CNN Pushes False Claims about Resignation of Harvard’s Gay: ‘Conservative Males Attacking Another Black Woman’
CNN’s pundits are pushing deceitful false claims about the resignation of Harvard’s former president, Claudine Gay.
As Slay News reported, Gay resigned from her position at the prestigious college on Tuesday as scandals mounted against the embattled Harvard leader.
Gay faced multiple charges of plagiarism while she was already at the center of allegations regarding Harvard’s facilitation of anti-Semitism on campus.
While many on the Left are trying to frame Gay as a victim, she will retain her $900,000 a year salary from Harvard, despite her resignation as president.
In the New York Times op-ed on Wednesday, Gay accused critics of waging a coordinated racial campaign to force her out of leadership.
On CNN, the network’s analyst Bakari Sellers and conservative commentator Scott Jennings feuded over whether racism was behind Gay’s resignation.
Sellers, a former Democrat member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, defended Gay on CNN Thursday.
He claimed, without evidence, that Gay was targeted because she was black.
He then misleadingly made the false link that this alleged racial targeting was part of an effort to discredit the Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda in academia.
“You can’t help but see the racial animus and the racial overtones in this,” he complained.
“You can’t help but see the attack on higher education. And this is even more troubling — you can’t help but see the complicity in mainstream media.
“When you have institutions like Politico yesterday platforming Christopher Rufo and giving him an interview and giving him a Q&A, that’s not journalism.”
Sellers continued by downplaying the dozens of plagiarism charges against Gay.
However, plagiarism is a direct violation of Harvard’s own rules.
And, once again, @CommunityNotes for the win.
Gay repeatedly violated Harvard’s rules against plagiarism. Source: Harvard.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 3, 2024
Instead, Sellers doubled down on his argument that racist conservatives had forced her out.
“What we’re seeing is that this is someone – this wasn’t an attack from her peers,” he claimed.
“This wasn’t an attack from other colleagues who had a problem with her utilizing their words without the proper citations because it doesn’t rise to the level of plagiarism, it’s improper citations.
“This is the right-wing, particularly right-wing conservative males attacking another black woman in authority and people have to call it out as such,” he insisted.
Conservative commentator Scott Jennings disagreed that the right was waging a “war on higher education.”
Jennings argues that conservatives are actually trying to reform higher education.
Claudine Gay’s troubles came about because of her own testimony before Congress and her own acts of plagiarism, he said.
“Conservatives didn’t invent time travel, go back in time and make up these plagiarism instances and conservatives certainly didn’t cause her to sit in front of the American people and the United States Congress and fail to unequivocally condemn genocide against the Jewish people,” he noted.
“That’s not anybody’s fault but her own.
“As the leader of one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States, Gay had to be held to a high standard morally and ethically,” Jennings said.
“She had a thin academic record to begin with and when the plagiarism issues popped up, I just don’t see how it was tenable for Harvard to ever say that we won’t hold our president to the same standards that we would hold our students,” he argued.
Sellers furiously shook his head and repeated, “No,” while Jennings spoke of Gay’s “thin academic record.”
“This is when we have to draw the line,” CNN’s Sellers shot back.
“I cannot sit here on national TV and allow individuals to attack the credentials and the academic record and the professionalism of Claudine Gay to get the position.”
“Because that’s what this conversation has delved into,” Sellers claimed.
“That this black woman didn’t deserve it in the first place.
“When we go down this path of saying she had a thin academic record to begin with — she was overly qualified.
“She was just as qualified as the 30 people who came before her who just all happened to be white.”
The Democrat complained conservatives had “ginned up” Gay’s “issues of citations” as he lamented the larger push by figures like Bill Ackman to eradicate DEI at Harvard and other universities.
Sellers then deceitfully attempted, again, to conflate opposition to the Marxism-based DEI agenda with racism, saying:
“When you have people questioning DEI, when you have people questioning diversity, equity, and inclusion and then question the record of this black woman, we have to draw the line and say, ‘see, that’s the game we’re talking about being played.’
“She didn’t cause that on that part on herself.
“We have to root that part out of the conversation.”
The former Harvard leader made a similar argument in her Times op-ed on Wednesday.
She accused her critics of using “tired racial stereotypes about black talent and temperament” and promoting “a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.”
“The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader,” she also wrote.
“This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.”
READ MORE – Al Sharpton: Harvard President’s Resignation Is an Attack on ‘Every Black Woman’
