Affirmative action for mediocre white guys

Billionaire elites flex their muscles at Harvard

Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.

I’m working on adding more ballot initiatives to the massive preview piece that I published last night, which I also plan to turn into a separate, regularly updated spreadsheet that will be easily accessible to the general public.

With so many worthy proposals on the docket, it can be hard to keep track of them, much less figure out how to donate to the organizers trying to get them over the finish line, so I hope to provide a very useful resource for activists and progressives alike within the next week or so.

In tonight’s edition of the newsletter, I want to take a broader look at what’s happening at Harvard and the dark truths it reveals about the forces that control American society.

Please consider a subscribing and/or donating to keep Progress Report afloat and sustainable. Far-right extremists are financed by billionaires and corporations, who invest in conservative outlets, think tanks, and law firms to advance their interests. We rely on forward-thinking readers like you to keep this publication afloat. Please help us fight the good fight.

---

---

Harvard President Claudia Gay resigned on Tuesday amid growing pressure from multiple scandals. The first Black woman to hold the position, her exit after just six months also makes her the shortest-tenured president in Harvard history, proving once again that mediocre conservative white men are the only true beneficiaries of affirmative action in this country.

Gay’s troubles began with Harvard’s response to Hamas’s heinous slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7th, which some wealthy donors considered too slow and tepid. She initially survived further condemnation for her overly clinical responses to tricky questions during a Congressional hearing on campus antisemitism and the flawed media coverage that followed, but Gay was ultimately forced out after the scandal was compounded by allegations of plagiarism in her old academic papers.

The allegations were initially lodged and then relentlessly pursued by the conservative Washington Free Beacon and far-right provocateur Christopher Rufo, the architect of the right’s moral panic over Critical Race Theory and now a crusader against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs on college campuses. Rufo spent months harping on Gay’s academic papers, depicting missing citations as smoking guns, even after the board of trustees, known unironically as the Harvard Corporation, cleared the now-former president of any serious wrongdoing, a stance it stood by after the footnotes to her work were subjected to absurd scrutiny.

Gay did make mistakes in citing sources, though they were far more technical than academically dishonest. Rufo, no stranger to bad faith arguments, wasn’t interested in appended corrections; instead, he used them to press the case that Gay was unqualified for the job and was only hired to satisfy the demands of the woke mob that he imagines is secretly in control of nearly every college campus in the United States. In his version of events, Gay’s citations were an outrageous scandal that was being covered up by leftist Ivy League heathens so that she could continue to implement DEI initiatives that hurt white people. I wrote a long piece about this affair last month.

One doesn’t have to defend Gay’s academic work to understand that the attacks had nothing to do with her old papers, nor were they even about antisemitism — she scrambled to institute rather draconian changes on campus to please donors, to no avail. Rufo has always been upfront about his objectives, to the point that he often tweets out his rhetorical game plan and media strategy. He did exactly that during his months-long campaign against Gay, and on Tuesday, his celebratory posts couldn’t have been more blunt.

Here’s what he said in mid-December:

And are two of the many smug tweets that he posted today:

As noxious as they are, the tweets above are also very revealing. Rufo may be celebrating his success tonight, but toppling Claudia Gay doesn’t change the fact that he is exactly what he accused her of being.

Disposable Tools of the Elite

Rufo did not reach this level of niche prominence because he is especially brilliant or talented. His entire career has been subsidized by wealthy far-right donors, tax cheats, and powerful elites who have seen him as a useful tool in their ongoing quest to shove hateful ideology down the throats of Americans and maintain control of public institutions.

Once a largely anonymous and inconsequential racist who made a living by railing against homeless people for corporate-funded think tanks, Rufo was plucked from obscurity by Tucker Carlson in the fall of 2020 because the Fox News host thought his tirade against CRT would resonate amid the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement. Ron DeSantis then gave him a plum gig as on the board of trustees at New College, a role for which his only qualifications were a falsified degree from Harvard and a loathing of trans kids.

Rufo’s campaign against Gay was made far more relevant by an alliance with billionaire donors who became obsessed with removing her long before the plagiarism was discovered. They promised to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in donations unless she was fired, threats that continued to add up through the end of the year.

Ken Griffin, one of the most actively outraged Harvard donors, is one of the biggest donors to the Republican Party. Les Wexner, another conservative donor, disgraced founder of Victoria Secret, and a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, also pulled his checkbook. Len Blavatnik, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, did so just before Christmas. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman was among the most vocal in calling for Gay’s ouster, and even though he’s a registered Democrat, he also took up Rufo’s charge against DEI.

They may have at first been outraged by incidents of antisemitism on campus, but they wound up fighting a very different war, one that mirrored their personal politics.

History repeats itself

When Rufo and other extremists talk about “restoring colorblind equality,” they’re putting a new rhetorical polish on the same old racist fantasia that Republicans have been pushing since the Civil Rights era. He is simply the latest tool in the long battle to repeal any effort to create a more equitable and just society that interferes with their ability to hoard wealth.

The United States has never had anything approaching “colorblind equality,” and now that affirmative action has been banned by the Supreme Court, at the behest of these same conservatives, the only people who are receiving any sort of helpful intervention are the Christopher Rufos of the world.

In an effort to seem magnanimous, a Silicon Valley investor named Jason Calacanis, who made his initial fortune during the first internet bubble, made as much clear in a long tweet posted shortly after the news of Gay’s ouster began to leak. He too claimed that we were returning to the fantasyland of a “color-blind, performance-based society,” and suggested that to create an even playing field, lower-income families be provided with unlimited tutoring and skills training as well as affordable college tuition “in degrees society needs.”

It sounds good in theory, but history has proven time and time again that these are not actual solutions. The anti-poverty programs of the 1970s focused on providing skills and job training, but they provided only fleeting relief because good middle class jobs began to disappear, allowing the wealthy to begin hoarding money. Bill Clinton’s so-called “welfare reform” focused on job training while cutting people off from material assistance at the same time that free trade agreements wrecked American industry. There is no amount of job training that can turn service industry jobs into economic security. Limiting access to college and promoting conservative doctrine on campus, meanwhile, is another way of snuffing out any challenge to the status quo.

Whether or not you think the sloppiness of some of her academic notations merited discipline, Claudine Gay was ultimately fired because Harvard, like most other American institutions, are controlled by wealthy people who are invested in self-gratification and maintenance of their own empires. Not all wealthy Americans are like this, of course, but the ones willing to step on necks to impose ideology that preserves their financial might tend to play an outsized role in society.

It’s hardly conservative to point out that Harvard is a massive business that operates tax-free and has an enormous financial interest keeping the most illiberal elements of society placated. Gay was collateral damage in the school’s scramble to ensure its endowment, which now sits at $45 billion, continues to grow. If we are to have any hope of stopping cynical tools like Christopher Rufo, we need resilient institutions that cannot be held hostage by their financial patrons. Otherwise, the game will continue to be rigged and unqualified bigots will maintain their ill-gotten power.

---

Wait, Before You Leave!

Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

This is a second full-time job, and I’m looking to expand. There are no corporations, dark money think tanks, or big grants sponsoring this work. It’s all people-powered. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes premium member-only newsletters with original reporting and analysis.

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!