TO BE FAIR, SHE’S SOMETHING OF AN EXPERT* ON THE TOPIC: Michelle Wu blames ‘racial bias’ for Claudine Gay’s downfall as Harvard president: ‘I’m just really saddened.’

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is defending Harvard President Claudine Gay after the campus’ shortest-ever tenured prez resigned following her explosive comments about antisemitism and as the leader faced plagiarism allegations.

Wu is blaming “racial bias” for Gay’s downfall at Harvard, noting that people against DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) have been pushing hard for the president’s resignation. Gay was Harvard’s first Black president.

The Boston mayor, who graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, was asked about Gay during an interview on Wednesday.

“I’m just really saddened by how the whole thing played out,” Wu said on ‘Java with Jimmy.’

“I simply don’t believe that three minutes of a video clip, especially in a certain setting where you’re in a place where people are putting you in a ‘gotcha’ moment, that that should define everything,” she later added.

Exactly — hence the nearly 50 allegations of Gay’s plagiarism that have since been reported.

* Flashback: Boston City Hall roiled by email party invitation for ‘electeds of color’ sent to all.

Exit quote: “I’m getting used to dealing with problems that are expensive, disruptive and white.’”

BECAUSE, LIKE SO MUCH IN OUR SOCIETY, THEY’RE THE PRODUCT OF HUMORLESS POLITICIZED MORONS: Why Aren’t Movies Fun Anymore?

I DON’T GET THIS: Equinox’s bizarre ‘We Don’t Speak January’ campaign. “‘You are not a New Year’s resolution. Your life doesn’t start at the beginning of the year. And that’s not what being part of Equinox is about,’ the message told hopeful new members.”

REVIEW: Tested: 2024 Lexus TX500h Offers Large-Family Largesse.

LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT CHECKERS AND EDITORS: Desperation: Panicked Gay Defenders Claim ‘Scalping’ Used by White People to Keep the Red Man Down.

Missed it by that much! I’m looking forward to AP’s new series on WWII history as well:

Some critics spoke of a conservative kamikaze attack on Gay, referring to a tactic from World War 2 in which Allied naval forces would deliberately ram their ships into Japanese planes https://t.co/u8eTcYvEJX

— John Hayward (@Cobretata) January 3, 2024

TYRANNY MARCHES ON: California’s Sweeping Gun-Carry Restrictions Go Into Effect Despite Court Ruling Them Unconstitutional.

SPACE: 12 times scientists penetrated the secrets of asteroids in 2023.

SAME: In This House We Believe in Keeping People Safe.

WHY BE SUICIDAL WHEN YOU’RE GETTING SKINNY AND GORGEOUS: Diabetes and weight-loss drugs—Ozempic and Wegovy—not associated with increased suicidal thoughts, finds study.

IN THE MAIL: The Case to Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden. #CommissionEarned

AT MY SUBSTACK: Claudine Gay Has Gone Away: Is this the dawn of a new day?

As always, if you like it, please sign up for a paid subscription. Thanks!

OH NO! ANYWAY. . . Deadly explosions kill more than 100 at event honoring Iranian general killed by US.

WELL: More women who are not pregnant stock up on abortion pills, study finds.

WHEN THE NYT IS DOWN ON DEI, I THINK IT’S PEAKED: The Word That Undid Claudine Gay: The fate of Harvard’s president is the latest evidence of a deep crisis in American academia.

In retrospect, Claudine Gay’s fate was sealed by a single word. (She resigned the presidency of Harvard on Tuesday, just six months into her tenure.) It wasn’t “plagiarism” or “genocide” — the fearsome fighting words most publicly associated with her case — but rather a careful, neutral piece of language that struck some listeners as outrageous for precisely that reason: an attempt at anti-inflammatory rhetoric that had the opposite effect. The word was “context.” . . .

The Israel-Palestine conflict and American election-year politics are not the only salient context here. Academia seems to be in the grip of a multidimensional crisis that goes beyond ideology, and also beyond Harvard. Higher learning is plagued by opaque admissions policies; runaway tuition costs; administrative bloat; grade inflation; helicopter parents; cancel culture. The list goes on. An assiduous scholar might connect these phenomena with recent events in Harvard Yard. An enterprising writer could weave the whole thing into a bristling campus novel, something worthy of Paul Beatty or Mary McCarthy.

Instead, for now, we will have to make do with Dr. Gay’s letter of resignation — emailed to students, faculty, alumni and others with the subject line “Personal News” — and the message from the Harvard Corporation (the university’s secretive governing body) about her departure.

What is most striking about these texts — each amounting to little more than 600 words, all of them carefully measured, few of them memorable — is their rigorous avoidance of context. . . . What’s curious, though, is that Harvard, which compels its undergraduates to master expository writing in their freshman year, cannot find the language to defend itself.

Well, it’s hard to defend the indefensible.

THAT HE’S PRESIDENT IS A STUNNING INDICTMENT OF OUR SYSTEM FOR SELECTING PRESIDENTS: “Whatever Biden pushes should be viewed with skepticism and concern, given that he’s a public official who has been wrong about foreign policy for 40 years.”

NEW TALKING POINT: Plagiarism charges now a right-wing weapon against DEI.

Sounds like they know they have a more widespread problem. And that’s probably right. A lot of unqualified people have been promoted in higher education administration, but it’s still been required that they, at least formally, check the boxes with dissertations and some publications. But since nobody really cared about the quality, there was probably a lot of this sort of thing going on. Now it’s much easier to check such things. The obvious solution, thus, is to devalue plagiarism as an offense. Up to now it was always a firing offense; it will soon be transmogrified into a mere peccadillo, or even a blow against a “privileged” system.

If they can get away with that, anyway.

Related:

How many conservatives did it take to force Claudine Gay to plagiarize 50 times? Was it more than 100,000? What specific weapons were used? Writing my thesis on this.

— Savannah (@BasedSavannah) January 3, 2024

UPDATE: Heh:

Claudine Gay Claims White Supremacists Went Back In Time And Forced Her To Plagiarize At Gunpoint https://t.co/dJlF7lmkGx pic.twitter.com/3qwcj04P81

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 3, 2024

WHEN WE START HAVING IBM AND ROCK-OLA MAKE THEM, WE’LL BE SERIOUS: The West Badly Needs More Missiles—but the Wait to Buy Them Is Years Long.

A factory here west of Oslo produces a missile-defense system that can shoot down drones, helicopters and other airborne threats from almost 25 miles away.

Capable of launching 72 missiles into the sky at once, the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, or Nasams, is what protects the airspace over the White House. When first deployed in Ukraine in 2022, it recorded a 100% success rate shooting down cruise missiles and drones in its first few months.

With the West confronting a rising number of potential threats, including Russia and China, orders are piling up for the Nasams from Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace.

“I’ve never seen anywhere near so much demand,” said Eirik Lie, a 30-year Kongsberg veteran who is president of the company’s defense unit, on a November tour of the factory.

New customers, though, will have to wait: It takes two years to make one Nasams, and there is already a multiyear backlog.

The Ukraine war has highlighted the West’s deficiencies in quickly producing more weapons at a time of need. The Gaza conflict may tighten supplies for certain armaments.

The constraint is particularly acute for missiles and the systems that defend against them, and also guard against the swarms of drones that have become a central element of modern warfare. . . .

Faced with increased tensions with China, Asian nations are developing their own missile capabilities “because of limited U.S. production,” said Bang Jong-kwan, a former South Korean Army Major General.

In 2022, Taiwanese officials publicly complained of U.S. delays on deliveries of Stinger antiaircraft missiles, alluding to supplies for Ukraine as being behind the holdup. In October, the chairmen of two separate U.S. congressional committees sent a letter to Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, questioning him over “alarming delays” to weapons deliveries to Taiwan, including antiship missiles. They were ordered in 2019, with the first batch finally arriving in spring 2023.

The Navy declined to comment.

Taiwan began mass producing a new domestic long-range land-based missile in 2021, and the country has three other types of long-range missiles in development, Taiwanese officials say.

We haven’t been serious about this stuff for decades and it shows.

MARTIN HACKWORTH: Some bells you can’t un-ring: The tragedy of the Claudine Gay saga isn’t plagiarism; it’s that she was the president of an Ivy League school in the first place. “The academy is on life support if Gay is, indeed, supposed to be among the cream of the crop.”

The academy survives on prestige, and she’s dealt it the single worst blow it’s ever received. Even the celebrity admissions scandals carried the subtext that maybe these institutions were corrupt, but look how badly people wanted to get in. Now it’s like why would you want so badly to get in?

IT’S TIME FOR CHANGE: Harvard Corporation members should resign in wake of Gay fiasco, watchdogs say.

More from Bill Ackman, who isn’t going home:

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 3, 2024

THANOS AND AGENT SMITH WOULD LIKE A WORD: We Need to Talk About That ‘Inevitable’ Switch to Electric Vehicles.

THE LEFT’S INTELLECTUAL CASE IS CRUMBLING, ONE STUDY AT A TIME: A key piece of the literature supporting ESG policy turns out to be irreplicable, or, to put it another way, bollocks.

I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: New Jedi Order Director Gives Super Woke Film Update.

[Sharmeen] Obaid-Chinoy of “Ms. Marvel” fame just suggested the first “Star Wars” film since 2019’s “Rise of Skywalker” may actually start production soon. “Soon” is subjective, of course. As of November, Ridley had yet to read a finished script of the film, to be penned by “Peaky Blinders” alum Stephen Knight.

The director teased the project during a New Year’s Eve interview on the far-Left CNN.

“I’m very thrilled about the project because I feel what we’re about to create is something very special. And we’re in 2024 now, and it’s about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”

CNN did its part to push the director’s Identity Politics bona fides, describing Obaid-Chinoy as the first woman and first person of color to direct a “Star Wars” film.

That’s CNN being CNN, which ignored female directors like Bryce Dallas Howard and Deborah Chow. Both have directed episodes of small-screen “Star Wars” projects.

Still, Obaid-Chinoy is reading from the dog-eared playbook that has sent Disney’s fortunes into a tailspin.

She’s also flat-out wrong.

Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia played an outsized role in the first three “Star Wars” films. More recently, actress Felicity Jones headlined “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and small-screen “Star Wars” projects include “Ahsoka,” led by Rosario Dawson, and other strong female heroes (Gina Carano’s Cara Dune).

The director’s quote recalls Jennifer Lawrence lamenting the dearth of female action heroes while ignoring pioneers like Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Princess Leia and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton).

Not to mention:

It’s “about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away?” Really? Did Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy miss the part where Kathleen Kennedy has been in control of Star Wars for the last decade? Maybe I’m confused, but I’m pretty sure she’s a woman.

I’m also pretty sure that before Disney bought and castrated Lucasfilm, “Empire Strikes Back,” the best piece of Star Wars property in history, was co-written by a woman. You know what Leigh Brackett, the writer in question, didn’t care about? She didn’t care about what sex she was as she penned one of the greatest films of all time. She was out to write a good story, and she did just that. I’d say that counts as a woman shaping a story in a galaxy far, far away.

And then there’s the very genesis of the franchise:

“ we’re in 2024 now, and it’s about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”… you mean like Marcia Lucas did back in the 70’s… BUT Disney can’t take credit for that so it doesn’t count! I can’t with these fake geek girls🤦‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/DIgwk5NfZG

— thatstarwarsgirl (@thatstarwarsgrl) January 2, 2024

How instrumental was Marcia Lucas in making the original Star Wars a massive hit? This influential: The ‘secret weapon’ behind Star Wars.

She was really the warmth and the heart of those films, a good person [George] could talk to, bounce ideas off of, who would tell him when he was wrong,” Mark Hamill said in a 2005 interview with Film Freak Central.

“I know for a fact that Marcia Lucas was responsible for convincing him to keep that little ‘kiss for luck’ before Carrie [Fisher] and I swing across the chasm in the first film: ‘Oh, I don’t like it, people laugh in the previews,’ and she said, ‘George, they’re laughing because it’s so sweet and unexpected’ — and her influence was such that if she wanted to keep it, it was in.

“When the little mouse robot comes up when Harrison and I are delivering Chewbacca to the prison and he roars at it and it screams, sort of, and runs away, George wanted to cut that and Marcia insisted that he keep it.”

Marcia was also responsible for arguably the most iconic sequence of the film: the trench run. According to Kaminski, the original run was scripted entirely differently, with Luke having two runs at the exhaust port.

“Marcia had reordered the shots almost from the ground up, trying to build tension lacking in the original scripted sequence, which was why this one was the most complicated (Deleted Magic has a faithful reproduction of the original assembly, which is surprisingly unsatisfying),” Kaminski writes.

“She warned George, ‘If the audience doesn’t cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he’s being chased by Darth Vader, the picture doesn’t work.’”

Additionally, Marcia Lucas significantly ratcheted up the tension in the final act in other ways: “Star Wars‘ initial edit did not have the Death Star approaching Yavin 4. Using voiceover and Death Star gunner footage stolen from the previous destruction sequence of Alderaan, Marcia Lucas created a ticking clock for the final battle. Originally, the only danger belonged to the X-Wing pilots and the Death Star denizens. Marcia Lucas removed the threat-exclusivity from the battlefield and placed a target on those good Rebels not yet in the fight. If Luke Skywalker doesn’t hit his target, millions more will die shortly after.”

Why are Disney cronies airbrushing Marcia Lucas out of history?

YEP: Has Anyone Noticed How Cheap it Was to Bribe the Biden Crime Family and Our Universities? “And this is, to me, perhaps the most troubling part of the story. The Biden crime family so undervalued my country that they sold it for chump change—not merely disloyal, but deeply dismissive and disrespectful.”

WHAT DOES MIT PRESIDENT SALLY KORNBLUTH SAY? MIT student group continues the fight for free speech in 2024.

WELL, THE NEW YORK TIMES: “What a delicious parenthetical!

That link on “poorly” goes to the FIRE website, where you have to do a search to see where Harvard ranks. I did the search (and you can too). We’re told the “speech climate” is “abysmal.”

But of course, this article, outside of its parentheses, portrays conservative critics of academia as the threat to freedom.

LOL. Of course.