There is so much to say about the Claudine Gay affair, anti-semitism at Harvard, and Harvard’s response to recent student protests that I have opted to say nothing. But over at Café Hayek, libertarian economist Donald Boudreaux asks an interesting question: How does Claudine Gay’s “my truth” differ from Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”? It seems to me that these ‘concepts’ share much with each other and that each is equally unwarranted. Well, here’s one way that Gay and Conway differ. According to Google Advanced Search, the words Claudine and Harvard have appeared together in 19 blog posts since December 11. (For those of you keeping score at home, all of these posts were critical.) The words (Kellyanne) or (Conway and “alternative
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There is so much to say about the Claudine Gay affair, anti-semitism at Harvard, and Harvard’s response to recent student protests that I have opted to say nothing. But over at Café Hayek, libertarian economist Donald Boudreaux asks an interesting question:
How does Claudine Gay’s “my truth” differ from Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”? It seems to me that these ‘concepts’ share much with each other and that each is equally unwarranted.
Well, here’s one way that Gay and Conway differ. According to Google Advanced Search, the words Claudine and Harvard have appeared together in 19 blog posts since December 11. (For those of you keeping score at home, all of these posts were critical.) The words (Kellyanne) or (Conway and “alternative facts”) has appeared exactly one time – in the piece cited above. Yet it’s difficult to argue that the damage done to the United States by Claudine Gay comes anywhere close to the damage done by Kellyanne Conway and the other enablers of Trump’s attack on truth.
So, is Boudreaux beating up on Gay because she’s a black woman, or because of hostility to elite (liberal) universities, or is he going easy on Kellyanne Conway because she’s a Republican? Just asking for a friend.
P.S.: The only time “alternative facts” appeared on Café Hayek (other than the post cited above) was to slam historian Nancy MacLean, who wrote a book critical of the economist James Buchanan, a famous proponent of limited government. Some of the criticism of MacLean seems plausible (I haven’t followed the debate closely), but it is remarkable that the only time Boudreaux uses the phrase is to criticize people on the liberal side of the aisle. Why, it’s almost as if he thinks liberals are a bigger threat to democracy and liberty than Trump.