David Roberts Upset That We're All Helping Conservatives Smear Black Scholars

Christopher Rufo sums it all up right here:

It's glorious: Academics defending plagiarism. Journalists opposing journalism. Newswires attributing scalping to "white colonists." Everyone focusing on the frame we set. That is how the game is won.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 3, 2024

We're especially amused by journalists opposing journalism. NBC News "journalist" Ben Collins sarcastically tweeted that we should put more reporters on the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal: "It is the most important thing in the world," he said. It is important, and reporters should be able to cover more than one story at a time. He was so butthurt that the New York Times reported on it.

Former Vox writer David Roberts, who now runs his own newsletter/podcast, took the same approach, arguing that the plagiarism scandal was ginned up from nothing and was "blotting out all other news stories." Really.

After Gay's resignation, Roberts wrote a lengthy thread against journalists committing journalism. We won't post the whole thing here, but feel free to click on it.

All right, I really should be doing literally anything else with my time, but I have certain compulsions, so here's a short thread on the Harvard thing.

Or actually, not about Harvard per se, because I, like most Americans, don't really give a shit what goes on at Harvard.
— David Roberts (@drvolts) January 2, 2024

We care when student groups are calling for genocide on campus and no one does anything about it.

And so here we are, all of us, talking about what the right wants us to talk about, actively doing its bidding, actively helping it destroy higher education & smear black scholarship & distract from its institutional antisemitism. We are all Rufo's bitches.
— David Roberts (@drvolts) January 2, 2024

"Smear black scholarship." How about the scholarship of Dr. Carol M. Swain, the black scholar from whom Gay plagiarized? She wasn't too pleased with her scholarship being stolen. No one cares about her, though, as she advised Harvard to fire Gay and "hire the best man or woman who can steer the university back towards sanity." This is about protecting DEI.