RadixJournal - January 03, 2024


Gay Ops

Topics
Claudine Gay plagiarism
Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Claudine Gay Chris Ruffo Martin Luther King Burkhardt Penn Mark
New Year's Gifts Un-Orthodox Judaism

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

132.15

Word count

2,098

Sentence count

152

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Harvard University President Claudine Gay has resigned, and it is the shortest tenure of any president in the history of Harvard s history. This is a sad day in the annals of Ivy League universities, where the idea of free speech has been squelched.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So, as of about an hour ago, Claudine Gay, who was the president of Harvard, I guess that was her title.
00:00:12.140 Yes, President Claudine Gay.
00:00:13.860 She has resigned, and it's the shortest tenure ever.
00:00:17.940 I think she was even appointed.
00:00:19.420 Wasn't she appointed last September or something?
00:00:21.840 It was very, very quick.
00:00:23.900 So, there has been an unrelenting attack from the Washington Free Beacon, etc., that to some degree seems to originate from Chris Ruffo, who's the guy who got all of these conservatives hopped up on critical race theory and going to their school boards and demanding that critical race theory not be taught to first graders and all this kind of stuff.
00:00:53.900 And they're at it again.
00:00:57.600 Now, Claudine remained longer than others.
00:01:01.340 The Penn president resigned during their testimony to Congress.
00:01:07.860 This is all about basically dissent against Israel on campus, including protest, etc.
00:01:14.840 Now, we don't have to revisit everything that they said.
00:01:18.760 We talked about that when it happened back in, was it November or something like that?
00:01:23.900 I would just say, as a reiteration, their testimony before Congress was completely sound.
00:01:33.820 And I actually don't have any criticisms over what they said.
00:01:39.740 They effectively did the Brandenburg test with the First Amendment as a model for what discourse should be on campus.
00:01:51.480 So, you should not punish anyone for free speech.
00:01:57.440 And you should obviously punish someone for what is harassment, you know, getting in someone's face, preventing them from going about their day, needlessly isolating an individual, death threats, etc.
00:02:14.160 Those are just simply crimes.
00:02:17.160 But other than that, free speech should be promoted, in fact, and facilitated.
00:02:23.360 And that includes bold statements like, from the river to the sea.
00:02:29.720 It might even include an extremely bold statement like, I think we should wipe Israel off the map. 0.99
00:02:38.560 Because that does pass the Brandenburg test in the sense that it is an outrageous declaration, but it's something that is not a direct threat.
00:02:51.480 It's a, you know, you could call it venting, or boasting, or whatever.
00:03:01.000 But you should not fire people for the fact that they went a bit too far in their rhetoric.
00:03:09.500 You can obviously fire them if they are engaging in what is harassment or threats, direct threats to an individual, directing violence.
00:03:18.920 This is how the First Amendment is understood in the second half of the 20th century, basically.
00:03:26.560 And everything that they said was completely sound.
00:03:30.220 Now, these women were, and they were all women, were remarkably inarticulate, and maybe inarticulate is not the right word. 0.99
00:03:39.880 They were articulate, but they were remarkably uncharismatic, and they were remarkably robotic and boring in the way that they articulated this ideal.
00:03:53.980 And they aren't the kind of image we might have of a Harvard president who's a dazzling intellectual, but also a kind of avuncular character.
00:04:06.660 You know, he comes in smoking a pipe and, you know, wearing tweed and is humorous and making various literary allusions, etc.
00:04:18.820 I think if someone were like that, they probably could have gotten away with sustaining free speech on Ivy League campuses.
00:04:28.820 But instead, we have these midwit social climbers like Claudine Gay, who were robotically, boringly, lifelessly articulating what is the standard of free speech in this country. 1.00
00:04:44.400 And maybe on that, for that, they almost deserve their firing or shouldn't complain.
00:04:51.440 But Claudine Gay was a little bit worse. 1.00
00:04:54.360 She has engaged in what I can tell is a lot of lazy plagiarism.
00:05:05.080 I think it's safe to say that Claudine Gay is not a terribly interesting scholar.
00:05:12.080 She's obviously a product of affirmative action and just the kind of hopes and dreams of white liberals for what they want to see academia become. 1.00
00:05:25.400 She is clearly just lifting sentences from other people's work now and without citing them.
00:05:35.560 And I think, again, I would almost describe it as lazy more than anything.
00:05:39.980 Because she even plagiarized a preface to a book or something in which she was thanking people.
00:05:46.660 She's just lifting turns of phrases from other people's works.
00:05:50.920 So she's acting like chat GPT in a way.
00:05:54.640 And I think that's probably telling.
00:05:56.600 Like, she is a human chat GPT who's paraphrasing, summarizing, and in some cases, just outright lifting sentences from other people's work, but kind of melding it together into something fairly new.
00:06:13.380 We're all lazy to some degree.
00:06:15.440 We certainly all engage in paraphrasing.
00:06:17.880 We're not the best in terms of, you know, putting forth an idea without citing it, without giving credit to someone.
00:06:24.420 That is a sort of ethical crime, but this was worse.
00:06:31.800 And so I understand it, but I don't know.
00:06:34.140 I, in a way, feel sorry for her because, I mean, I hate to sound overly racist here, but why are we putting these people in a position that they're not going to succeed, where they're not going to succeed?
00:06:48.260 In the sense of, why are we promoting these diversity hires?
00:06:55.640 And just putting them in a place where they don't, I mean, they're going to act like chat GPT because that's how they think about academia.
00:07:04.640 Like, you dot your I's and cross your T's, and they promote you because you're black.
00:07:10.100 And you go with the flow of general academic opinion, and then you get invited to conferences where you can spout bromides and paraphrase other people's data.
00:07:22.820 I mean, it's, she was good in the, I mean, it's a, maybe I'm being overly sympathetic.
00:07:29.920 There's a certain degree of tragedy of this kind of thing where well-wishing white people throw her out there and she, she's never going to be able to succeed because she doesn't have the mind of a scholar in which you do engage in original thinking.
00:07:52.360 And you do engage in original interpretation, and you do engage in a quest for truth in which you're, you're breaking through the walls.
00:08:02.780 You're not being confined with what has happened before you.
00:08:06.320 I don't think someone like this as a midwit and also to be brutally frank as someone with a great deal of African ancestry, this is just not how she's going to succeed in life. 1.00
00:08:20.800 And it's just cruel to put these people in this position.
00:08:26.200 But anyway, just to sum up my position on this, I don't think she's a great scholar.
00:08:32.040 I do think she's a diversity hire.
00:08:35.140 But the only reason why this is happening is because she is allowing, soundly allowing criticism of Israel. 0.98
00:08:44.820 And so this notion that like the DEI regime has been dismantled and, you know, conservatives are now welcome on campus or whatever, that is just bullshit. 0.62
00:08:58.820 This is solely about preventing any criticism of Israel.
00:09:04.600 And if, I mean, understandably, if I were the next president of Harvard, a wonderful thought, but probably not going to happen.
00:09:16.160 But if I were the next president of Harvard and I wanted to keep my job and I did it and I wasn't as principled as some others, I would crack down on criticism of Israel.
00:09:28.500 And I would hire more pro-Israeli scholars just so we could have a bit of more hegemony on campus if I wanted to keep my job.
00:09:39.020 And so it's like, this is entirely what this situation is about.
00:09:47.420 Entirely.
00:09:48.480 No one cared about her lazy scholarship until she not even criticized Israel, but allowed, hypothetically allowed, the criticism of Israel to exist.
00:10:01.940 So I don't see this as a win at all.
00:10:05.820 In the short term, very bad.
00:10:07.900 And maybe you could say, and I actually tend to agree with this, in the long term, it might be good.
00:10:15.840 Because when it's just very clear that there are overt penalties to, you know, reasonable criticism of the Jewish state, people start to wonder.
00:10:31.100 It's a sign of losing legitimacy and hegemony on that issue.
00:10:35.100 So there it is.
00:10:38.780 Yeah, plagiarism seems to be a kind of, it's a little bit of a cliche when it comes to the black academic, right?
00:10:47.720 I mean, we even have the example of a Martin Luther King who's accused of plagiarism and committed plagiarism as far as anyone can tell.
00:10:56.260 And of course, he's one of the important luminaries of black intellectual thought.
00:11:04.100 I mean, of course, he was primarily a political activist, but his influence, you know, in academia, when it comes to, you know, the sort of black perspective, the black intellectual perspective, obviously, is pretty enormous.
00:11:17.500 Um, and he was a plagiarist, so.
00:11:20.680 Oh, yeah.
00:11:21.820 It's kind of.
00:11:22.780 A bad plagiarist.
00:11:24.060 Yeah, yeah.
00:11:24.680 I mean, the wholesale lifting.
00:11:26.800 Yeah.
00:11:27.240 And to your point, it's, it comes down to laziness to some extent.
00:11:30.160 Uh, so it's a really, it's really kind of an embarrassing thing, uh, to occur for, uh, you know, the president of Harvard or, you know, an intellectual at this level, a black intellectual at this level to be engaged in plagiarism. 0.64
00:11:45.260 I mean, it's, it's just kind of inexcusable.
00:11:46.900 Also, Mark, don't you think it almost also comes down to arrogance?
00:11:51.880 Because, and I mean, I mean this seriously in the sense that, I mean, arrogant in a good way.
00:11:57.980 If you're a real scholar or a writer, you don't think that someone else can phrase it as well as you can.
00:12:08.320 You know, you don't want to plagiarize because you're smarter than everyone else.
00:12:13.020 You know what I mean?
00:12:13.660 Like, there's a certain mentality of the intellectual where you want to make it new and break through the walls.
00:12:26.400 Like, do it, you know, you can be inspired by other people and obviously, but like, your truth is so powerful and only you can deliver it and you just want to sign your name to it.
00:12:37.400 That kind of bombastic arrogance or narcissism that is a quality of almost every great intellectual or artist. 0.92
00:12:48.380 And the fact that she just does this petty crap kind of indicates to me that not only is she lazy, but she's just kind of a little social climber at the end of the day. 1.00
00:13:03.540 You know, you want to say the right things, you don't want to rock the boat, you want to, you know, not offend, etc. 0.97
00:13:13.800 Great scholars want to offend.
00:13:16.560 I mean, Nietzsche blew up his entire academic career, extremely promising academic career.
00:13:22.660 He was the youngest person ever to be given a chair at Basel.
00:13:25.880 He blew it to smithereens with the birth of tragedy.
00:13:29.280 I mean, there are some limitations to the birth of tragedy and whatever criticism we might have, you know, needless to say, Nietzsche gets the last laugh outside of like Burkhardt or something.
00:13:40.960 Not a lot of his critics are being read and discussed to this day.
00:13:45.160 That's what you want in an intellect. 0.95
00:13:46.840 You want an intellectual who's such a narcissist that he or she would never conceivably plagiarize, you know, but she's a midwit. 1.00
00:13:54.800 Yeah, I don't disagree.
00:13:56.920 I mean, why would you even be involved in intellectual pursuits if you're not trying to contribute something that's novel or new or look at it from a new angle, make a new discovery and so forth, right?
00:14:09.400 I really do.
00:14:10.600 I mean, I think it's kind of telling of like how you react to this.
00:14:14.520 It's a bit of a Rorschach test.
00:14:15.880 But I, again, I don't respect Claudine Gay, but I really have a lot of just hatred for these hacks, Chris Ruffo, etc., who will stoop to these levels to defend Israel. 0.70
00:14:35.520 You know, the allegations are there, and they're real, but I just don't get on board with them.
00:14:43.820 Yeah, I mean, it's hard to fall in love with either side, obviously.
00:14:47.300 So it's hard to, you know, I mean, looking at this Caducean conflict, it's right.
00:14:52.720 You don't really feel like you have a dog in the race or a dog in the fight.
00:14:58.760 I agree with that.
00:15:00.480 I mean, I guess the only thing that we can say positive is that she was stumping to some extent for free speech against Israeli pressure on campus.
00:15:11.560 So that's, you know, we're in favor of that as well, of course, right?
00:15:17.380 Yeah.
00:15:18.420 But we need better champions, of course, than Claudine Gay. 1.00
00:15:22.680 Honestly.
00:15:23.200 I hope so.
00:15:23.820 Let's pray.
00:15:27.940 So that's your thing.
00:15:28.880 Let's pray.
00:15:33.000 Let's pray.
00:15:38.400 Let's pray.
00:15:38.900 All right.
00:15:39.380 Let's pray.
00:15:40.100 Let's pray.
00:15:41.540 Let's pray.
00:15:41.840 Let's pray.
00:15:42.300 Let's pray.
00:15:42.680 Let's pray.
00:15:43.420 Let's pray.
00:15:43.540 Let's pray.
00:15:44.900 Let's pray.
00:15:45.420 Let's pray.
00:15:46.280 Let's pray.
00:15:46.880 Let's pray.
00:15:47.400 Let's pray.
00:15:48.380 Let's pray.
00:15:49.040 Let's pray.
00:15:49.480 Let's pray.
00:15:50.420 Let's pray.
00:15:51.640 Let's pray.