Thread by @thrasherxy

here's my read of what happened with harvard's president, who i predicted would be out: we are in a dangerous place w political expression in journalism & academia, but (w one notable exception) not primarily bc of republicans & right-wingers, but bc of democrats & liberals.

to set the stage: it is a mistake to think of dangers to free expression as a right v left, dem v republican matter. still, elite news media (itself often the problem) as such and reports mostly on *state* book bans and idea bans in the u.s. south.

harvard is not only a private uni, but the wealthiest in the world. in a blue city, in a blue state. (can't get more classically liberal elite than cambridge.) democratic mayor, governor, both senators.

so, apart from one (significant) player, this witch hunt was by liberals.

caludine was quickly put to a test with the war on palestine. and she revealed herself quickly to be a member of what I call the overseer class. despite being heralded as the first black president of harvard, she was *not* there to support black/poc students or faculty...

rather, she was there to keep black/poc faculty and students (and, had she been there long enough, union/izing staff) in line. selected so that, when the day came, she would crack the skulls of her own to maintain power, with a nice veneer of respectability.

and crack she did.

when students admirably spoke up about the genocide, president gay attacked free speech. she conflated antisemitism w antizionism &

"Harvard President Gay Announces Antisemitism Training, Condemns Pro-Palestine Phrase ‘From the River to the Sea’"
thecrimson.com/article/2023/1…

then black student elom tettey-tamaklo was evicted for successfully de-escalating conflict. black ppl around the world begged gay to intervene. she did nothing.

Harvard grad student evicted from campus housing after intervening in protest .hlrecord.org/first-amendmen…

meanwhile, gay started an "antisemitism task force" that had no harvard scholars of antisemitism...& like all uni presidents across the country, she said nothing abt the destruction of every uni in gaza & the murder of several of her counterparts

so, before turning to the next act of this saga, here's the james baldwin quote about the role of black police officers, which i apply to the role of a member of the overseer class like president gay.

ok, act II: the racist dynamics that successfully went after palestinian students, staff and faculty at harvard come for president gay.

now—suddenly—she seems to be seeing race as a dynamic as the racist forces come for her.

and here, you can see some conservative players, namely congresswoman elisde stefankik &, much more importantly, anti-crt crusader chris rufo. everyone knows by now how gay fumbles the bag at her hearing—& how she wants a grace in her language she never extended to her faculty.

but the thing is, until this moment, the forces that would take her down had all been from liberals. gay herself started an "antisemitism task force." mass gov healey had started a similar task force, as had the white house. the senate passed a resolution.

dems, one and all.

then you get chris rufo who says "Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic “decolonization” in the public" and to "Make the center-left disavow them."

well, gay, healey and biden did exactly this!
mind.

gay survives one vote at harvard from "the harvard corporation" (their board of trustees). i still predicted she'd be gone before their next term, and it was easy to see again, bc of rufo

rufo says they "launched the gay plagarism story from the right. the next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her."

well, the nyt train to do rufo's bidding is never late!

how many stories did we get from the nyt about gay (and penn and mit)? the liberal times moved the liberal dial to force the liberal gay out of liberal harvard. stefanki and rufo could not have done this alone; they were succcesful bc of the moral rot of liberalism.

so act iii: gay resigns.

what now?

even though msnbc et all is salivating to say this is a conservative witch hunt, it would be a mistake to stop there.

this was caused by a failure of liberalism.

personally, I don't care what happens to gay. i was appalled at her false conflation of antisemitism w antizionism, her anti-intellectual pandering to donors by culling any scholars of antisemitism from her task force, and her coldness to evicted black student elom tettey-tamaklo

but, of course, if they can get the president of harvard, they can get anyone. so we must think carefully abt what happened and what lessons are to be drawn. bc this tactic will be used to target many of us as scholars of/who are lgbtq, black and—especially—palestinian

a wrong lesson would be to frame this as casued by the rightwing attacks on crt & dei in the south. the gay saga (like the penn saga) is dovetailing w those attacks now, but the crt/dei matters in the south (florida, texas) are of republicans, and gay is about dems and liberals

(just as, small aside, a cop went into a school looking for banned books right before christmas...in massachussetts - "Massachusetts police dept searches middle school classroom for book 'Gender Queer,' sparking outrage") wpde.com/news/nation-wo…

here are some lessons/questions i think are more important for liberals/leftis to draw from this:

the president of harvard was hired to be an overseer, not to be someone to change the power dynamics for black ppl and women. can we dream of other models of representation?

why aren't liberals afraid of suppressing speech on palestine? might all these laws, resolutions and task forces be turned on liberals when liberals aren't in power?

why do liberals allow donors to call so many shots on what happens on campuses (and in arts orgs, publication, etc.?)

why did claudine gay think she could use racist techniques of control (conflating antisemitism and antizionism, suppressing speech, allowing a black student to be expelled for doing the right thing) on her students but evade those techniques coming for her?

why does mainstream news media (sometimes) see a threat in the policing of everday life by republicans, but sees no danger when it's democrats increasing policing budgets, arresting more black people, deporting more latinx ppl, suppressing palestinian protest?

why is the *singular* story of claudine gay almost exclusively the story of an individual? most ppl, rightly, don't give a shit abt harvard. a casual news reader might have heard of "the 1st black president of harvard." then "the 1st black president of harvard is under threat."

but to me, the important racial story of gay isn't her six months of breaking some barrier and then being ejected. it is unpacking and understanding the overseer class: why someone is likely selected for that job to do things like, hypothetically, bust the unions at harvard...

to provide a black woman's face not just to be the fall person but to, hypothetically, keep the press/public from thinking abt the faces of black women jantiors and food service workers are harvard, who are being poorly paid despite harvard being the richest uni in the world. or—

—not so hypothetically, maybe a gay type is hired to be an overseer, so that when black students or palestinian students learn from their critical studies and try to stop their school's cog in the academia/political/financial war machine, she can do so without mercy or criticism.

but we should *not* stop at "she was a black woman and they treated her poorly." this is not untrue, and sadly, getting the black woman president of harvard will make life hell for black women throughout academia.

however—

gay herself tried to play a game where she could crack the skulls of dissidents, thinking she could win. she did the bidding of rufo's ilk, then she was dismissed herself.

so a final lesson/question i have, for now, of uni presidents & would-be overseers...

the war machine will come for anyone. in gaza, they kill uni presidents. in america, you can be like gay, denounce "from the river to the sea," ignore black students & they'll *still* fire you.

so uni admin: do you think your silence will protect you?

with the help of msnbc etc, dems will try to get your votes to stop rightwing crt attacks. but you must know that free speech on college campuses is in extreme danger bc of a witch hunt by democrats—biden, healey, harvard alum & even by gay herself, taken down by what she starred

this is also a good time to remind ourselves that even with state suppression of dei, crt and trans health—matters which are much worse in the u.s. south in terms of state powers—liberal media has helped this suppression succeed, especially the nyt

as our dear friend @tomscocca (an aside: read his devastating essay on illness just out day in my mag) wrote months ago, the front page pile on the nyt did on gay's citational practice, they did by publishing 13,945 words on trans health on the front page popula.com/2023/03/06/the…

if the nyt isn't, you know, publishing fawning profiles with lovely photos of chris rufo; and publishing 13,945 words on trans adolescent health; and publishing four by-line stories abt penn's pres, the rufos of the world have much less power nytimes.com/2022/04/24/us/…

"Land acknowledgements everywhere"🔥🔥🔥

Liberals often get defensive about such evidence when they are confronted with it by leftists. But they must face it, or else. As James Baldwin said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

yup!!

bill ackman, the billionaire who successfully has ousted claudine gay, is a registetered democrat and a major donor to the democratic party.

try again, @jordanzakarin. zionism isn't a republican issue. apart from rufo & stefanik, everyone in this story are democrats.

@jordanzakarin (if you're going to cover this story on @MorePerfectUS, @jordanzakarin, get it right: zionism, miliatarism, hedge funds...these are all solid elements of the democratic party & liberalism. i "omitted" nothing.)

@jordanzakarin @MorePerfectUS @UnrollHelper

@jordanzakarin @MorePerfectUS it was democrats—ackman, nyt, wapo, harvard board, harvard faculty, mayor/gov/senators/white house—even gay, who took herself down after two months of speech suppresssion.