MR. PRESIDENT, WE MUST NOT ALLOW A COLLEGE PLAGIARISM GAP!

To be fair, Rufo is in excellent company here. As Tom Wolfe told Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo in 1980:

I believe it was in the New Republic that Mitch Tuchman wrote that the reason you turned against liberals is that you were rejected by the white-shoe crowd at Yale.

Wait a minute! Is that one by Tuchman? Yeah, oh, that was great.

He talked about your doctoral dissertation.

Yeah, he wrote that after The Painted Word. It went further than that. It was called “The Manchurian Candidate,” and it said in all seriousness that I had some-how been prepared by the establishment, which he obviously thought existed at Yale, to be this kind of kamikaze like Laurence Harvey – I think that’s who was in The Manchurian Candidate, wasn’t it? – to go out and assassinate liberal culture. I loved that. And he’s talking about Yale. When I was at Yale, William Buckley was writing God and Man at Yale, saying that it had been taken over by the Left and that the Left was pouring all this poison into the innocent vessels of the young. Tuchman’s saying I turned on liberalism is amusing in itself, because it would indicate that I had either been or pretended to be a liberal and then had turned on my comrades for some devious reason. All I ever did was write about the world we inhabit, the world of culture, with a capital C, and journalism and the arts and so on, with exactly the same tone that I wrote about everything else. With exactly the same reverence that the people who screamed the most would have written about life in a small American town or in the business world or in professional sports, which is to say with no reverence at all, which is as it should be. And these days, if you mock the prevailing fashion in the world of the arts or journalism, you’re called a conservative. Which is just another term for a heretic. I would much rather be called a conservative in that case than its opposite, I assure you.

I’m so old, I can remember when The Manchurian Candidate was meant to be a satire of those who imagined Russians under every floorboard; I’m pretty sure that John Frankenheimer didn’t intend his film to be a how-to guide for routing them out.

(Classical allusion in headline.)