{"id":2143832,"date":"2024-01-08T19:01:02","date_gmt":"2024-01-09T00:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/our-intellectual-elites-arent-just-plagiarists-theyre-also-morons\/"},"modified":"2024-01-08T19:01:02","modified_gmt":"2024-01-09T00:01:02","slug":"our-intellectual-elites-arent-just-plagiarists-theyre-also-morons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/our-intellectual-elites-arent-just-plagiarists-theyre-also-morons\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Intellectual \u2018Elites\u2019 Aren\u2019t Just Plagiarists. They\u2019re Also Morons."},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Four-intellectual-elites-arent-just-plagiarists-theyre-also-morons%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2143832&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">There\u2019s a documentary called \u201cBehind the Curve\u201d in which a group of people who think the Earth is flat decided to <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/sciencetech\/article-11972055\/Flat-Earther-spends-20-000-DIY-experiment-accidentally-proved-planet-ROUND.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">test<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> their hypothesis. They spend something like $20,000 on a laser gyroscope, and run some tests, and lo and behold, they learn that the Earth, contrary to their assumptions, is in fact round. Their response was exactly what you\u2019d expect. At first they didn\u2019t want to believe it, they started rationalizing away the experiment. \u201cWe were taken aback by that,\u201d one of the men said. He added: \u201cWe obviously were not willing to accept that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">That documentary came out a few years ago. It was an interesting look at human psychology and how people respond when their own actions debunk their whole worldview (literally their worldview, in the case of the flat-earthers). It\u2019s not an easy thing to experience. It\u2019s one thing for someone else to prove you wrong. It\u2019s something else entirely to disprove your own ideology, and to reveal how bankrupt and nonsensical it is.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It\u2019s easy to point and laugh at flat-earthers, but this is a phenomenon we\u2019re seeing more often these days. In fact, it\u2019s been playing out for the whole country over the past few weeks, as proponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, have witnessed the complete implosion of the president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a woman who personifies everything DEI stands for. She came from an extremely wealthy background; her family runs the largest concrete plant in Haiti. She became the first black president of Harvard University, despite publishing only a handful of academic papers. She did it all based on three factors: her skin color, her gender, and her willingness to smear and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.karlstack.com\/p\/the-lynching-of-roland-fryer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">destroy<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> all of her ideological enemies along the way. And in just a couple of weeks, she\u2019s been outed as a complete moron and fraud. She proved she\u2019s incapable of answering extremely basic questions in Congress. She also demonstrated that she\u2019s incapable of writing anything without ripping off dozens of other papers.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/episode\/ep-1288-the-matt-walsh-show\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show<\/a><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Given all this, the cognitive dissonance for the DEI crowd has to be overwhelming right now. After all, one of the holiest figures in their entire cult has just crashed and burned. She\u2019s provided irrefutable evidence that DEI rewards mediocrity and destroys every institution that embraces it. That\u2019s difficult for these people to accept, as you can imagine. That\u2019s why, in the wake of Gay\u2019s resignation as president of Harvard, there hasn\u2019t really been a debate over the merits of DEI, or anything approaching a reasonable conversation. The word \u201cdebate\u201d suggests that two sides are presenting their arguments in a clear and rational way. In this case, what\u2019s happening is that the anti-DEI side is making coherent arguments, while the pro-DEI faction can do nothing but perform and posture and vomit its emotions all over the place. They\u2019re actually a lot less respectable and coherent than the flat-earthers. At least the flat-earth proponents have arguments, as flimsy as they may be. But that\u2019s still more than can be said for the DEI defenders.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The spectacle that aired on CNN over the weekend perfectly captures the dynamic. It features two D.E.I. advocates \u2014 Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Kara Swisher \u2014 speaking with two sane male counterparts, Reihan Salam and Jonah Goldberg. In this debate, Goldberg and Salam explain why DEI is a scam used to smuggle leftist ideology under the guise of diversity. The women on the other side of the discussion can only scowl and huff and repeatedly declare how \u201cinfuriated\u201d they are. Lulu Garcia-Navarro also interrupts constantly while demanding that the two men on the other side stop interrupting her (which they never did).<\/p>\n<p>Salam makes the reasonable case against DEI and remains logical, level-headed, and perfectly coherent throughout. But once the other side starts interjecting, it all goes downhill.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Our discussion of DEI on The Chris Wallace Show. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/3OqZXs5Xr7\">pic.twitter.com\/3OqZXs5Xr7<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/JonahDispatch\/status\/1743654553680011332?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 6, 2024<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The whole segment goes on like this. The women just keep shouting about how horrible it is to assume that Claudine Gay was a DEI hire, even though Harvard\u2019s policy \u2014 for generations now \u2014 has been to elevate mediocre candidates on the basis of their skin color. And then, when it\u2019s pointed out that Gay plagiarized more than half of her academic writings, their response is to attack the motivations of the people who uncovered this plagiarism. They have no response but to screech incoherently.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">As with so many other debates on so many other issues, if you knew nothing about the issue, and you saw this discussion, you would immediately know the women on the Left are full of crap. They bring nothing but their emotions to the table. All they have is their indignation and their feelings. If you ask them for evidence to prove their assertions, they\u2019ll say something about \u201cbooks that have been written about this.\u201d This is why these people get in trouble for plagiarizing so often. They don\u2019t know how to provide citations. \u201cBooks\u201d are not a citation. And, again, all of this would be clear to any observer who had no background knowledge about the subject. If you do have background knowledge, then it\u2019s even more obvious that the women on the Left are full of crap.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">On this issue, like most others, the Left has no intellectual leg to stand on. If there was any sort of substantive argument to be made for DEI, they would make it. They would produce evidence, for example, that institutions become more effective as they become more diverse and inclusive. They wouldn\u2019t just assert this fact \u2014 as they always do \u2014 they would show it. But they can\u2019t. Instead they simply insist that their position must be true, and even if it isn\u2019t true, only a bigot would point it out. After all, pointing things out \u2014 noticing things \u2014 is the cardinal sin on the Left. That appears to be their entire argument when it comes to the entire Gay controversy. They won\u2019t try to claim that Gay didn\u2019t plagiarize. It\u2019s clear she did, repeatedly. Instead they appear to be arguing that it was our responsibility to not notice the plagiarism, or to ignore it once we did, because she\u2019s a black woman.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is the total intellectual bankruptcy of the Left. And since the Left controls all of our powerful institutions, this intellectual bankruptcy lies at the core of all of them. This is the larger problem underlying the Gay debacle. The real problem with Gay\u2019s plagiarized papers isn\u2019t that they were plagiarized. It\u2019s the fact that, even if they were original thoughts, they were vapid and dumb and pointless. It used to be that Harvard presidents <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/James_B._Conant\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">conducted<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> original research on important topics like biochemistry. Now they write useless garbage for a nonexistent audience, solely to advance themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is the part of the whole Claudine Gay story you don\u2019t hear much about, but it\u2019s far more important than the fact she lifted several paragraphs from other authors. It turns out that, even if she hadn\u2019t plagiarized a word of her academic writings, Claudine Gay would still be a total fraud.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">First of all, let\u2019s just look at the topics of all of her <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/scholar.harvard.edu\/files\/cgay\/files\/claudinegay_10-2022_0.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">publications<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Every single one of them is about black people or equity in some fashion. That\u2019s not an exaggeration. That was Gay\u2019s obsession. Her papers have titles like, \u201cThe Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation,\u201d and \u201cThe Impact of Gender and Race on the Politics of Black Women,\u201d and \u201cThe Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes Toward Latinos.\u201d This is what passes for research on \u201cdiversity.\u201d It\u2019s the least diverse resume you can possibly imagine. It\u2019s like paging through a random author bio on Salon.com. With a sole, exclusive focus on black issues, Gay shouldn\u2019t have been in the running for any job anywhere but, perhaps, a historically black college. And even there, she would have been totally unqualified.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now to be fair to Gay \u2014 in and of itself, this resume isn\u2019t necessarily disqualifying. If Gay had been writing truly groundbreaking stuff about gender and race and the politics of black women or whatever, then you might be inclined to give her a pass on this singular obsession she has on skin color. But the deeper you dig, the worse it gets. It turns out that Gay wasn\u2019t just a race-obsessed grifter who plagiarized whole paragraphs every now and then. In fact, the data behind Gay\u2019s papers \u2014 the information she was passing off as new and important \u2014 was also garbage.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let\u2019s zero in on one of the papers I mentioned a few seconds ago. It\u2019s called \u201cThe Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation.\u201d This <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dossier.today\/p\/these-scholars-asked-claudine-gay?utm_source=profile&#038;utm_medium=reader2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">paper<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was published in the American Political Science Review all the way back in 2001. It\u2019s an important paper, because it\u2019s one of the handful of publications that somehow got Gay tenure at Stanford University, before she moved on to Harvard. The basic idea of this paper is that when black people get elected to Congress, they make white people want to vote less. Somehow, this thesis made sense to Gay and everyone who peer-reviewed this document. To that end, the paper contains all kinds of tables which point to data that supposedly prove this point \u2014 that whites just hate voting when black people are on the ballot. That\u2019s the kind of discovery that would confirm white supremacy is real, and white people are bad, and so of course both Stanford and Harvard loved it. It was too good to check.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The problem is that a few decades later, a researcher named Jonatan Pallesen decided to <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jonatanpallesen\/status\/1738376777532096573?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">look<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> into the claim anyway. And he found that Gay\u2019s data contradicts itself. At one point, Gay\u2019s data tables show that Missouri Congressman Bill Clay\u2019s presence on the ballot didn\u2019t have much impact on voter turnout. But elsewhere Gay\u2019s tables show that Bill Clay had a very significant effect on voter turnout \u2014 close to a 17% reduction in turnout, in fact. Put aside the fact that it\u2019s absurd to claim that Bill Clay, simply because he\u2019s black, would make white voters want to stay home on Election Day. The question remains: Why do Claudine Gay\u2019s tables contradict themselves?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">There\u2019s no clear answer to that question. Pallesen couldn\u2019t come up with an explanation. Claudine Gay certainly hasn\u2019t offered one. And here\u2019s the really incriminating detail: Every time researchers have tried to look into this, Gay refused to provide the underlying data that she used to generate the tables in her papers. In 2002, two professors \u2014 Michael Herron of Dartmouth and Kenneth Schotts of Stanford \u2014 <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dossier.today\/p\/these-scholars-asked-claudine-gay?utm_source=profile&#038;utm_medium=reader2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">presented<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> a paper that effectively debunked Gay\u2019s entire methodology. They included this footnote: \u201cWe were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay\u2019s results because she would not release her dataset to us.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">That\u2019s pretty incriminating. But here\u2019s the really amazing thing. That footnote was removed from the final version of Michael Herron and Kenneth Schott\u2019s paper. If you try to find and download the paper online now, you won\u2019t find any mention of Claudine Gay. It\u2019s been <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dossier.today\/p\/these-scholars-asked-claudine-gay?utm_source=profile&#038;utm_medium=reader2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">scrubbed<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> completely. Instead, if you find the paper, you\u2019ll find that Herron and Schott debunk a \u201chypothetical\u201d methodology, without using Claudine Gay\u2019s name at all. It\u2019s almost like someone wanted to protect her for some reason. But, writing for Jordan Schachtel\u2019s Substack, Chris Brunet <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dossier.today\/p\/these-scholars-asked-claudine-gay?utm_source=profile&#038;utm_medium=reader2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">got his hands<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> on the first version of Herron and Schott\u2019s takedown \u2014 the one that hasn\u2019t been censored or redacted in any way. The <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dossier.today\/p\/these-scholars-asked-claudine-gay?utm_source=profile&#038;utm_medium=reader2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">full, uncensored footnote<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> calls Gay\u2019s conclusions \u201clogically inconsistent.\u201d It repeatedly calls out Claudine Gay by name. And it includes a lot of technical details which no one \u2014 including Claudine Gay \u2014 has refuted.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/onelink.to\/dwapp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a far bigger scandal than Claudine Gay lifting some paragraphs here and there. The fact is, her ideas and the data underlying those ideas were useless and fraudulent. Her publications were race-based screeds that were only ever cited by a handful of academics \u2014 and those handful of academics very quickly proved they were complete garbage. And yet, Gay somehow became president of Harvard. Documents criticizing the substance of her \u201cscholarship\u201d were scrubbed. Even now, she\u2019s still making around $900,000 as a professor. This is the state of Harvard University and American academia in general. And this is the key point.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, our intellectual elites are often thieves and plagiarists. That certainly matters. But what matters more is that they are just as intellectually bankrupt as they are morally bankrupt. They are charlatans. Their power and influence is crumbling by the day. And based on their panic over the past few weeks, we can be pretty sure they\u2019re aware of it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s a documentary called \u201cBehind the Curve\u201d in which a group of people who think the Earth is flat decided to test their hypothesis. They spend something like $20,000 on a laser gyroscope, and run some tests, and lo and behold, they learn that the Earth, contrary to their assumptions, is in fact round. Their<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":305,"featured_media":2143833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[541],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2143832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-daily-wire"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2143832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/305"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2143832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2143832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2143833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2143832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2143832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2143832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}