America This Week, January 05, 2024

And I'm Walter Kern.

Walter, how was your holiday?

My holiday was splendid in a way that my life usually isn't.

On New Year's Eve, I was the guest of Fontainebleau Hotel in Las Vegas along with my wife, and

we were able to join in a kind of celebration that I thought had passed from this earth.

There were truffles in baskets, black truffles the size of golf balls.

It was actually like the driving range where you get a bucket of balls, except you got

a bucket of truffles at this party.

Wow.

Yeah, they made risotto.

I'd never seen a whole truffle before.

They're kind of like lumps of coal.

Let alone a bucket of them.

Yeah.

And, you know, the thief in me, you know, there's a thief in all of us, I like to think,

saw these buckets of truffles and just wanted to liberate a single one.

But I was sure that the Vegas security net was as tight as ever, so I didn't get grabbed.

Oh, that's true, because the eye in the sky, right?

You'd end up in a back room with Robert De Niro breaking your hand bones with a hammer,

right?

Yeah, or worse, Joe Pesci.

Joe Pesci, yeah, exactly, yeah, with a pen, yeah.

But yeah, I was able to see the fireworks of the Las Vegas Strip from the top of the

tallest building in Nevada, the tallest habitable building.

There's a kind of a tower in Las Vegas that's taller, that doesn't have rooms, the Stratosphere.

But Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck were in attendance at the same party.

Wow.

I was able to glimpse their love from afar.

Did it have like an aura?

Was it like, was it visible?

Well, it was visible in the form of many security guards.

Here's what it takes to be a Hollywood A-lister.

You can have a ring of security guards at a party where everybody else is pretty fancy.

It's been pre-selected.

There was a private elevator, you had to have wristbands.

And so there aren't any, you know, paparazzi or anyone just sort of molest you, but still

you're ringed by however many, you know, glowering guards.

And behind that group, behind that group of guards, you party as though you're just a

regular person, you know, as though you don't notice the fact that no one else can come

near you except those who have been pre-approved to come past the perimeter.

So I gawked rather like I would at the Penguin exhibit, you know, to see how they were doing

back there.

He was in a white suit.

I wonder if, is that to keep people from like approaching or is that a real security issue?

You know, it's definitely a status symbol.

I don't think there was anyone who, as I say, posed much of a threat.

It kept me from approaching, I'll tell you that.

I mean, I didn't want to have to give a password or go through whatever frisking was necessary

to advance 12 inches across that barrier.

But it was a Vegas party in style.

There was caviar, you know, not just truffles.

There was a hidden room where sushi was dispensed.

Sushi that you could not have obtained, you know, legally in any other way from fish that,

you know.

Right.

It's like coelacanth or something like that, right?

Exactly.

Extinct three million, three hundred million years ago.

Oh, the, you know, the optic nerve of the giant squid sliced thin on a cracker.

Oh, exactly.

With a soup saw of what's a good endangered animal, like land based animal?

I don't know.

You know, a koala or something like that.

Koala toes.

No, I don't know.

Koalas maybe.

You know, the timber wolf.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

The red wolf.

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

The red wolf eyelid spread across, you know.

A little lump of sushi rice.

So, yeah, we consumed extinct animals in the company of A-list stars while staring out

or gazing out at the Las Vegas Strip as far as what works.

And the thing that we got to see from our perch was the sphere.

The new Las Vegas attraction, which is this giant, you know, bowling ball just

off the strip that is constantly illuminated with changing psychedelic

patterns and is as big as a stadium.

And I've got, it's one of the first impressive new structures I've seen

in America for a long time.

I was going to say, like, America is a little wanting on the sort of

impressive big things.

At least lately.

Right.

Yeah.

We used to toss them off all the time.

Yeah, here's the Grand Coulee Dam, you know, whatever.

Right, right, right.

No, this is worthy of Shanghai or one of the cities that will soon lead the world.

And because it's round, they have to do spectacles that involve round things.

So it often turns into a giant happy face and winks at you.

It does things like that.

Other times, it's just the biggest lava lamp, the biggest dorm room lava

lamp ever constructed.

But that's awesome.

I'm all for that.

It was awesome, you know, and people who know awesome, like Elon Musk,

have visited the sphere and said that it qualifies as a new example

of awesomeness.

So I was kind of heartened for America.

We still innovate.

I think we have the only sphere on the planet.

If you have thousands of dollars, you can see YouTube play inside it.

We should have a Department of Awesome in the end, a cabinet-level agency.

Well, under Trump, I think that's been promised, has it not?

One week ago, I mean, one week, maybe a few months ago, he promised some

actual infrastructure improvements to the United States.

Interesting, interesting.

So we need that, a new cabinet-level awesome agency, and we do have

to take Greenland.

I think we should just take it.

I was so disappointed when we didn't buy Greenland.

And I'm told, my sources tell me, and this is worthless as journalism

file under gossip, that American oligarchs are going to buy Greenland anyway.

That the reason we didn't buy it as a state, as a nation, is that

Because somebody else wants it.

They're private entities who want it, because there's vast mineral wealth,

especially metals and so on, which could drive battery-powered cars and so on.

I don't know if it's lithium or other things.

Yeah, I was talking about this with a friend.

We gave up on that idea too easily.

We should have just sent an email to Denmark, right?

I mean, what are they going to do?

From this press-at-state-dot-gov email account to saying,

Oh, by the way, we've decided that, you know,

Monroe Doctrine, bitch, we're going to take this.

And if you have any objections, talk to the EU or fight or whatever

it is you choose to do.

What are they going to do?

I mean, they're Denmark.

Right.

Exactly.

And if there are any clear lessons from American history,

at least the history that I learned in grade school in the 1970s,

it's that when confronted with a giant real estate purchase that's possible,

the American government should always buy rather than pass.

Seward's Folly turned out well.

The Louisiana Purchase turned out well.

If there was any clear lesson from history,

it's that when offered a giant chunk of a continent

or, you know, piece of the globe for less,

for actual money, just buy it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we can always depreciate the currency later, right?

I mean, you know.

We're doing that anyway.

We're doing that anyway.

Well, anyway, there's been a lot of news since you and I were last at a show

and thanks, by the way, to all listeners in America this week

for that week holiday, which we missed you all, but it was a good holiday.

A lot of stuff happened, four big things in particular,

but there's one that's kind of hot in the news today.

By the way, when this show is actually up,

it'll be Friday, I'll be in Iowa officially starting

a year of being on the campaign trail.

So there's going to be some other videos you should look for on Racket today

if you're watching this.

So we'll talk about the campaign later,

but there were a series of stories that were really interesting already this week.

Do you want to get into the Claudine Gay thing?

I mean, I didn't follow it so much at the time,

but it's kind of fascinating to look at from afar.

Well, because I have a wife who attended Harvard

and attempts to lord it over me

and because I myself went to Princeton,

the superior institution of quiet people.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, the quiet types who run the world, you know.

I might have to go run off and throw up a little bit,

but then...

Yeah, believe me.

Any populist sympathies you might ascribe to me

are going to be thrown into question

when you realize that I have a Princeton-Harvard rivalry

going on in my house,

as though such a repulsive thing could be of interest to anyone.

But yeah, well, Princeton has quiet people like Alan Dulles

who just secretly run the world.

Harvard has people who loudly and out front run the world.

Princeton produces great drummers,

and Harvard leads singers.

So in other words, I pay special attention to this.

And yesterday, Claudine Gay threw it in.

She decided to follow the UPenn president out the door

following weeks of scrutiny and controversy

that started over her congressional testimony

in which she was accused of not properly...

Genuflecting.

Just backing up, the timeline on this is

the Gaza thing happens,

there are hearings in Congress

at which these university presidents

are basically asked to condemn Hamas, right?

And they kind of flub the question.

I should confess, I hate that tactic.

It's an old campaign trail trick

to make a candidate look like an idiot

no matter what the answer.

So you might remember from the debate in 2020

when Joe Biden and Chris Wallace

were asking Trump to condemn the Proud Boys.

You either look like you're kissing ass to the questioner

or like you're endorsing something horrible.

The video that emerges from that is almost universally bad.

So my feeling is always like

the only way to answer those questions

is like what Ramaswamy did yesterday

or the other day before when somebody

from the Washington Post asked him to renounce.

White supremacy, you know,

I understand the game you're playing,

like screw you, I'm not going to bow to your catechism,

that kind of thing.

You can answer it like that,

but if you do it in any other way,

it's going to look bad no matter what

and I think media amateurs sometimes struggle

in that situation.

Having said that, they didn't answer all that well.

And this is what set in motion the whole thing, basically.

In her case, there's an additional problem

that was actually uncovered, though.

It was discovered that in Claudine Gay's academic past,

she had cited without reference

or copied or included in her papers

pieces of text

from other professors,

other writers.

And these plagiarism

and these

plagiarism examples

started to mount.

More and more were found

and Harvard defended her unanimously.

It resulted in a lot of euphemistic defense

like duplicative language,

I think was a term

that was used to substitute

for plagiarism.

There was a lot of what you might call

Jesuitical argument

over what constitutes plagiarism

and so on.

But the trend was against her.

They just kept turning up more examples.

They also got certain academic groups

to condemn her

and then some of the authors of papers

that she appeared to have borrowed from

also spoke out against her.

And what I said at the time

when this stuff first came to light

and Harvard insisted on keeping her

was that it was like

Harvard had fallen into a ditch

and rather than getting out of it

would have been getting rid of her

they decided to build a house there

and they mounted a big defense

they used all these euphemisms

they suggested that they had already

investigated this stuff

but it also came out

that the New York Post had been about

to run a story back when

before this controversy came to the fore

about her plagiarism

alleged plagiarism problems

and Harvard had threatened them

with lawsuits

and the Post did not run the story

and Harvard also claimed

that it did a private investigation

and exonerated her.

But I think personally

I knew that her days were limited

you just don't

you don't sort of gut it out

in this case

because there was evidence

and more and more evidence

as the weeks went on

that she had at least played fast and loose

with these time honored standards

which are in Harvard's own book of rules

and as a

former Ivy League student myself

who faced a disciplinary hearing

in fact

about possible

copying

I was not sympathetic

when I was at Princeton

I was given a Spanish quiz

at a table, a round table

where we sat shoulder to shoulder

and a student across from me

claimed that he saw me

look at the paper next to mine

This is like that Woody Allen joke

about the metaphysics class

where you look into the soul

of the boy sitting next to you

Exactly

Not to rerun my defense

in the great Spanish paper controversy of 1980

but

I remembered having indeed looked

at the paper next to me

to see whether the guy

it was a timed test

to see what page he was on

compared to me

who was not going very quickly

through his test

and anyway

that turned into this brouhaha

I almost had to call my parents

and say

that Princeton education

that expensive thing

that we're all engaged in here

it just fell apart

I knew she wasn't long for this world

and when she resigned this week

she made a statement

that suggested the whole thing

was a racial episode

To jump in

I hadn't really been paying attention

to this whole thing

so I kind of started from that

from her op-ed that came out

in the New York Times this week

and the op-ed's

incredible

it's almost like a list

of every rhetorical technique

that's been dragged out

kind of in this most recent

I hate the word

cancel culture era

when people say

talking about the attacks

that you've faced

the number of times you've been called

the n-word

I've been accused of not fighting

anti-semitism

but then the big one was

she said that what was happening with her

wasn't about her

but it was a skirmish

in a broader war

to unravel public faith

in the pillars of American society

so when you go after me

you're not attacking me

you're trying to undermine the pillars of American society

I almost admired her at that point

it takes balls

to write something like that

and put it in the New York Times

which I assume is probably how she became

president of Harvard to begin with

you have to really have some nerve

to take positions like that

but then I thought well it's possible

that she really was unfairly

rung up on plagiarism charges

as does happen, we have these new plagiarism checkers

that use AI to look for similarities

I'm always

unsympathetic to writers

who are even close

because

a good writer

that's not going to happen to you or me

because it just wouldn't occur to us

to try to downshift to somebody else's

text

but it does happen

and there are people who

maybe they're trying to take something

that's kind of an unremarkable piece of data

and transfer it

and then you have to artificially make it

your own

but she's got example after example

of using other people's language

whole passages full of them

and there's tricks in there to try to defeat

the old Google system

like inserting parentheses

to try to break up

the text and that sort of thing

Matt you just pronounced parentheses

in a way that I've never heard it before

did you mean parentheses?

parentheses

I thought that's what you said

you said parentheses

not to be a stickler

I'm a whisperer

I thought maybe that was the Jersey way

to do it

they had her dead to rights

they had her dead to rights

and what I found amusing

interesting is the apologetics

that have come out since

they've basically suggested

that yeah

she might have been a plagiarist

yeah she copied stuff

but the origins of her persecution

are what we should worry about

the fact that a guy named Christopher Ruffo

and this Bill Ackman

who's been on Harvard's case ever since

over the Gaza thing

are people who shouldn't be allowed

to bring such issues to the floor

that in other words

though she may be guilty

her accusers are guiltier

in some overwhelming cultural

political sense

and therefore

the whole thing

the whole effort to hold her to these standards

was tainted

one of the writers Stephen Voss

even said the work was technically plagiarism

but described it as minor to inconsequential

on the plagiarism scale

on the well-known plagiarism scale

it's like the pain scale at the hospital

where they ask you if your pain is 1-10

you always add 2

you want the pills

but here you always subtract 2

because it's the president of Harvard

the plagiarism scale gets adjusted slightly

depending on what will be lost

if one is convicted of it

in a weird way

one of those hard boundaries

that always worked in the past

is something plagiarism or not

we decide by how many words

are the same in the same order

it seemed to be one of the easiest

how can I put it

one of the easiest infractions to judge

even for the layperson

suddenly has become this foggy

socio-cultural battleground

like everything

and as you said

this is a minor case

according to others

Jonathan Chait

at the New York Magazine

saying three things are true

I saw him say

bullet points

1, 2, 3

it was a political persecution

2, she was guilty

and 3, something something

in Hollywood they have a term

when you're talking to an actor

and you want to criticize them

you call it making a sandwich

you say one thing

I love your hair

2, you're doing a terrible job

3, I love your clothes

Chait kind of made a sandwich

about gay there

only in number 2

was there any actual meat

but I gotta say

I found the whole thing

in the end satisfying

first of all

because my wife went to Harvard

and I'm in a constant battle

I have another family member

who went there

but I don't talk about my children

I'm beset from different sides

on the Harvard question

and I don't have ammo

but I gotta say

to see Americans