Grab your popcorn, kids, it’s a good old fashioned Plagiarism War. In the end, it was the morally inverted rape parades that drove America’s more moderate billionaires to interrogate those age old questions “what the hell is going on at Harvard,” and “why the hell am I paying for this?” But today, as an entire class of former-fence sitters introspect, not only on the problems of the world but on the donor class’s role in causing these problems, no personal evolution has been more stark, or more public, than that of hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who is presently waging war against the American institutions most hopelessly rotted by radical activist politics; no disrupted vector of radical power more starkly embodies the changing times than Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president who, it would seem from the press, Ackman just fired; and no piece of this saga, from inception to the vindictive institutional backlash now bearing down on Ackman’s wife, would be possible without the discourse vacuum inherent of Elon Musk’s free Twitter — a total collapse of the Overton window. With the shape of culture up for grabs, idealists and ideologues from every pole, and from every corner, have finally come to agreement on one point: the game is no longer rigged in favor of the craziest people alive. This is why, for the first time in decades, everyone is playing to win. Anon, have you ever seen a scared authoritarian before?

Things are about to get ugly.

The story went something like this: following Hamas’ October 7th terror attack in Israel, TikTok-brained “yay terrorism” demonstrations seized the world, and chaos erupted on college campuses across America. There, the concept of two aggrieved racial minorities — Jews and Arabs — demanding “safety” from each other (silence from their opponents) shattered far left orthodoxy, and the internal inconsistency of activist zealotry concluded in the disastrous congressional hearing of three prominent university presidents. In a noble, if totally unexpected defense of free speech, each of these powerful women declined to condemn the masturbatory genocidal fantasies levied against Israelis on their campuses, an argument that would have found more sympathy had these same campuses not spent the last decade endorsing the concept of “words constitute literal violence.” Public outrage was immense. Ackman threatened the boards of Harvard and MIT, accusing the latter of tax fraud. College donors across the country revoked millions in funding, and UPENN’s Elizabeth Magill was forced to resign.

All of this, from the threats to the attacks to the shaping of each story, was coordinated in public, on Twitter, before an audience of millions. None of it was censored.

While Gay initially survived the charge of antisemitism, she was quickly overtaken by charges of academic fraud. Again, this story played out almost entirely on Twitter. Here, at least 40 violations of Harvard’s ethical standards were uncovered by the conservative Free Beacon, and the activist Christopher Rufo dramatically amplified the news. “It’s a political attack!” shouted Gay’s allies, which was obviously true. But the charges against Harvard’s now former president nonetheless constituted legitimate violations of Harvard’s ethical standards. They had also been covered up by Harvard’s board. The scandal trended globally, and in the end not even President Obama could save Gay (which, according to the sort of media that hates them both, he did attempt to do). She finally resigned, blamed the backlash against her presidency on racism, and the machine struck back. But it did not strike back against Ackman, or at least not directly. It went after his family.

Following the trail of an anonymous tipster, Business Insider accused Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a celebrated designer and manic pixie “material ecologist,” of plagiarism. While charges consisted mainly of a few missing quotation marks, good intentions couldn’t possibly matter following the partisan targeting of Gay. Business Insider’s purpose was obviously to destroy someone important to Ackman, both a punishment and signal to any other turncoat shitposting billionaire, and in these efforts the press has tirelessly worked for days. In response, Ackman publicly accused a prominently-placed figure at MIT of coordinating the hit, and implied the charges against his wife were both unserious, and fundamentally malicious. Nonetheless, he agreed the subject of plagiarism was important, and promised, therefore, to fund investigations into MIT’s entire leadership in search of similar malfeasance. Finally, Business Insider followed up with more accusations against Neri, including definitions of random words on Wikipedia (???). With headlines around the globe now pillorying the woman for fraud, Ackman evolved his approach. He would no longer be satisfied in mere investigation of MIT. He would now, for love, burn down the entire academic world. And also Business Insider.

Man, people really care about academic integrity!

On the other hand, duh, Claudine Gay was a powerful DEI bureaucrat long before she was the president of Harvard, and every piece of this, from her targeting to the backlash over her targeting, is obviously a referendum on DEI. This is not about antisemitism, and it is certainly not about plagiarism. The country is embroiled in a heated, national conversation on a dramatic centralization of bureaucratic power in the hands of the very far left, for which “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” has only ever been, from its inception, a tool for maintaining.

Happily, the talking heads have done us all a favor, and momentarily dispensed with the bullshit. Over the weekend, the real fight clownishly unfolded on the Chris Wallace Show, where Grandma Yells at Cloud (Kara Swisher) and the NYT’s buffoonish Lulu Garcia-Navarro joined Never Trump GOP blowhole Jonah Goldberg and Reihan Salam for a debate over the only question anyone actually cares about: why are we still hiring people based on race and sex in 2024, and should we keep doing this? Here, proponents typically argue racist hiring isn’t happening, and also racist hiring has to happen or we’re racist. But this conversation went a little differently.

Out of the gate, Kara invoked the “mirrortocracy” (white men), invoking the mythological “white patriarchy” central to her faith. As Reihan attempted to rebut this staggering cleverness with a monologue on fairness, Lulu cut him off. “Ridiculo” she shouted in an accent reminiscent of Hilaria Baldwin, making certain everyone on the panel understood she was not a regular white woman, but a white woman of Hispanic heritage, which therefore made her slightly more correct. The real problem, she insisted, was people of color could never win within this racist system called America. “If she’s there,” Lulu said of Claudine Gay, “it’s because of DEI,” and “if she loses it’s because she was actually never good enough to be there.” It was a bizarre, uncomfortable, accidental admission of reality, which, for just a second, shocked everyone to silence. But then it was back to raw emotion from all four guests. The reason, it seemed, was nobody knew what was coming next, and uncertainty breeds fear.

Towards the end of the conversation, Kara mentioned there were never any consequences for “white men” (a pejorative), not only betraying the deeply racist, sexist thinking she’s picked up these past five years or so, but her total ignorance of the subject at hand.

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford’s former President. Chopped. Robert Caslen, the University of Southern Carolina’s former president. Chopped. And what was it that happened merely weeks before Claudine Gay’s resignation? Ah yes right, Liz Magill, a white woman embroiled in controversy following the very same hearing that catalyzed Gay’s downfall. Chopped. Claudine Gay was not fired because she was a black woman. The truth, of course, is obviously the opposite: she was protected, in a manner no other college president in her position would have been protected, because she was a black woman. Was she targeted by people who didn’t like her politics? Of course, but now you’re just describing journalism, which brings us to the meatiest subject at hand: how the story broke, how the story grew, and what it means for stories moving forward.

As conversation rocketed back to Claudine Gay, the ‘sympathetic’ figure somehow meant to justify the systemic sexism and racism inherent of DEI, Lulu couldn’t help from mentioning Christopher Rufo, her real obsession, bringing to the fore — for me, at least (Lulu continued shouting nonsense) — the question of Twitter’s power. After all, here were five professional talking heads on television discussing the fallout of, yet again, a story shaped entirely on social media. The impact of the internet in this regard is nothing new, but that a story so overwhelmingly disadvantageous to the far left hasn’t been censored or shaped by the media’s most popular platform for speech is a matter of enormous consequence.

I found a viral clip this week that blew my mind:

Here, liked by over 6 million people, a young woman accurately describes our entire human reality: a search for consensus. The concept of “America,” for example, is just the product of a conversation about who and what we are, and most people don’t really think that hard about these questions. Largely, the average person only tunes into the discourse to learn what they’re supposed to think, not to disagree. Humans are fundamentally social creatures, and human society is basically gossip. We are deeply, impossibly interested in the concept of ‘what people are saying,’ which means he who shapes the discourse shapes the world.

For over twenty years it’s been obvious the internet doomed the 20th Century media oligopoly. But it took decades for a majority of Americans to move online, and in 2016, at precisely the moment it seemed social media would replace the former order, an unofficial alliance of powers refortified an elitist hold on discourse. A year ago, Elon shattered that alliance. The thought criminals were freed, and the window of acceptable discourse broadened until it broke — a total Overton collapse. Now, for better and for worse, there is no more curation, there are no more fake trends, there are no more Washington Post-employed state sock puppets propped up artificially, and there is no more political censorship. Yes, whatever Elon finds personally annoying tends to vanish (R.I.P. Substack links), and he’s still not been tested by a major election. But, for now at least, news trends are dominated by stories people actually care about (even when they suck). This has never happened before, and so the phenomenon necessarily poses opportunity that has never before existed.

For decades — more, probably — American politics and culture ‘evolved’ in one direction. This evolution concluded in Harvard removing portraits that were too white. In IBM punishing executives for hiring too many asians. And in the abolition of “academic merit” at the conceptual level. Proponents of such abhorrent practices assumed the future would carry on apace, as did most detractors, and so mostly no one really fought for control of the “right side of history.” Sure, there was a spicy blog post here and there. But real war? With reputations and fortunes on the line? Why bother if the conclusion was inevitable?

Well, if the future is just talk, and talk is finally free, the conclusion is no longer inevitable. There’s potential upside, now, and so is it really any surprise the first man swinging runs a hedge fund?

I doubt Harvard will change overnight, but its reputation, which is and can only be the sum of people talking, has been tremendously sullied. To attract donors, to keep its federal funding, and to guarantee graduates of the university will continue to be associated with a brand of excellence, the machine will have to evolve. Not just at Harvard, but everywhere, from the Ivy League to Silicon Valley. If it doesn’t, people will talk. This talk will be permitted. The machine will break.

And so the fight — the real fight — begins.

-SOLANA