National Review senior editor Charles Cooke questioned on today’s Editors podcast why so many in the mainstream media are rushing to defend Claudine Gay — and suggested her apologists are the reactionaries here.
“DEI is a terrible, evil philosophy,” Cooke said, “that smuggles in, under otherwise unobjectionable terms, a worldview that would take us back to the worst moments in human history.”
Cooke pointed out, “It is a worldview that is antithetical to free inquiry, antithetical to free speech, that wants to group people by their immutable characteristics.”
Cooke noted that “since we last talked about Claudine Gay . . . one-hundred percent of [the media coverage] has been on the color of her skin and her sex.”
Even worse, Cooke said, “the argument has been that she must be replaced with another person who has the same immutable characteristics. . . . That is regressive. That is reactionary, not the opposite, not the people who want to judge people based on their behavior and their qualities and their virtues.
“And in any other context,” Cooke said, “it would be clear if you changed slightly the makeup, if you said we have to have a Harvard president who’s Jewish, we have to have a Harvard president who’s a man, we have to have a Harvard president who is straight: It would be patently obvious that is a bad way of looking at it. That does not change if you substitute those for the word black or woman or gay.”
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