Male Speaker 1: Yo, go do a deep dive on this guy right now. He seems like someone I would probably be friends with.

Male Speaker 2: Mama, I'm in love with a criminal. Because Luigi, that's a spicy meatball.

Micah Loewinger: The alleged killer of the United Healthcare CEO is getting the TikTok treatment, much to the disgust of some in the traditional media. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, Harvard president Claudine Gay found herself in the hot seat at a congressional hearing last year after protests on campus were deemed antisemitic. That was just the beginning of her troubles.

Male Speaker 3: The elite college is facing pressure again to oust its leader as House lawmakers investigate academic plagiarism allegations.

Female Speaker 1: You might as well murder somebody in academia if you're going to plagiarize your dissertation.

Micah Loewinger: Tune in for the second episode of our miniseries about the leadership crisis at Harvard and what it spells for universities writ large. It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. You know the story. On Wednesday, December 4th, a hooded assassin gunned down a corporate exec on a midtown Manhattan street in the hushed twilight just before sunrise.

Micah Loewinger: From there, the narrative took off in many directions. With so little context to be found at that early stage, police and journalists went online to comb for clues. TikTokers were at it, too, doing what they do so often, turning a breaking news event into a group scavenger hunt.

Male Speaker 1: Yo, go do a deep dive on this guy right now. He's got a Twitter and honestly, seems like someone I would probably be friends with.

Micah Loewinger: That video got 1.8 million likes.

Female Speaker 2: The astrology girlies got hold of his birth chart. Are you ready for this? There's no surprises. Taurus Sun, Virgo Moon, Aries Rising, and y'all want to argue that astrology is not real?

Female Speaker 3: When I googled him, his Goodreads showed up, and as a bookish content creator, I am at liberty to review his Goodreads presence, so let's get into it.

Micah Loewinger: Those who pored over his digital footprint found his positive review of The Unabomber Manifesto and his review of a book about back pain. They found what appeared to be the X-ray of his back surgery, a LinkedIn profile that pointed to a stint in the video game industry, and an X account count following Andrew Huberman, AOC, Joe Rogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ezra Klein, and Sam Altman. A fairly unremarkable mishmash media diet for a tech bro interested in politics and fitness. Speaking of which, it was his Instagram account and all those shirtless photos that likely drew the most attention this week.

Male Speaker 4: People had already decided he was a sex symbol based on like the two inches of eyeball that we'd seen from him, but now we've got full body tea. Like he is ripped. It feels like it's Christmas day on the Internet.

Male Speaker 2: Mama, I'm in love with a criminal. This type of love isn't rational, it's physical. That was Britney Spears, and I believe we're all feeling that right now. Because Luigi, that's a spicy meatball.

Micah Loewinger: There were videos about whether Mangione could be saved with jury nullification and offers to pay his legal bills, and unfounded theories about how he'd been framed. For much of social media, this was a clear cut story of a hero and villain.

Female Speaker 4: Today we mourn Brian Thompson, a man who revolutionized healthcare by denying it.

Female Speaker 5: Empathy is unfortunately not covered under our current plan. You know what I mean?

Female Speaker 6: Deny, defend, depose on the bullet casings. I was like, oh, wow. Yes, clear. Message and receipt. We got it.

Male Speaker 5: After this healthcare CEO thing, we're so close to class consciousness, like millimeters away. Like roughly 9 millimeters away.

Micah Loewinger: The dark humor, the glee, and the overnight canonization of a murder suspect sparked disgust and confusion. An op-ed from the Wall Street Journal's editorial board argued that Mangione devolved into madness as he "trafficked in the theories of exploitation and blame that dominate corners of the Internet." Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of the Atlantic, described the killing and the specter of political violence as a sign of impending decivilization. But her piece made no reference to America's broken healthcare system, which is also quite bad for civilization. Here's Chris Cuomo on NewsNation.

Chris Cuomo: You are worse than what you oppose when you celebrate murder as a justifiable end for disagreement over policy. What the hell is going wrong here?

Laura Ingraham: The Instagram posts from nutbag people--

Micah Loewinger: Laura Ingraham on her Fox News show this week.

Laura Ingraham: Crazy. Like he's cute, and people celebrating this. This is a sickness. Honestly, it's so disappointing, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised. Up next, the other big news out of New York, Daniel Penny. A lot of people think he's a hero and tonight he's not guilty. My take next.

Ben Shapiro: This is simply Marxist, leftist, radical evil.

Micah Loewinger: Ben Shapiro on his YouTube channel last week.

Ben Shapiro: When you say it's okay to murder CEOs on the street, that is a call for revolution. Second, violence against members of private industry, that isn't even a protest to public policy. Let's be fair about this. That isn't even shooting politicians, which would be evil enough. It's even a different level of evil because it's a protest against the very system of free markets themselves.

Micah Loewinger: Shapiro's audience appeared to disagree. The video was heavily downvoted by a ratio of 8 to 1.

Brooke Gladstone: If you go down to the comments section, you'll find messages with thousands of likes. "Remember guys, Ben has more in common with that CEO than he has with any of us."

Micah Loewinger: "This isn't a left versus right issue. It's the working class versus the wealthy. That's probably why you're trying to pretend it's something it's not."

Brooke Gladstone: "Saw my lifelong hardworking father become bankrupt as a result of claims being denied after getting cancer. You are out of touch, man."

Micah Loewinger: "Wow, maybe I've been wrong this entire time. Ben, I don't think you actually care about us. I think you just want our money. I think you just want us to hate each other."

Brooke Gladstone: Many have evinced shock at the mixed reaction to cold-blooded murder. Others, not so much. In recent days and years, we've often marveled at the reactions of our fellow American. As we grope for some clarity, at least this time we don't have to grapple with slippery intangibles like zeitgeist. This context is quantifiable, so get ready for some numbers. According to data derived from CMS, the federal agency overseeing the coverage of more than 160 million people on Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIPs program, and the health insurance marketplace, UnitedHealthcare dismissed about a third of all claims in 2023. That's twice the industry average. Its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, raked in close to $400 billion this past year, revenues that have grown by between 9% and 14% each year going back to 2021. It's ranked by Fortune magazine the eighth largest company in the entire world.

Senator Elizabeth Warren: Now, Mr. Witty, UnitedHealth Group owns the country's largest insurer, the country's largest claims processor, the country's third largest pharmacy benefit manager, a huge pharmacy chain.

Brooke Gladstone: At a Senate Finance Committee hearing last May, Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty, noting that the company employs, or she said, controls 10% of the nation's doctors.

Senator Elizabeth Warren: Because UnitedHealth has bought up every link in the healthcare chain, you are now in a position to jack up prices, squeeze competitors, hide revenues and pressure doctors to put profits ahead of patients. UnitedHealth is a monopoly on steroids.

Brooke Gladstone: In January, the health news outlet STAT published a detailed investigation into how a UnitedHealthcare subsidiary, NaviHealth, used algorithms to deny care for seniors enrolled in the company's Medicare Advantage plan. That prompted a class action lawsuit against UnitedHealthcare and its parent company. Also this year, a Senate committee concluded that UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and CVS, which owns Aetna, had purposefully denied claims for costly nursing care to patients recovering from falls and strokes. Then there's the class action lawsuit brought by the City of Hollywood Firefighters' Pension Fund against the late Brian Thompson and two other UnitedHealth Group execs for allegedly dumping stock just before a Justice Department antitrust investigation into the company. There's so much more.

Male Speaker 6: The prior authorization process where a physician might have said you need this procedure and UnitedHealthcare found ways to slow walk that, delay the procedure, deny the procedure and ask for more paperwork.

Brooke Gladstone: Our pretzel shaped, employer based/government funded/public-private hybrid of a healthcare system was a compromise crafted in part to protect the deep pocketed insurance companies' bottom lines. Even leaving the corruption aside compared to peer nations, American healthcare, in a word, sucks.

Female Speaker 7: Let me just start off this video by saying I do not condone violence by any means, but as a mom who was nine months pregnant sitting in the emergency room with my one-year-old baby, being told she had a giant brain tumor that was causing her brain to essentially swell out of her head, she needed to be transferred to New York City so she could have emergency brain surgery and instead we sat in the hospital for three days because UnitedHealthcare refused to approve the transfer via ambulance from the hospital where we live to another state. Again, this isn't to condone violence whatsoever. All I'm saying is that I do not doubt for a second what the motive of that suspect was.

Brooke Gladstone: In the latest Commonwealth Fund report comparing global health across the globe, 10 nations, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States were assessed on five criteria, access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes. Australia scored first and Germany second to last, but frankly, they were clustered pretty closely together. All of them met their residents' basic health care needs, including universal coverage. Until you got to the US, which was so far below the others on the graph, it looked like it had been dropped there by accident.

Meanwhile, medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in America. More than 100 million people, 41% of adults, are struggling with medical bills they can't pay. According to an investigation by KFF Health News with NPR and CBS News. KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, said that the project "exposed that medical debt, rather than fighting disease, is now a defining feature of the nation's healthcare system." About that so-called manifesto. A few pages penned by Luigi Mangione reported in snippets, but at this writing still isn't available to read in context. Well, here's what NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny had to say.

Joseph Kenny: That document is currently in the possession of the Altoona Police Department as part of their investigation. Just from briefly speaking with them, we don't think that there's any specific threats to other people mentioned in that document. It does seem that he has some ill will toward corporate America.

Brooke Gladstone: If that seems noteworthy to Chief Kenny, then he's part of a dwindling minority. According to a 2022 Pew study, some 71% of Americans feel some ill will toward corporate America, a sharp rise in just the last few years.

Nick Hanauer: You probably don't know me, but I am one of those 0.01 percenters that you hear about and read about. I am, by any reasonable definition, a plutocrat.

Micah Loewinger: This is Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, delivering a TED Talk in 2014, 10 years ago.

Nick Hanauer: Tonight, what I would like to do is speak directly to other plutocrats, to my people, because it feels like it's time for us all to have a chat.

Micah Loewinger: He described his incredibly lavish life achieved through what he calls luck, hard work and a couple key talents.

Nick Hanauer: I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future. What do I see in our future today, you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99% of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind.

Micah Loewinger: He laid out the accelerating rate of income inequality in America.

Nick Hanauer: If wealth, power and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo feudalist, rentier society like 18th century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks. I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world. Wake up, wake up. It cannot last.

Brooke Gladstone: Revolutions happen. Can we still assume in today's America that it can't happen here? The murder, as horrific as it was, was not the most important news in this sobering saga. It was our reaction to it. Was it a sign of what Adrienne LaFrance called decivilization? Or was it Nick Hanauer's wake up call?

Micah Loewinger: As we try to understand what this moment means, one thing is clear: the massive disconnect between this week's conversations on social media and in the once hallowed op-ed pages. It felt like two different planets orbiting two different suns. We can only hope the fact-based media finds a way to close the distance. Coming up, the untold media story behind last year's dramatic ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. For the rest of the hour, we're airing part two of our series we made in collaboration with the Boston Globe, looking at how American colleges and universities have become a political punching bag with a focus on the oldest and richest of them all, Harvard. To recap, the latest salvo against elite universities began in earnest a year ago. After the Hamas attack on October 7 sparked Israel's ongoing war in Gaza, college campuses became a locus for protest and the media couldn't look away.

Female Speaker 8: America's elite colleges are a world apart from the war in Gaza, but protests about the war are putting them at the center of a growing controversy.

[protesters chanting]

Micah Loewinger: At Harvard, a letter written by the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and originally co-signed by 33 other Harvard student organizations blamed Israel entirely for the attack. The university leadership response wasn't deemed strong enough by either the protesters or by the community of donors and alumni who began to complain online about the tolerance for what they saw as antisemitism at their alma mater. As the newly inaugurated president of Harvard and the first Black woman and only second woman to occupy that role, Claudine Gay was in the hot seat. Then the Republican controlled House Committee on Education in the Workforce got interested and hauled in the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania for a grilling.

Female Speaker 9: Based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for Intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?

Micah Loewinger: The drubbing in the press of the three leaders was instant and devastating. For Claudine Gay, it was just the beginning of her unraveling. In this week's episode of a series we're calling the Harvard Plan, reporter Ilya Marritz documents the role of journalists and activists in Gay's plagiarism scandal. Here's Ilya.

Ilya Marritz: The Yale Halloween costume controversy of 2015 is not much remembered today, but for Aaron Sibarium, it was decisive.

Aaron Sibarium: Let me just preface this by saying I'm always speaking in a personal capacity.

Ilya Marritz: Sibarium is now a reporter with the Washington Free Beacon.

Aaron Sibarium: Views do not reflect those of my employer or anyone else in my immediate professional orbit, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Ilya Marritz: Back then, Sibarium was a Yale sophomore and opinion editor of the Yale Daily News. Shortly before Halloween, the university's committee on Intercultural affairs sent out an email on blast about how not to dress for the holiday. Avoid cultural appropriation--

Aaron Sibarium: Be respectful of everyone, don't wear offensive costumes. Pretty boilerplate bureaucratic stuff.

Ilya Marritz: Then a lecturer named Erika Christakis, Harvard College class of 1986, sent a follow up email to students in the residential college where she worked with her own take.

Aaron Sibarium: More or less saying, you shouldn't expect the university to police Halloween costumes. Talk to each other if you're offended. That was really it.

Ilya Marritz: Christakis, who is an early childhood specialist, opined, "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious, a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?"

Aaron Sibarium: Campus goes crazy. Oh my God, she's defending blackface. She's X, Y and Z.

Ilya Marritz: Then her husband, a Yale professor, also got swept into it.

Aaron Sibarium: Next thing you know, her husband, who's the head of the hall residential college, is encircled by screaming students in the courtyard.

Female Speaker 10: Sending out that email that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?

Male Speaker 7: No, I don't agree with that.

Female Speaker 11: Then why the fuck did you accept the position? Who the fuck hired you?

Male Speaker 8: I have a different vision to rule.

Ilya Marritz: It became a whole thing with the Atlantic, the New York Times and other news outlets getting in on the story. The editors of the Yale Daily News, of which Sibarium was one, met to decide what kind of editorial they wanted to write on this.

Aaron Sibarium: It became very clear two minutes into the meeting that anyone who pushed back was going to get called racist.

Ilya Marritz: Sibarium was in the minority, but as the opinion editor, it fell to him to write a piece that reflected the majority view, not his own.

Aaron Sibarium: I ended up having to write this sobbing, saccharine editorial about how horrible people of color at Yale are treated and how the administration hasn't done enough to elevate their voices, blah, blah, blah, blah. Obviously, I didn't believe in any of this. I thought the whole controversy was nuts.

Ilya Marritz: He saw how it resonated, though, and he wanted to cover colleges in the aggressive, skeptical way he thought they deserved. After Yale, he found his way to the Washington Free Beacon, a pugnacious right wing outlet whose motto, flanked by two cartoon missiles, is covering the enemies of freedom the way the mainstream media won't. There, he made college controversies his beat. Years later, when things blew up at Harvard, Sibarium got out the popcorn.

Aaron Sibarium: It was fun to watch them squirm because they couldn't issue a full throated condemnation of Hamas without really pissing off a certain small slice of activists. They couldn't not issue such a statement because then Jewish students and donors, as they did, were going to say, what the hell, guys? Yes, I thought that was delicious.

Ilya Marritz: Sibarium has a scruffy beard and describes himself as a secular Jew and a big believer in free speech. He wasn't writing much about the Harvard crisis until one day, just after the congressional hearing where Claudine Gay testified, he received a tip from an anonymous source.

Aaron Sibarium: It was about Claudine Gay's plagiarism. I thought, wow, this could be big, but I don't want to get my hopes up.

Ilya Marritz: He did his due diligence, and the tip checked out. On December 11th, 2023, his story ran in the Free Beacon asserting that Gay had taken from others' work on four papers published between 1993 and 2017. Harvard's rolling crisis had entered a new phase.

Male Speaker 9: University says Claudine Gay has now asked that corrections be made to her 1997 dissertation because of what it called inadequate citations.

Female Speaker 12: In a statement to multiple news outlets, Harvard says the university reviewed more of Gay's academic work and that the president plans to update her dissertation to correct instances of "inadequate citation." Stopping short of calling it plagiarism.

Ilya Marritz: I found reviewing Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarism to be tedious. It's about matching four words here, six words there, about a paragraph that looks to be around 70% the same as someone else's work, and so much academic jargon. Some of the alleged lapses are in the description of methods or the review of others' writing. Language here can be jargony and formulaic and repetitive, and that's expected. It seems clear, though, that she was at best sloppy.

Even professors who are sympathetic to Gay say they are troubled by this stuff. But I'm calling it alleged plagiarism because Harvard's own review did not conclude Gay's errors met its standards for plagiarism. Instead, it said she had left out citations and quotation marks in several articles. The reviewer said Gay's work still stands as original and that she did not intentionally claim other people's work as her own. After that review, yet more examples of Gay's alleged lapses were reported. We now come to the scuzzy side of this whole affair. The plagiarism allegations fueled attacks on Gay that were ugly and personal.

Female Speaker 13: Claudine Gay has revealed she faced death threats and was repeatedly called the N word in recent weeks as a right wing effort to out--

Ilya Marritz: Gay and her family began receiving 24/7 police protection.

Female Speaker 5: You might as well murder somebody in academia if you're going to plagiarize your dissertation.

Male Speaker 10: Harvard is committed to DEI and Claudia Gay's race protected her from losing her job. It's outrageous.

Male Speaker 11: That's right. The president of what is supposed to be America's most prestigious university is accused of plagiarism on top of everything else.

Ilya Marritz: That was the public side of the plagiarism conversation. I want to show you what I've learned about what was going on behind the scenes. These plagiarism allegations didn't come out of nowhere. They emerged from a complex web of tips and axes to grind. The whole picture may never be clear, but it's useful to examine what we do know because a close reading of one academic's footnotes and quotation marks became a referendum on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Eight years after the Halloween costume flap that crystallized things for Aaron Sibarium, he landed a story that helped to oust a college president. Sibarium didn't get to break that news because hours before the Free Beacon published his story, he was scooped by another critic of campus life.

Aaron Sibarium: I was just like, "I'm not the first one," damn it.

Ilya Marritz: Behind that scoop, there's a tale involving one of America's most active culture warriors. In 2019, a man named Christopher Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox for the very first time. He was talking about the homelessness problem in Seattle, where he then lived. Rufo's look is clean cut, young dad. He speaks in complete, forceful sentences. He must have made good TV because he was invited back. By 2020, Rufo had pivoted from quality of life issues in cities to a different problem.

Christopher Rufo: Critical race theory, in simple terms, is an academic discipline that holds that the United States was founded on racism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and that those forces are still at the root of our society today. Tucker, this is something I've been investigating for the last six months, and it's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government. What I have discovered-- It's not a benign philosophy about teaching racism. It's a radical philosophy that's rooted in Marxism.

Ilya Marritz: Right after one of these appearances, then President Trump ordered government agencies to cut back sensitivity training programs. There seemed to be a direct line from Rufo on the TV to an executive order. As the New York Times noted. Now so many of Harvard's critics are alumni. Elise Stefanik, Bill Ackman, and so on. Not so many people know that around this time, Christopher Rufo enrolled at Harvard. Specifically, he entered a master's program, getting his degree in 2022. It was at the Harvard Extension School, a way easier to get into institution than other Harvard schools. It's designed for working adults, and much of the instruction happens online.

When Rufo published his book America's Cultural Revolution, his dust jacket bio touted his master's from Harvard. Rufo's book has become a bible to the critics of wokeness at universities. It traces the intellectual roots of current efforts at diversity and racial reconciliation back to the radicals of the 1960s and '70s. He promoted the book on podcasts.

Christopher Rufo: The critical race theorists were very focused on building a pedagogy.

Ilya Marritz: When their revolutions failed, he says, they retreated to the universities, incubating many of the concepts that have become huge today.

Christopher Rufo: Systemic racism, whiteness, white privilege, intersectionality, et cetera. These kind of core set of ideas that are now ubiquitous at one time were really marginal academic ideas, limited to just very few of these scholars and intellectuals.

Ilya Marritz: For some influential Harvard alums, Rufo's ideas were transformative. Bill Ackman, hedge fund billionaire, Twitter influencer, Harvard College, class of '88, called Rufo's book America's Cultural Revolution, "One of the more important books I've read." Another hedge fund billionaire and Harvard College grad, class of '89, Ken Griffin, has referred to "This cultural revolution in American education." Just a few months earlier, Griffin seemed to be happy with Harvard. In the spring of 2023, the university announced a $300 million gift from Griffin to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, then led by Claudine Gay, totally unrestricted. Within a year, he changed his tune completely, calling American college students--

Ken Griffin: Frankly, just like whiny snowflakes. Where are we going with education in elite schools in America?

Ilya Marritz: Christopher Rufo wasn't done shining a bright, blinding light on universities because on December 10th, 2023, one day ahead of Aaron Sibarium, he published an article breaking the news of Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarism. Then he went on TV again.

Christopher Rufo: The facts are clear. Now the decision that has to be made is a very simple one. Does Harvard value veritas or truth? Or does Harvard value DEI and having the right race and gender symbolism at the top of its university hierarchy?

Ilya Marritz: We asked Rufo for an interview more than once. He declined comment, but Rufo had a co-author who did speak.

Aidan Ryan: How'd you get the story? What led you to want to pursue that?

Ilya Marritz: The Boston Globe's media reporter, Aidan Ryan, Harvard College class of 2021, talked with the co-author last January.

Chris Brunette: I'm not sure how familiar you are with my whole involvement in this.

Ilya Marritz: Meet Chris Brunette. Yes, another Chris. He's a substacker from Canada.

Chris Brunette: I was working as an investigative journalist at the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Ilya Marritz: The Daily Caller News foundation is a nonprofit connected with an outrage fueled media company that was founded by none other than the man who nurtured Chris Rufo's career, Tucker Carlson. Brunette told Aidan that he was the one who brought the story to Rufo. Here's how he says it happened. Brunette had suspected a different Harvard government scholar of falsifying data. By the way, that was never proven. In the course of his digging, Brunette got interested in Claudine Gay.

Chris Brunette: Then I wrote several articles about her.

Ilya Marritz: The Daily Caller didn't want Brunette's reporting, so he published on his Substack.

Chris Brunette: I thought my articles were like super damning, but once again they didn't have any impact, partly because I discredited myself by just not being professional enough. I was like writing angry screeds pretty much, and so my articles kind of fell flat.

Ilya Marritz: A year passed. Claudine Gay was elevated to president, and a tip came in.

Chris Brunette: Which actually contained the firm plagiarism accusation, finally.

Ilya Marritz: Much like the tip Aaron Sibarium saw at the Free Beacon, this one said Gay's articles lifted from other scholars' work. Brunette then approached Chris Rufo.

Chris Brunette: I didn't really know him before, like we were mutuals on Twitter, but I needed firepower so I brought it to him.

Ilya Marritz: Rufo was interested. They spent a few days reporting it out.

Chris Brunette: And we published it. His initial tweet, at first, it got 100 million impressions. It's probably like 200 million now.

Ilya Marritz: After years of digging in the wilderness, Brunette finally had a reporting coup that would get him noticed. He told Aidan he had actually logged his own time in academia. He wasn't just reporting on it. Brunette previously had been a research assistant to an economist at UChicago who came under attack from other economists for comparing BLM activists calling to defund the police to flat earthers. The professor still has his job. Brunette defended the professor on Fox News.

Chris Brunette: That more or less got me rejected from every PhD program I applied to. I was canceled, pretty much. That was pretty nakedly my motivations. I was angry, bitter, and hurt.

Ilya Marritz: So you could say resentment of academia was one motive behind the very first story about Claudine Gay and plagiarism. Who was Chris Brunette's source? What was their motive? Brunette isn't saying. Still, if you talk with people inside the government department at Harvard, the place Chris Brunette was writing about and not getting a lot of pickup, people who were there at the time remember one particular grad student who seemed to be struggling with their coursework. This student hurled a lot of accusations at a lot of people in the department about scholarly misconduct.

We really don't know whether this person was the source. When I reached them by email, they didn't confirm or deny any role, but they did include in the message the ugliest things I have ever seen written about Claudine Gay. Just a note, the Chris and Chris reporting team is no more. After their initial success, Rufo steered a fellowship to Brunette to support his work. Then, according to Rufo, Brunette started a lot of fights with their colleagues. He also spread antisemitic content online and called Rufo an Israeli asset. According to Brunette, Rufo has blocked him on Twitter.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, a visit to the upside down world.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We're listening to the second episode of our series about the leadership crisis at Harvard. When we left off, just before the break, two conservative writers, both named Chris, had collaborated on a bombshell story accusing the president of Harvard of plagiarism. We pick up with reporter Ilya Maritz, who spoke with another journalist whose plagiarism reporting came hot on their heels.

Ilya Marritz: I have so many questions. I asked the Free Beacon's Aaron Sibarium to help me untangle how he and the Chrises, Rufo and Brunette, came to report close to the same story at nearly the same moment. Rufo has called it a team effort. Were you aware of each other reporting? Did you know somebody else was on this story? Were you guys communicating at all?

Aaron Sibarium: No, I did not. There was absolutely no coordination of any kind. I genuinely did not know that they were on this.

Ilya Marritz: Sibarium says it was pure happenstance. In fact, he was a little upset when the Chrises published first, but then he saw the effect of one story landing right after the other and he was pleased.

Aaron Sibarium: There was this really effective, almost one-two punch.

Ilya Marritz: What's more, it created a permission structure, Sibarium's words, for mainstream outlets to pick up a story they might not have assigned on their own.

Aaron Sibarium: From that moment on, the narrative just totally was out of the control of Harvard.

Ilya Marritz: The New York Times was particularly activated, pulling in reporters from other beats to cover the story. I counted close to 50 pieces in the Times focused on this crisis just in the three weeks between the plagiarism allegations surfacing and Gay's resignation as president. The Boston Globe went big too, of course, hometown paper. One editorial blamed Harvard for muddying what should be a clear cut line about plagiarism in its effort to defend Gay. Still, I was curious about the origin of Sibarium's reporting, which, like the Chrises, began with a tip. He wrote that his source was a professor at another university.

You wrote that you verified their identity, but I don't believe you told us who they are. I don't know who they are. What can you say about the source of the allegations?

Aaron Sibarium: I can't say much more than what was reported, which was that anonymous individual who's a professor at another university.

Ilya Marritz: It's stunning how many tips were circulating about Gay's scholarship in the fall of 2023. Aaron Sibarium got one, so did Chris Brunette. I've seen a tip from an anonymous email account sent out the day before the Big House hearing, apparently to five different news outlets. On top of that, the New York Post had been working on its own plagiarism story. When the Post approached Harvard for comment, Harvard's lawyers responded that publishing the piece could be defamation.

Aaron Sibarium: That did, I think, create a rational fear in the complainant's mind and reinforce the complainant's desire to be anonymous. In terms of my own and I think other people's motivations for the story. I just think it is newsworthy that the president of the most famous university in the world plagiarized.

Ilya Marritz: All that said, for a guy who enjoys the cut and thrust of debate, Sibarium also concedes a lot of points. It's like he thinks on some level that the whole storm around Claudine Gay was an overreaction. The alleged plagiarism, not that bad.

Aaron Sibarium: It was not on the same level as a lot of other people who have since been caught up in plagiarism scandals.

Ilya Marritz: Was she really the apostle of DEI she'd been made out to be?

Aaron Sibarium: I honestly don't. Even though I was emphasizing the DEI stuff, I get the sense that she embraced that in large part because she thought that's what everyone wanted to hear.

Ilya Marritz: What about his own work? Pointing a big finger at real people, academics and administrators. He told me he feels badly when one of these people becomes a target for hate, but to write about an issue, you need a protagonist.

Aaron Sibarium: It's frankly impossible to scrutinize them without there being some kind of main characters who get caught in the crossfire.

Ilya Marritz: He told me about some deans at Columbia whose text messages he obtained and reported on. They contained some troubling stereotypes about Jews.

Aaron Sibarium: It wasn't like virulent antisemitism, but they maybe touched on some tropes that were troubling. They ended up resigning. I think that all of those deans are like evil monsters who hate Jews. No, of course not.

Ilya Marritz: You know that's how your stories are going to occur to people when they see them.

Aaron Sibarium: I know. I just don't know any other way to surface this stuff.

Ilya Marritz: In 2015, Aaron Sibarium was appalled by what he saw as politically correct posturing at Yale that targeted two administrators over Halloween costumes. He might say it's not a fair comparison, but it's worth pointing out that in 2023, he and the Chrises did the reporting that fueled the social media pylon that helped to take down Claudine Gay. While Aaron Sibarium and Christopher Rufo were not cooperating on their plagiarism reporting, there is a link. Their paychecks, both men's earnings, depend in part on the generosity of a billionaire hedge funder you haven't met yet.

Paul Singer: Professors, they are mostly hopeless beyond repair.

Ilya Marritz: Paul Singer, Harvard law, class of 1969, doesn't do a lot of public speaking, but when he does, he does not hold back.

Paul Singer: The miniscule number of ones who are not radical left wing dolts clutching Mao's little red book are huddled together in basements whispering the truth, while the thugs and deranged are upstairs on the quad screaming at Jews.

Ilya Marritz: At a Manhattan Institute dinner last summer, Singer ripped universities as havens for Marxists and Jew haters. Singer is the major funder of the Free Beacon, where Aaron Sibarium published his scoop. He's also a funder and chairman of the Manhattan Institute, where Christopher Rufo is a scholar. That means both men's work is supported by a very rich man who is clearly very, very angry about the direction universities have taken. Singer declined to comment.

Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard on January 2nd, 2024, exactly four weeks after the house hearing. She wrote in a message to the community. "When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education."

It does appear that Gaye was steered towards the job. I learned in the course of reporting this story that she was asked by the Harvard Corporation more than once to put her name forward for president. She was one of three Black women to be made deans by the previous president, Larry Bacow. Bacow was known as someone with a knack for nurturing talent. One could argue the Harvard Corporation should have done more to vet her and, once she was hired, that they should have prepared for a possible backlash.

Christopher Rufo: Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come.

Ilya Marritz: The day after Claudine Gay resigned, Christopher Rufo claimed credit for her downfall with a piece in the Wall Street Journal. Throughout the campaign, he wrote, "I adopted the unorthodox approach of narrating the strategy in real time, explaining how conservatives could shape the media narrative and apply pressure to Harvard." He linked the offensive against Harvard to ones against Disney, Target and Bud Light, and noted approvingly that Florida, Texas and other states have banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public universities. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: In public universities, there have been somewhere around 100 bills proposed in states across the country, of which a number of them have passed, that have rendered illegal DEI offices at universities.

Ilya Marritz: Muhammad is probably the university's most vocal defender of DEI programs. Although he's about to leave Harvard for Princeton, Muhammad was already tracking the backlash to DEI when it came for him.

Ilya Marritz: I don't remember.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: I can show you right now on my computer. It doesn't take much.

Ilya Marritz: On his office computer, he pulled up a clip from the same House Education Committee hearing where Claudine Gay gave testimony.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: You could literally--

Ilya Marritz: Show me, show me. Let's do that. Before any of the college presidents had the chance to speak--

Virginia Foxx: It's clear that rabid antisemitism in the university are two ideas that cannot be cleaved from one another.

Ilya Marritz: In her opening remarks, Virginia Foxx, the committee chair, called out a class that Muhammad was teaching that semester. He calls it a mouth drop moment.

Virginia Foxx: A prime example of this ideology at work in Harvard where classes are taught, such as DP 385 Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Yes, boom, there it is. It's like, whoa, really? The first class mentioned in the world is my class, and then she goes on to cite two more.

Virginia Foxx: History and recent perspectives. Even the Harvard Divinity School has a page devoted to "social and racial justice."

Ilya Marritz: Muhammad's course is called Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power. It includes readings on antisemitism in the United States and the race laws Nazi Germany adopted on the road to murdering millions of Jews. I asked Virginia Foxx how she became aware of the course. She didn't answer that, but a spokesperson said it's emblematic of the oppressor-oppressed framework she says fuels antisemitism on college campuses. Foxx seemed to be saying that a course which includes teachings about antisemitism was now evidence of how universities encourage antisemitism. For Muhammad, this is when we entered upside down world.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: How did a concern about what the university leadership was doing to protect Jews come to blaming me and others who teach about race and racism on this campus as the root cause of the problem?

Ilya Marritz: Muhammad freely concedes that some DEI workshops can alienate people. As for where Jews and antisemitism fit in, he says the DEI framework was originally conceived around racial, not religious identity. It missed a lot.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Is it a fair criticism that many DEI offices weren't built to address religious based discrimination? Yes, I would agree.

Ilya Marritz: That's changing now, he says. What I see is that DEI has become one of those terms that's prisoner to our increasingly stupid social media fueled discourse.

Dana Bash: Governor, some Republicans are trying to blame the bridge collapse on policies that encourage workplace diversity.

Ilya Marritz: For example, this absolutely incredible exchange between CNN's Dana Bash and Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed. Moore is Black.

Dana Bash: A Utah state representative who was running for governor tweeted, "This is what happens when you have governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens."

Ilya Marritz: The Key Bridge was completed in 1977. It was rammed by a container ship.

Dana Bash: Another Republican running for Congress in Florida posted, "DEI did this." What's your response?

Ilya Marritz: Actually, let's not hear Governor Moore's response. Let's look at the effects of the DEI panic.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Slavery, for example, cannot be taught in the state of Texas currently-

Ilya Marritz: To kids in school.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: -except as an aberration with America's founding principles of liberty. But it's more of a contradiction because we have a very difficult time explaining why we had slavery longer than we've had freedom in this country, so it doesn't make sense. It doesn't pass academic muster. It is a lie. Texas is legislating a lie.

Ilya Marritz: The DEI panic had the most success initially in red states and in public institutions. Now Muhammad says it's making inroads in elite private schools. Just four years ago, Claudine Gay's predecessor as president, Larry Bacow, started using terms like structural racism and white supremacy. The university accelerated a diversity plan. You could say the rapid adoption of inclusion programs at places like Harvard and Disney was its own kind of social media fueled contagion. In any case, it's over now. Harvard's new president does still talk about diversity as a core value, but Muhammad sees quiet retrenchment.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: They haven't yet dismantled the offices that were built, but there is almost no public defense of the work coming from Harvard University. You can find mostly silence across higher education amongst the most powerful universities, many of which were taking a leadership role in this work.

Ilya Marritz: Was it possibly a mistake? Given the ferocity of the counterreaction and, as you say, the fact that in many parts of the country now, a lot of this history can't even be taught or not taught with the fullness that you feel it deserves. Was it a mistake to pursue DEI in this way in the first place? Is there any other way to get to the conversation that you think that America needs to have?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: No.

Ilya Marritz: You'll do it all again?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: I do it all again? Yes, because you cannot solve for people who are committed to structural racism and forms of neocolonialism by appeasing them. You cannot solve that problem. There is no pathway to justice but through truth and education, period.

Ilya Marritz: There is an insane circularity to these fights. The critics say that college campuses have become ideologically rigid and intolerant of dissenting viewpoints, especially conservative ones. This is what Aaron Sibarium saw in the Halloween costume controversy. Their solution, as espoused by Virginia Foxx and Chris Rufo, is to drop DEI to tell teachers what they can and cannot teach, and to silence liberal voices. Who here really believes in free speech and academic freedom?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: In the December 5th testimony, if you go back and listen to it, the solution to antisemitism was education, was training. Every faculty member and every student at your university should be taught about the history of antisemitism. How many classes do you have on antisemitism? How many Jews are teaching the history of their people. They're right, actually. Which only shows you the moral duplicity and their critique of race and racism as something that is destroying higher education. That promotes censorship, doesn't promote free thinking.

Ilya Marritz: In the months after Claudine Gay resigned, Chris Rufo lobbed accusations at more Black women at Harvard, saying their scholarly work was inferior. Those women kept their jobs. Pro Palestinian encampments sprouted up on campuses across the country, keeping colleges in the headlines.

President Trump: The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do--

Ilya Marritz: The founder of Trump University, a now defunct, unaccredited, for profit, sham institution of learning, promised to use the power of the government to squeeze real universities.

President Trump: Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.

Ilya Marritz: That's next week in the third and final episode of the Harvard Plan.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. The Harvard Plan is a collaboration with the Boston Globe. The production team includes Ilya Marritz, Emily Bottine, Kristin Nelson, Jasmine Aguilera, Regina De Heer, and Jared Paul. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wong, and Katarina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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