If you’ve spent any time on X today or looking over the left-wing reactions to Claudine Gay’s ouster then you already know it’s following a very predictable path. Her supporters are clearly angry and are blaming everything on the dastardly right-wing racists who were behind the effort. In fact, Claudine Gay herself is saying as much in the NY Times this afternoon:

On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.

My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.

This view of things borders on being delusional. The woman found to have committed plagiarism nearly 50 times whose attorneys threatened a newspaper into silence really shouldn’t be proclaiming the values of excellence, openness, independence and truth. But, her own take is somewhat tepid compared to what people like Nikole Hannah Jones and Ibram Kendi are saying (you can guess if you haven’t already seen).

Fortunately, not everyone in the world is that far gone. The Atlantic published a piece today by Tyler Austin Harper which points to the real problem.

Conservatives have long seen Gay as the “diversity hire” avatar of their DEI bogeymen. They wanted an excuse to force her out, so they went looking for skeletons. The problem, for progressives, is that the conservatives found a closet full of bones. As The Intercept’s Ryan Grim put it, “The right launched a witch hunt against Gay but instead found a plagiarist.” Although the initial examples of plagiarism were weak—easy enough to excuse as shoddy paraphrasing and forgotten quotation marks—a series of subsequent investigations by the conservative outlet The Washington Free Beacon found more damning cases. As Rufo predicted, the plagiarism story soon broke into the mainstream, thanks to sustained coverage in outlets such as The Boston Globe and The New York Times. A fair-minded but bracing December 21 Times op-ed by John McWhorter, simply titled “Why Claudine Gay Should Go,” was a nail that struck especially loudly against the coffin wood.

Those who rushed to characterize her resignation as the outcome of a “bullying” campaign designed to oust Harvard’s first Black president omit an inconvenient detail: She was clearly guilty. The bullying worked because the facts were too difficult to massage. That didn’t stop many of my fellow academics from trying.

Harper then walks through a series of efforts by academics and journalists to save Gay from herself. These efforts he suggests probably did more damage that the resignation of Gay would have by itself.

The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it. (Soon after Rufo and Brunet made their initial accusations last month, Gay issued a statement saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.” She did not address those or subsequent plagiarism allegations in her resignation letter.)

Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn’t have to give it to him.

As it happens, Politico Magazine published a new interview with Rufo this afternoon in which the ask him directly what his goals were in bringing forward these allegations and why this campaign ultimately worked.

On December 19, you tweeted that it was your plan to “smuggle [the plagiarism story] into the media apparatus from the left, which legitimizes the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple [Gay].” Can you explain that strategy in more detail?

It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard’s history….

Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?

It gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.

But here’s the key point. None of this works unless what you’re saying is true.

Why do you think you can be so open about your strategy and still have it work? Why don’t you feel like you need to be covert about it?

First, and most simply, because I’m telling the truth — and the truth has an inherent and innate power. I believe that if it’s propagated correctly, it has the power to defeat lies.

That’s why Claudine Gay is out and why, as much as the left hates him, there’s not much they can do to Christopher Rufo. He was telling the truth. Put another way, he was doing the job other journalists could have and should have been doing themselves. So he can go out and be very transparent about his goals of forcing the left-wing media to stop ignoring this because he had the truth on his side. The real scandal here isn’t right-winger does journalism. The real scandal here is that it took ten days for all of the journalists on the left to finally do their jobs.