We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emilijiashinsky, culture
editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show at
radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at FDR LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. If you're keeping
track at home. I just realized I did it again. Follow us on
x at FDR LST, not Twitter. I'm joined today by Chris Brunette.
He's a contributing editor over at The American Conservative. He rates on Substack at
Carlstack dot substack dot com. That's Carl with K. We taped this on
December twenty first, just as in New York Times came out with an article
actually following up on some of the reporting that Chris Brunette did with Chris Rufo
on clotting Gay and plagiarism. They really kicked this whole thing off by starting
to look into examples of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard in the past,
having plagiarize other people's work. So what I talk about with Chris on
today's episode, and I'm introducing it here just to sort of give a preview
of what's to come is his work exposing gay, the various examples of plagiarism
that we now have, his plans to keep digging into this in academia in
the future. It's all really, really interesting, and I think it does
speak to a lot of deeper problems in higher education and this sort of really
uncomfortable reality that we are sending so many of our best and brightest through this
four year filter that may never leave them, especially in IVY League. But
it's yea, I shouldn't even say especially in the IVY League. It's obviously
exists in state schools, in the deepest red of Red States. It's basically
everywhere. And before long, you know, people look around in twenty twenty,
people look around now after October seventh, and oh, my goodness,
what has happened to higher education? And we've had this debate, you know,
a couple of times on the show since October seventh. We've talked about
it felt like every day in twenty twenty because it was so important and pressing.
But the reality is this is now so deeply embedded in our society and
in our culture. And I think the clotting gay example really speaks to that
because this woman is the head of the most prestigious American institution, American academic
institution, but actually perhaps the most prestigious academic institution in all the world that
is here in the United States. I mean, it's just an incredible embarrassment.
It's obviously unfair to students at Harvard and really around the country. But
I'm eager to bring you this interview with Chris Brunette, who worked with Chris
Rufo to kind of break this story open, and it's continuing to look into
all of this. So I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday week.
There is no better week than the week between Christmas at New Year's and I
hope you're all enjoying it, and I hope you enjoy this interview with Chris
Brunette. Chris, Welcome to Federalist Radio Hour. Hey, I'm very glad
to be here. This is my second podcast ever. Well, the first
one was that it was Radio Hour like a few weeks ago. But now
that we've broken to such a big story like, it would be crazy not
podcast. Yeah, podcast are the best way to go through some of those
big stories. I feel like, because you get the time and space to
kind of talk through them. Speaking of which you are a contributing editor over
at The American Conservative, You're not American, You're Canadian, which is a
differentes as far as I'm concerned, right, well, I'm I try not
to like trick the listeners or my readers, Like I'm pretty open about how
I'm Canadian I am, and also I write about So I've written six or
seven stories for them, and like three three have been about Canada and three
have been about Europe. So I'm not like writing about like how American I
am. But yeah, I am Canadian, and I am conservative for a
Canadian, like I would call myself this interest, but in Canada, I'm
like far right extremes, and so I don't really fit in there. I
left the country. I fled after COVID, Like I was already not feeling
like I fit in in Canada, but like during COVID, I've been got
so crazy that I am. I left the country and I don't plan on
going back. And one of the big reasons I left, just so I'm
going to end on this is in Canada, if you're unvaccinated, which I
am, you can give an organ donation, but you cannot receive an organ
donation, and so that really really pumps me. And then I like that
they won't let me have an organ purely out of spite, not that I
need an organ, but like if I did need an organ, they wouldn't
let me have it. M Yeah, I mean that's I didn't know that
that was the long Canada. That's outrageous, but it gives you, I
guess, I think, helpful perspective when you're writing about some of these things
you just mentioned breaking a big story, Could you start just by telling us
a little bit about how that came to be and we'll go through everything kind
of one by one by one, or one through five as it is.
But if you could tell us just a little bit about what you wrote,
and then we'll walk through each kind of scandal in and of itself. Sure.
Well, I've been investigating Clouting Gay, the president of Harbers for two
years. My first job in media actually was at the Daily Caller. And
I quit my job at the Daily call It because they wouldn't let me publish
stories about Claudine Gay or about Harvard and because it was too much legal risk,
right, So I quit and did it on my own substack, and
for two years I was like investigating cluding gay and I wasn't really getting any
traction, Like my stories did okay, but like my substack wasn't growing that
quickly, right, And then she became president of Herbert. She was just
the dean, but now she's president and that kind of is what flew up
all the stories in her face. And the most recent one was two weeks
ago. I published it with Chris Ruffo on his substack and City Journal,
and we found, courtesy of an anonymous tip, lots of my stories come
from NONUS emails. Right. We found plagiarism in her nineteen ninety seven doctoral
thesis. We found about twenty examples of like verbatim plagiarism, so just like
straight up copy and pasting, and also Moses plagarism, which is like patchwork
plagiarism. And our examples were pretty bad, but they weren't like the worst
plagiarism in the world. It wasn't like the end of the world for her.
But we got really lucky in that, Like once we got the ball
rolling with our plagiarism story, the Washington Free Bacon posted their own plagiarism story
the New York Post. Yeah, New York Posts had a big one too,
with like really really bad examples, and they had professors coming forward,
and the professors were saying like, hey, like this happened to me.
This is plagiarism, This is really bad. And they added a lot of
gravita to the story with us and then the Washington Free Bacon posted a fourth
one. And then now that four or five stories of the plagism have come
out, each with like twenty examples in each, so there's like sixty seventy
examples. Now now it's like really really blowing up. And just yesterday,
like the New York Times covered in the CNN, it was the leading story
on CNN Nightly News, Like it's really the left wing media is picking it
up now finally after it was just like the right wing media for a couple
of weeks and who is like, maybe we just back up for a second,
because you have this background where you actually were looking into clouding gay before
a lot of people cared about Clyding gay, even though she also was part
of the as far as I understand, was part of the kind of inner
Harvard movement to get rid of Roland Fryar for being sort of a heterodox outside
of the liberal bubble on crime statistics and things of that sort. Who is
she and why did you initially really want to start digging into her? So
two years ago I received an anonymous tip or anonymous document from that turned out
to be an internal Harvard investigation that I published on my substock and it was
another professor in the political science department who committed data paper data fabrication, and
so my original target was not Claude Gay, it was this guy. But
then it turns out she's the guy. She's the dean who covered up his
data fabrication, and so like that turned me on to her, and then
I wrote a bunch of particles about her and what I discovered it. So
she's a political scientist, first of all. She began her career as an
assistant professor at Stanford, and she was granted tenure at Stanford, and it
was probably the weakest tenure case Stanford as ever seen. She when she was
granted tenure at Stanford, she only had four published papers and they were all
about critical race theory. Like that's her pet theory, is a racial threat
theory. It was like her big bread and butter, which is the theory
that white people are afraid of black people, which causes white people to vote
in certain ways. And then after ten year at Stanford, she got an
offer at Harvard, so she went to Harvard, and there she only published
a couple more papers, like she a credit to her almost as soon as
she went tenure, like she did barely just enough her tenure. Then no
more, she stopped publishing papers. Once she went to Harvard, she basically
became an administrator. She became the dean of something, and then the dean
of the Faculty of Arts and Science. And then last year she was promoted
to be president of the university. And it came out recently that she was
promoted. And first of all, it was the shortest residential search in the
last eighty years, so like they didn't do a full search, they just
like picked her basically. And Bill Ackman revealed that the search committee explicitly picked
her because she was a black woman, like that was the main criteria.
And it kind of makes sense, like that's what everyone assumes, right,
and because she doesn't have the qualifications on paper, but she is the qualifications
based on skin color. Yeah, that seems to be a theme of criticisms
of her career, and actually that's a good transition point into what you and
others have found. Especially one of the things I liked about your guys' initial
report is that you included comments from people who could evaluate, you know,
how severe the case was and all of that. So if you could just
walk us through the evidence that the president of Harvard, this celebrated scholar,
is a serial plagiarist, that would be great. Chris, all right,
well, so the strongest evidence is that she has already submitted corrections to six
different journals and like, so she's corrected her work, but at the same
time says she's done nothing wrong. And if you go and look at all
the examples of plagiarism, which, by the way, the New York Times
this morning posted an article where they walk through examples of plagiarism and like they
go through the worst examples and show them side by side. So that would
really do more justice than me just like talking about the parandims. Yeah,
that that article, And of course people in the article point their fingers at
conservatives for seizing on the issue. But yes, it's amazing that the New
York Times even you know, and Jake Tapper, as you mentioned, led
his story off or let his show off with it just yesterday. They're definitely
interested, right. The funniest example of platiarism, which has gone the most
viral is she plagiarized the thank you notes in one of her papers, so
like, I forget the exact word, but her thank you notes says like,
I'm tremendously grateful for you for pushing me to work harder, and I
have done it without your wonderful help. And then it was taken word from
word for word from another political scientist thank you note. And so she's either
lazy or I guess back in nineteen ninety seven, the standards were a lot
lower. So what I'm expecting to find actually is I'm working with an organization
which I don't think I can announce it now, but I'm working with them
to gather a database of all the papers of every university president and provosts and
dean and big shot. And we're putting them all in a database. And
then we're I'm working with the university professor who knows about and we're going to
check them all for plagiarism. Using AI. It's just a matter of doing
it, Like that's a very time consuming project. But I'm and it might
not be successful, Like who knows, maybe there's no more plagiarists in the
world, but we're expecting it to be fruitful. Yeah. Actually, one
of the big questions I've heard so much, and it's actually a really interesting
one about Claudine Gay is how does Harvard hire someone that you know? As
soon as she's in the middle of a controversy, it becomes very clear there
are all of these examples of plagiarism. How do how does this person climb
the ladders of higher education? Not just you know, in America, but
in the world. Harvard is probably the most prestigious academic institution in the world,
and this woman sits at the head of it. And it was so
easy to kind of topple this house of cards or to figure out that there
was a lot of plagiarism in her background. And one of the things I
think is interesting about that Chris is back in the day, so if you
plagiarized, it was a lot harder to check, and you could move up
your career without anticipating that one day the house of cards would be brought down
with a pretty easy, you know, couple hours plugging your work into a
plagiarism checker, maybe not even a couple of hours you're putting it into AI.
Nobody anticipated they probably should have, but nobody anticipated decades ago that they
would be so easily found out. And I bet that a whole lot of
people in academia is just quaking in their boots this holiday season. Right,
Well, Claude and Gay was born in the wrong generation. If she were
a Zoomer, she would have chat EVT and like her whole career would be
so much easier. And all those questions you asked, actually the people who
want to find out the answer to them about how she could have risen in
Harvard is the United States Congress. So just yesterday the Congress announced a probe
specifically into her plagiarism. So before they were investigating her anti Semitic remarks or
her Botch testimony basically, and now they're investigating her plagiarism. So she has
until December twenty nine to produce all of the internal Harvard documents about how they
investigated I'm using air quotes for investigated her plagiarism. Because every time she's been
accused of plagiarism, Harvard comes out and stands behind her unanimously, and their
investigation always takes one day. And when you run these types of investigations,
what other academics say is that they usually take six months to two years,
and Harvard is clearing her unanimously in one day, and each time they clear
her more evidence than comes out a few days later. So it's like,
I think they kind of regret unanimously any behind her the first time, because
like it's just gotten so much worse since then, and now it's gotten so
bad that Congress has given them until yeah, until December twenty nine. So
I one good way to judge what are the chances of being her being ousted
from being the university president are prediction markets. And I'm not sure what you're
if your users know what prediction markets are, but I use them all the
time to get an unbiased because I'm obviously biased in the story, right,
Like I'm like rooting against her, and I like to think she's going to
go because my career kind of depends on her going, or it would be
good my career. I was the guy who broke the story that took down
the perfect President. If she stays in the job, there's continued fodder for
your work. Yeah, I mean I've won either way already, and not
only I want. Anyone who values meritocracy has won already. Anyways. The
prediction markets are where gamblers can bet against other gamblers on real world outcomes,
and there is currently a forty five percent chance that she is fired within the
next year. Wow, So I wontter if she's seen that. Yeah,
it's a coin flip. Basically, a lot of people are thinking it might
happen during Christmas, right that's a good time, because like all the heat
is mounting right now, and that might save them from the congressional probe that
is to on December twenty nine. And a lot of people think she might
because they've already kind of dug in their heels. What they might do is
just like ride out a few months, let it blow over, and then
maybe this summer that will she'll quietly leave to go spend more time with their
family. Yeah. I mean, it's a fifty to fifty coin slip right
now whether she'll stay or go. And I'm betting on her going, Like
I literally bet real money. I'm not sure if that's good journalistic practice,
but I'm pretty open about my bias. Like the tagline on myself stack is
opinionated investigative journalism, And I put it opinionated in there because I don't really
think there's such a thing as unbiased investigative journalism. Like, everyone has a
bias. It's just a matter of how open you are about it. Yeah,
you have a bias when you choose a headline, when you decide what
to write about. It's all there's no way to extricate it from what you're
doing. I think that's fantastic. On the scholarship question, I mean plagiarizing
the acknowledgments is really funny. I think we're up to some five big examples
between all of the probes into clouding gay and as you mentioned New York Times
as a story just today, that's we're taking this December twenty first, are
there what is the kind of on the academic side the acknowledgements hilarious, but
thinking about you know, other scholars, other academics who she cribbed from on
a substance of level, what is that tell us basically, like, what
do we know about her? Pattern there and what does that tell us about
how she approached some of this work. So it's important to know that she
didn't just steal like lazy paragraphs. She sole ideas. And one of the
best examples of this is doctor Carol Swain, who I love. I didn't
know who she was until this week, but now I'm like her biggest fan.
So cluding Gay stole paragraphs from Carol Swain's work, and then Carol Swain
looked into it. Who Carol Swain is a black lady, Not that it
should matter, but since it kind of does, cladding gay. So yeah.
So Carol Swain was like a big name in the emerging field of DEI
or critical race theory twenty thirty years ago, and she was like against affirmative
action. She was like kind of Clarence Clarence Thomas hype black conservative. And
then yeah, so she's come out and she said, look like clouding Gate
not only stole my paragraphs, but she built on my work. She took
my work and twisted it. My work is the foundation of all her work.
And like it's I've been shut out of the media because my work was
honest, but it went against their preferred narrative, and she's been lifted up
because even though her work was dishonest, it was exactly what white liberals wanted
to hear. And that's who put fighting Gay in Turge really is like guilty
white liberals. Right yeah, well, and I mean that's kind of the
bigger picture here. And again, as somebody who's been looking into not just
her career, but then as you explore her career kind of academia as a
whole, there's something about the style of her substance. And when I said
a style, it is not just style, of course, his politics,
the stylish politics, the you know, the kind of Tom Wolf, as
Tom Wolf would describe it, style over substance here, and it seems to
me Clutting Gay is basically a textbook example of someone whose career benefited enormously from
that that style, the political fashions over the substance, and the fact that
she is at the head of the most prestigious college in the country, which
is refusing to get rid of her when shown the problems with the substance.
This is kind of a leading question, Chris, But that seems to say
a whole lot about higher education. Right, Well, yesterday I published my
first article in The Blade, which is exciting for me, Like I don't
know why I like publishing in New olitza kind of I don't know, but
I published an article co Harvard is the bud Light of academia, and that
kind of sums up what you're getting at is that, like lud Light was
a punchline, and now Harvard is a punchline, Like it took them four
hundred years to build their reputation for excellence and now like other professors see them
as like a cautionary tale to be avoided. And yeah, I mean other
professors are speaking up. If you look on x, which is a good
place to find professors speaking about this, you'll see like untold number of professors
speaking out against Harvard, like talking about how it's a travesty that Claudi and
k is ruining their reputation because that's really what she's doing. She's the fact
that she is their leader, and she's a serial plagiarist and a mediocre less
than mediocre scholar, and she's their president. It's really tanking their reputation.
Like I've never seen anything like this in academia before, just like nobody had
ever seen anything in the beer market before that happened to by Light. Yeah,
it's just go ahead. I was just gonna say, I mean,
it's the so what because I can I know, like the New York Times
quotes people saying, you know, basically, this is just a conservative hit
that they're being. They're nitpicking years and years and years of scholarship, blah
blah blah blah blah. But obviously, if you're another professor or another you
know, somebody who's who's in management at another school, or you're a student
who was just kicked out of school for a mistake that you made, a
miss a judgment, that you made a sort of moral judgment that you aired
in. And here's the president of the university. That does feel like and
maybe you can speak to this. Having scanned the reactions of other people in
academia, that seems like a pretty big part of the so what question?
Right, Well, I'm not even scanning reactions. I'm getting emails from them,
and a lot of them say like, hey, I can't say this
outloud, Like people from Harvard have emailed me and said, hey, I
can't say this outloud, But like you're spot on. We can't speak up
against her because like that would be career suicide at Harvard. So there's a
vocal minority that's cheering cludding gay on still, but they're like the vocal minority,
right, they're not the majority, the silent majority, Like I think
she's a joke or embarrassed fire and just like are tired of this whole thing.
They want her to go, and it's just a matter of them having
their voice heard to the US Congress and to the US and to's the Harvard
Corporation Board of overseers, which is really the final decision maker here. So
that's like I can't name them off the top of my head, but that's
like Penny Pritzker, Penny Pittsker and her friends basically are the ones can make
the final decision. It's chilling. Yeah, Well, they're the ones who
installed her, and she's she's an easy puppet to control, right because she
has such a weak profile. She's what it's not like she's gonna say no
to them or I guess she has to note to them on the anti semitism
issue. Yeah. Yeah, one professor who's spoken up, I was very
grateful for this quote that he gave me was doctor Philip died Big. I
don't know to say the last name, died Big. He won the Nobel
Prize in Economics last year and I emailed every Nobel laureate just get to get
a quote, and he was the only one that answered me. And full
credit to him, because it's not easy for someone with that much profile to
speak up. But he gave me a very strong quote talking about He wasn't
talking about cluttings, plagiarism, and this speaks to just how many things are
wrong with her. He was speaking about her leadership and her messaging on anti
Semitism, and he gave me a very strong quote about how people who were
oppressed don't dream of equality, they dream of being becoming the oppressor. And
that's like a very fiery quote for a Nobel winner and economics. I'm very
very grateful he gave me that quote. It got like millions of views on
Twitter. My Twitter has dolded the past week by the way, I went
from ten thousand to twenty five thousand. You know that another thing we haven't
even touched on, although it's loomed really obviously in the background of the whole
conversation is how this is part of the fallout from the bizarre although not surprising
testimonies they gave him the anti semitism hearing clutting Gay along with Liz McGill from
Penn and the pressive event my Tea just obviously we've talked about on this podcast
a couple of times already, but that's clearly part of the context here.
So combined with that, Chris, I'm wondering again, as you're reporting on
the reaction, as you're hearing from people, as you're you know, kind
of in this in the middle of this as a reporter yourself, how are
those two things affecting higher education in America right now inside of itself and with
outside pressures from people like Bill Ackman, Virginia Fox obviously in Congress, head
of the Help Committee in Congress, who announced the investigation today. Is this
continuing to really royal academia or you know, are they just kind of dealing
with it superficially and hoping that it goes away. I think it kind of
has gone away for the rest of academia. Like I think if you're the
president of Brown or the president of UCLA right now, you're not too worried
about being fired over anti Semitic whatever on campus. I think they've mostly figured
out how to deal with it, and it's kind of pasted its peak media
attention. Right, it was like the main thing in the media for a
couple of weeks and now it's kind of Christmas. People aren't so much focused
on it free speech And I'm not trying to downplay anti Semitism or the whole
Hamas issue, right, It's just not really something I write about. I've
never I've written like three hundred articles in my career, and not a single
one has been about anti Semitism or Israel or Middle East during politics. Although
I do write about free speech on campus, I make a I've just I
don't know the most recent Like I don't know. I try to stay away
from the Israel war, and for that reason, I'll kind of I'm not
an expert on how it's impacted the climate because I've kind of tuned out that
whole dialogue on X Like really, for me, this is a personal story,
Like I'm personally invested in it, and I'm invested in the meritocracy component
and the free speech component has kind of taken it back to you. I'm
sorry that's not a great answer to your question, but that's my truth.
No, I think it is actually because you know, the free speech question
sort of split people in the center and the center right and the right in
general during the anti Semitism hearings. But one thing I think that was clear
from the hearings is that they are, even in an academic sense, they're
so bogged down in the mediocrities of Dei ideology. They're just so incapable of
original thought because they're you know, in prisons intellectually of their own. You
know, they sort of locked themselves into these ridiculous Dei cages, and that
ties into absolutely everything. You know, they're obviously hypocrites on free speech.
But that question of like media like just plain mediocrity, I feel like is
maybe the biggest takeaway from the whole, like the last two months, whether
it's the president of Harvard turning out to easily be discovered as a serial plagiarist
or or you know, being incapable of having a coherent and principled and seemingly
like actually logical answer on what's happening in her code of conduct and you know
what constitutes bullying harrassment in any of those things, Chris, is that is
my interpretation of this. Would you agree with that, No problem if you
don't. But it does seem like all of this the big theme is that
higher ed is just utterly mediocre. I think there's still a lot of excellent
people in higher education. For for a long time, I was set on
blowing up higher education. So I was set on revolution. But now I'm
coming around to reform, Like I saw a hope that it can be reformed,
and the university has played such an important role, Like it's easy to
say burn them down, defund them all, but I don't know. I'm
kind of sympathetic to academia. Like I wanted to be an academic. I
was black both from academia, Like I was rejected from every PhD program I
got into. So maybe that's my my my motivation. I was really angry
for a while, which so I wanted to burn down the system, which
is why I should exposed as product coruption. Yeah, but no, I
mean, like Claudine Gay has to go because she's embarrassing so many good people,
and like Harvard, I know it's also easy to say Hervard's evil Harvard's
in the middle of every war that's ever happened in history. But it's hard
to tell that to like chemistry professor who's dedicated his life to chemistry and only
cares about chemistry, and like he's built his whole life from chemistry. He
loves it. And then out of nowhere, like this mediocre woman has come
and embarrassed him and like hurt his reputation and hurt his funding. Like I
feel bad for that guy. I want to I want her to be fired,
not for my own eventual purposes, but like I think it'll make the
world a better place if mediocre people aren't in charge of the most important institutions
in society. And yeah, I mean that's really what it's all about at
the end of the day, is it's is making the world a better place.
And that's what I'm trying to do with my reporting. And I listed
kind of way, yeah, making sure those chemistry professors are still around ten
twenty years into the future, there that we still have you know, non
mediocre that you know, the great engine that is America's higher education system doesn't
produce or promote mediocre over substance. Chris Brunette that's so interesting. Really appreciate
you coming on the show. People can find your work on substack. What's
the substack link again, Chris, Carl Stack. If you google Carl Stack
with the K, that's the first result. There you go, Chris Brunette.
Really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. All right, you've
been listening to another edition of The Federalist or radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more.
Until then, it lovers a freedom and anxious for the fray. All you