By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Hebraic Affairs Editor A. Cahan
Think it's hard to get into Harvard? Just look at this sample question from a recent admissions exam:
Don't worry if you flunked it – so did Harvard President and tenured Professor Claudine Gay.
In fairness to her (and Harvard types always have a good excuse for bombing an exam), she was asked this question by a bad-faith Republican hack who spends her every waking hour advancing the political fortunes of a notoriously corrupt criminal who admires, dines with, and defends neo-Nazi Jew haters. (We'll get back to Elsie Stefanik '06 later.)
Gay also made the fatal mistake of showing up for her lynching having been prepped by lawyers from one of the fanciest law firms on God's good earth, the result of a merger of Boston smarts with savvy Washington political instincts, now doing business under the ungainly name of WilmerHale. (Even HaleWilmer sounds better, like a greeting that Templeton the rat would give to a Brooklin pig.)
According to the usually authoritative New York Times, Gay's ridiculous equivocation was done on the advice of those smart savvy WilmerHale attorneys:
Well, if you're going to go down in flames, might as well have WilmerHale as your wingperson, right?
Just ask them. According to their website,
They understood the importance of Harvard's reputation with Congress? They let poor Claudine Gay and two other college Presidents jump right off the cliff.
Gay would have been better off taking the advice of any $125-an-hour hungover criminal defense attorney hanging around Cambridge District Court, who would have told her: “Just tell the judge whatever the f*** she wants to hear and then let's get the f*** out of there and get a Jameson's.”
The resulting s***storm of fake outrage claimed the head of the President of Penn and threatened to bury Gay herself.
Jay Michelson of The Daily Beast explained how the calculated effort to discredit everybody the reactionary right doesn't like constituted yet another right-wing brew of hypocrisy and demagoguery. Elsie Stefanik had begun her interrogation of the Presidents by asking whether they should condemn calls for intifada, claimed (wrongly) that intifada was synonymous with genocide, and then demanded a yes-or-no question to whether calls for genocide should be banned on campus.
The Presidents responded correctly that such calls, if intended as harassment or intimidation, would be banned but not if such statements appeared in footnote 214 of a scholarly work. Such nuances are anathema to hacks like Stefanik, still fuming from her dismissal from the nothingburger job of member of the Harvard Institute of Politics Board of Advisers:
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| Elsie Stefanik isn't as nice as she seems |
...this is the subtlety one would expect from a university president, and also what we would expect a would-be demagogue to exploit, which is exactly what Stefanik did.
What’s more, the same civil libertarians who are the darlings of Republicans when they defend conservatives in this case have defended [Penn President] Magill....
Of course, when it comes to conservative speech, Republicans like Stefanik are warriors against censorship of all kinds. In a 2021 interview, Stefanik complained of a “petition pressuring the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School to remove me from the bipartisan board of Harvard Institute of Politics,” due to her objecting to electors from four states in the 2020 election. “This is how cancel culture works,” she said.
But now Stefanik is practicing cancel culture on steroids. She and others are calling for Magill’s ouster—not for anything she personally said or did, but for merely stating that hateful antisemitic speech may or may not count as harassment, depending on the circumstances.
It’s cancel culture when it’s me, but not when it’s thee.
That's right, the same hacks, frauds, and Republican apologists whining about the lack of free speech on college campuses are now whining about – too much speech on campuses.
At any rate, Elsie, having been served the head of Penn's President on a platter courtesy of their Wharton School plutocratic alumni, was hungry for more:
But a funny thing happened on the way to Elsie's auto-da-fé. The Harvard Corporation, not accustomed to being told what to do by some wayward alum, said:
Translation from the Harvard (for those of you who don't speak it): Elsie, go f*** yourself.
The usual suspects, not worth quoting here, have had their usual fake conniptions about the idea that Harvard would not fire its President for fumbling the answer to one loaded question thrown at her by someone who opposes every value that Harvard allegedly holds dear.
The same frauds are trying to portray Harvard as a hell on Earth for Jews, somewhere between Germany 1938 and getting in front of Alan Dershowitz during a live TV interview.
Is it that bad in the Yard? Here's one recent incident:
Wait until Elsie Stefanik hears about this.
We spoke to some actual Harvard undergraduates a few weeks ago. The little grinders didn't seem to be quaking in fear, regardless of their ethnic background.
The situation at Harvard is tense, explosive, and fraught with fear and peril, as captured on the cover of the December 7 Harvard Independent:
The number of stories on the Indy's homepage describing the hatred, fear, and anguish amongst the little overachievers due to anti-Semitic or other harassment: 0.0.
Is it barely possible that the cries about how Harvard does nothing whilst a wave of anti-Semitism sweeps down from Pforzheimer to the River is not based on the actual concerns of actual members of the Harvard community, but on bad-faith Republican reactionary efforts to call into question the entire project of a liberal education and replace it with government-run promotion of nonsense as practiced by Ron “I could use a lift or two” DeathSantis?
Unlike President Gay, we don't have $1,500 an hour mouthpieces telling us to be careful what we say. We'll just say what she should have said when asked if genocide is bad.
We'll say yes.
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