Our universities may be irrevocably broken.Here's the obvious question:
On Monday, Parkland survivor and outspoken conservative Kyle Kashuv announced that Harvard University had withdrawn his admission from the school over the revelation of racist, offensive, idiotic posts written on a private Google document with friends when he was sixteen years old. Never mind that Kashuv apologized publicly for the comments; never mind that his public behavior has evinced no racism whatsoever.
Forgiveness must be withheld.
don't most colleges accept applicants based on their actions from age 14 to 18
— darth™ (@darth) June 17, 2019
The Daily Beast's Will Sommer explains:
The messages that cost [Kashuv] his Harvard admission came to light in May when a fellow Parkland student tweeted images of the racist messages Kashuv wrote while still a high-school student. In a shared Google Doc with classmates, Kashuv repeatedly wrote the word “n---er,” adding “im really good at typing n---er ok.” In another message, Kashuv called black student athletes “n---erjocks.”Yes, and here's the context for the latter:
The racial slurs in an open Google doc have gotten more attention, but I suspect these texts from Kyle Kashuv may have weighed heavier in Harvard's decision. pic.twitter.com/hu7CYyE1M3
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) June 17, 2019
This text isn't one-upmanship, or herd behavior. It's Kashuv casually using a racial slur in a private conversation to express disgust with a fellow student for dating black men.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) June 17, 2019
Harvard's reversal is being blamed on political correctness, of course, but Sommer tells us that Kashuv had been targeted by a couple of fellow conservatives:
Many of Kashuv’s former allies abandoned him after the messages came to light. At the same time, far-right figures like anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer—who view Kashuv as a member of the GOP establishment—led a campaign urging Harvard to revoke Kashuv’s admission.I don't know the real reason these two turned against Kashuv. But Loomer has her own history of alluding to interracial romance in order to score right-wing racial points.
Laura Loomer is attempting to pressure Harvard into revoking their acceptance of Kyle Kashuv over his recently unearthed remarks pic.twitter.com/Z7QkUoKhFJ
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) May 23, 2019
On Monday, right-wing provocateur and Kashuv foe Jacob Wohl celebrated the revoked admission, calling Kashuv a “political charlatan” in a post on the messaging app Telegram.
Back in 2015, an operative for James O'Keefe's Project Veritas who went by the name "Laura Lewis" posed as a white liberal and made contact with Erica Garner, a Black Lives Matter activist and the daughter of Eric Garner, who was killed by a policeman's chokehold on Staten Island in 2014, dying as he repeated the words "I can't breathe." "Lewis" obtained video of Erica Garner accusing Al Sharpton of being overly interested in money and publicity -- a clip that became the source of a front-page story in the New York Post. A writer for the site Animal New York noted how "Lewis" got her footage:
“Yes, that is her in the photo,” wrote attorney and activist Esther Baldwin by email, referring to a screenshot of footage taken by fellow protester Janelle Ryan. “She approached me at the march that I did the day preceding the rebuilding of Eric Garner’s memorial under the pretext of helping her black boyfriend in Florida with some issues of police harassment/brutality. I explained to her at the march that the Dream Defenders were doing good work in Florida and that she should connect with them.”"Lewis"...
Like her Twitter account, Lewis was a little over-the-top in her attempt to gain legitimacy. “When I got to Staten Island, almost immediately after greeting Erica, she pulls me aside to talk about the boyfriend again. I guess she didn’t think that I could believe that she had a black boyfriend (as if that is so far fetched), so she pulls up a picture of a black man on her phone to provide evidence of her relationship, which I thought was very odd. Then she begins to tell me that she’s so sick of the system and that Ramos and Liu [two murdered police officers] got what they deserved. That’s when I ended the conversation and walked away from her.”
... is clearly Loomer.
So a woman who used a (real? fake?) black boyfriend to worm her way into the confidence of black activists in order to embarrass one of America's most prominent black leaders eventually turned against a fellow right-winger who demeaned whites who date blacks.
I don't know what goes on in the heads of these people.
As for Kashuv, I'm not shedding too many tears. From his Wikipedia page (footnote numbers omitted):
Kashuv became director of high school outreach of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and gave speeches about gun rights, until his resignation in May 2019. Governor-elect of Florida Ron DeSantis, a Republican, included Kashuv on his Transition Advisory Committee on Public Safety....He has friends in high places. He'll be fine.
Following the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, Michael Gruen, an "influencer marketer", noticed Kashuv's posts on Twitter and approached him offering to help him get his message out. With the help of former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, and Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro, meetings on Capitol Hill were set up for Kashuv. During his visit, Kashuv met with President Trump, Melania Trump, and several other politicians including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senator Orrin Hatch.
In April 2018, Kashuv met with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and discussed the Second Amendment.
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