to attract more faculty of color … also … she weakened Harvard’s position on academic freedom by censoring conservative points of view.

Defending the interests of white Americans generally is not part of the WSJ’s brief.

No more has needed to be said about Claudine Gay’s academic credentials since Eugyppius.com posted the devastating Claudine Gay, Plagiarist, December 15, 2023. This concludes:

Gay simply doesn’t command the elementary statistical vocabulary to discuss these ideas, so she has taken it from other people who do. This is a Harvard University President…

Gay is an obvious, blatant incompetent, and anybody who defends this is either a malign actor or a snivelling craven academic loser.

The only real question is why Harvard picked this weak reed—there is no shortage of black women purporting to be academics. I suggested a reason in How Could Harvard Have Chosen A Dud Like President/Plagiarist Claudine Gay? J. Philippe Rushton Knew. In Rushton’s words:

Blacks have a self-assured ”bright” talkative, personality, which leads many people to over-estimate their abstract reasoning ability … Whites… erroneously assume that, because Africans are talkative, they must know what they are talking about.

When I first looked at this piece early on Saturday the comment thread demonstrated clearly that WSJ readers were not fooled. They overwhelmingly rejected this attempt to attribute Gay’s fall to an outburst of academic rectitude. Instead they forcefully asserted that Gay’s sin had been to get on the wrong side of the Israel Lobby.

This comment thread has now been taken down.

Ask authors Douglas Belkin [Email him] and Arian Campo-Flores [Email him] why this was done.