Here’s why Obama stepped in to save Harvard prez Claudine GayBy Social Links forBenjamin Weingarten
Published Dec. 24, 2023, 12:15 p.m. ET
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Why would former President Barack Obama spend his time and political capital defending a protector of genocidal Jew-haters — “depending on the context” — later exposed to be a serial plagiarist?
That became a live question with Jewish Insider’s revelation Obama had “privately lobbied” for Harvard President Claudine Gay to keep her job amid calls for her head following the mealymouthed and morally bankrupt testimony she delivered before Congress — testimony illustrating exactly why Jew-hatred had erupted and been allowed to fester on campuses following Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 attack.
She showed that Harvard, like its elite peers, had become a “safe space” for one group above all others — Hamasniks and their bigoted intersectional allies — putting Jewish students under threat of not only harassment but bodily harm in the name of an absolute commitment to free speech afforded to virtually no one else on the heavily censorious campus.
One explanation for Obama backing Gay is he shares her tolerance for the pro-Palestinian Israel-haters and their woke comrades on the radical left, with whom he may well feel a kinship.
It’s easy to conceive of a college-age Obama marching in solidarity with these students as a onetime campus radical himself who would graduate to the pews of rabid “anti-Zionist” and anti-American Rev. Jeremiah Wright; pal around with the like-minded Louis Farrakhan, Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi; and spend eight years as president empowering Islamic supremacists Sunni and Shia while putting the screws to Israel.
Harvard must wake up — Claudine Gay needs to be removed as president after antisemitism, plagiarism controversies
Jewish Insider’s reporting suggests a more mundane explanation: Obama aimed to “keep the broader administration stable” — an administration governed by a board helmed by former Obama administration Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, who led and championed Gay’s selection as Harvard’s president.
But Obama’s defense of Gay almost assuredly transcends sympathy for her remarks and the students for whom she spoke, concern about Harvard’s stability or a desire to effectively defend a political ally, given Pritzker’s responsibility for Gay’s presidency.
Like l’affaire Gay broadly, Obama’s intervention should be seen as a major salvo in the broader war over diversity, equity and inclusion in America’s most influential institutions.
Obama is making a play to protect the DEI regime itself — a regime, already roiled by the backlash against wokeism and the Supreme Court’s strike against affirmative action in schools, critical to maintaining political power.
Barack Obama is the leader of the Democratic Party in everything but name and the face of our credentialed pseudo-elites.
Harvard is arguably the most prestigious university in the world.
Claudine Gay, proudly touted as Harvard’s first black and second female president, has devoted much of her career to advancing DEI and led the creation of a sprawling DEI administrative state, injecting racist “anti-racism” and anti-equality “equity” into every aspect of the school.
This parallels what Obama’s progressive successors have done to the federal government under the Biden administration.
Israel- and Jew-hatred on college campuses is a natural byproduct of DEI.
The ideology, rooted in cultural Marxism, divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, casting Judeo-Christian Western civilization and its defenders as uniquely evil and Israel, the collective Jew — a state whose modern incarnation emerged out of the Holocaust and thrived despite perpetual attempts by tyrannical Jew-hating neighbors to destroy her — as most evil of all.
DEI cloaks leftism, and its rotted and corrupted core, in race and identity to provide it a moral and virtuous veneer and make it unassailable; to organize a coalition of otherwise disparate groups; and pit them against other Americans as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy.
DEI, in short, is a tool of power and control — engendering political and ideological conformity and the mobilization and weaponization of its cadres — the left has wielded to maximum effect as it’s taken over every influential institution.
If Claudine Gay were to fall, it could topple the entire house of cards the left, led by Barack Obama, helped build.
DEI statements have become mandatory across academia. But some colleges and universities are pushing back against this form of group-think.
The DEI machine has always been about toeing an ideological line — not meaningful change
To fire her would be to acknowledge the evil hatred of the West at DEI’s core; admit DEI elevates politics over merit, given Gay has proven to be something of an academic fraud; and therefore delegitimize the movement as a whole given Gay’s and Harvard’s symbolic and substantive prominence in it.
The DEI project falling in the academy would be cataclysmic for the left given these institutions are pivotal for indoctrinating and credentialing the next generation of leftist leaders atop society’s commanding heights.
Elite schools are the left’s center of gravity, feeding power centers from Washington to Wall Street to Silicon Valley.
That Obama stepped in to support Gay suggests he believes it to be a political imperative of the highest order.
Presumably he thinks circling the wagons around the besieged Harvard president will cause this scandal, exposing the emperors of the Ivy league have no clothes, to blow over.
The American people cannot let that happen.
Instead, we must intensify the scrutiny of our elite institutions and their leaders, demand they be held accountable for their illiberalism and indiscretions and restore an emphasis on virtue, excellence and devotion to American greatness rather than our destruction.
What do you think? Post a comment.
The triumph of DEI would spell death for our republic.
To save it, we must defund and dismantle the DEI regime.
Benjamin Weingarten is editor at large at RealClearInvestigations.
Thanks To Universities Melting Down, DEI Under Pressure
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Originally Posted by Kathianne
