Quaker Guns

and the chickenshit army

Claudine Gay is Anthony Fauci.

One of the most common responses I get is I don’t care about this topic: about Israel and Gaza, about California, about Harvard and stupid Claudine Gay. What’s the point? Why write about that one thing?

My answer is almost always the same, which is that all the crises are the same crisis. Over and over and over, the structures and stories are familiar, the lessons are broadly applicable, and the pathetic narrative policing from the “mainstream” is the same.

So if you don’t care about the thing itself, take the story of Claudine Gay’s semi-resignation — she’s stepping down from the Harvard presidency and returning to the Harvard faculty with life tenure and a $900,000ish annual salary, which is quite a prize for failure — as a bigger story about the way controversy works in 21st-century America. Gay’s departing op-ed in the New York Times is word-for-word what you would expect it to be, and tell me this doesn’t sound exactly like the bullshit you’ve been reading for years about the pandemic:

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.

Claudine Gay’s attack on her critics is the attack on the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration: they’re attacking expertise, they’re trying to undermine trust, they’re trying to destroy the legitimacy of our institutions. It’s The Counterattack, elite class battle drill 1A, and you see it all day, every day. “Your highness, the peasants are revolting!” Take the stupid deflections one by one:

“This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.” The argument — the factually correct argument — was that Harvard was led by a mediocre scholar with a dismal record of research and publication, which means that the attempt to replace a poor leader was an attempt to restore public faith in a pillar of American society. Harvard should be led by a formidable public intellectual. Claudine Gay isn’t that, and never was.

Again, Claudine Gay isn’t the point. Another undeservedly powerful mediocrity famously said that “attacks on me are attacks on science.”

It wasn’t true in that case, and it isn’t true in this case. Attacks on Claudine Gay aren’t an attack on the pillars of American society, and I just had to stop typing for a moment to clear a short fit of laughter. The balls on this woman.

Critics: You’ve only published eleven papers over the course of your entire career, and many appear to contain plagiarized passages.

Gay: Ohhhhh, you’re attacking THE PILLARS OF AMERICAN SOCIETY.

Get stuffed, dork.

Harvard will now be led by its longtime provost and new interim president, Alan Garber, who has an MD and a PhD. The most recent version of his academic c.v. that I can find online is a few days more than eleven years old, and it’s a 20-page recitation of a couple-hundred papers and book chapters plus a long list of professional activities and editorial positions at important scholarly journals. Here were the last ten papers listed on his c.v. more than a decade ago, and note that he was a co-author with people like John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya:

120. Levesque BG, Cipriano LE, Chang SL, Lee KK, Owens DK, Garber AM. Cost effectiveness of alternative imaging strategies for the diagnosis of small-bowel Crohn's disease. Clin Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2010 Mar;8(3):261-7, 267.e1-4. Epub 2009 Nov 5. PMID: 19896559

121. Garber AM, Sox HC. The role of costs in comparative effectiveness research. Health Affairs 2010 Oct;29(10):1805-11. PMID: 20921479

122. Perlroth DJ, Goldman DP, Garber AM. The potential impact of comparative effectiveness research on U.S. health care expenditures. Demography 2010; 47 Suppl:S173-90. PMID: 21302424

123. Freeman JV, Zhu RP, Owens DK, Garber AM, Hutton DW, Go AS, Wang PJ, Turakhia MP. Cost effectiveness of dabigatran compared with warfarin for stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation. Ann Intern Med. 2011 Jan 4; 154 (1):1-11. PMID: 21041570

124. Elshaug AG, Garber AM. How CER could pay for itself – insights from vertebral fracture treatments. N Engl J Med 2011; 364:1390-92. PMID: 21488762

125. Garber AM. How the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute can Best Influence Real-World Health Care Decision Making. Health Affairs 2011; 30(12):2243-51. PMID: 22147851

126. Turan B, Goldstein MK, Garber AM, Carstensen LL. Knowing loved ones' end-of-life health care wishes: attachment security predicts caregivers' accuracy. Health Psychol. 2011 Nov;30(6):814-8. PMID: 22081941

127. Ioannidis JP, Garber AM. Individualized cost-effectiveness analysis. PLoS Med. 2011 Jul;8(7):e1001058. PMID: 21765810.

128. Park KT, Tsai R, Perez F, Cipriano LE, Bass D, Garber AM. Cost-effectiveness of early colectomy with ileal pouch-anal anastamosis versus standard medical therapy in severe ulcerative colitis. Ann Surg Alan M. Garber 15 2012;(256):117-24. PMID: 22270693

129. Perlroth DJ, Bhattacharya J, Goldman DP, Garber AM. An economic analysis of conservative management versus active treatment for men with localized prostate cancer. J Natl Cancer Inst Monogr 2012; 45:250–257. PMID: 23271781

130. Aranovich G, Bhattacharya J, Garber A, MaCurdy T. Coping with chronic disease? Chronic disease and disability in elderly American population 1982-1999. Forum for Health Economics & Policy, in press.

So one of our most important research universities was led by a president who was a mediocre and little-published scholar, and will now be led for a while by someone who is actually and provably a scholar of considerable substance. Quick: does this change seem likely to “unravel public faith in pillars of American society,” or to re-establish some of that faith?

Let’s go on: “Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda.”

The attack on Claudine Gay was a defense of education and expertise, noting — for example — that her thin body of published work borrowed from other highly accomplished scholars. Gay’s critics quoted experts, respectfully, at length and often, because accomplished scholars regarded her as a poor scholar. To call this defense of authentic expertise an attack on expertise is sociopathically shameless.

“Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”

Claudine Gay ruined her credibility, and the attempt to force her to resign as the president of Harvard was a demand that a trusted institution be run by a leader who merits trust and respect. The effort against Claudine Gay was an act of cultural conservation and restoration — a building up, not a tearing down. It didn’t undermine; it strengthened and reinforced.

So. In every regard, Claudine Gay’s op-ed flips the action upside-down: She responds to people who are fighting for institutional integrity and respect for real expertise by accusing them of attacking institutional integrity and expertise. You have seen this many times.

You will see this many more times.

What’s especially interesting about the moment, given its tremendous familiarity, is that all of the usual threats and attacks accomplished precisely nothing at all. Christopher Rufo, Chris Brunet, Bill Ackman, et al are being smeared with all of the accustomed epithets and malicious fake-analysis about their dark and horrible real agenda.

Hunt around social media if you feel the need to find more discussion about Claudine Gay’s critics being mean anti-intellectual racists, because my patience for swimming in sewage pumped in from stupid people is running out. And see the Charles Blow thing, for example, if you must.

The cultural armies gathered around our mediocre elites appear to be well-armed for battle in the same sense that the Confederates were well-equipped to keep McClellan from striking deep into Northern Virginia. Like all the scouts kept saying, the enemy just had so much heavy artillery.

In a conflict over culture and institutional integrity, the usual suspects used all of the familiar weapons.

Critics demanded that Claudine Gay resign.

Then the familiar culture war army rushed to the battlefield to declare that Claudine Gay was a brilliant scholar being attacked by mean dumb racists who hate everything and are mean and stupid.

Then the critics just kept going.

Then Claudine Gay resigned.

That’s it. All the caterwauling and subject-changing and burden-shifting and deflection and media noise did nothing, full stop.

It’s not about Harvard; it’s about everything. Take that sequence and keep going.