Don Moynihan: This is a witch hunt targeted primarily at scholars of color who study race. Chris Rufo now going after Christina Cross for "plagiarism" - his go-to example is *descriptions of data that are similar.* There are only so many ways you can describe data!

This is a witch hunt targeted primarily at scholars of color who study race. Chris Rufo now going after Christina Cross for "plagiarism" - his go-to example is *descriptions of data that are similar.* There are only so many ways you can describe data!

Instead of addressing the substance of her work, the game plan is to accuse Cross of plagiarism. As with Gay, they launch an anonymous accusation and then publicize it. Harvard will reject it, but the effect is to discredit Cross, Harvard and let people know that those working on race are targeted.

Wrote about the attack on scholars on race. It is happening both at the individual and institutional level. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/open-seaso...

Open season on scholars of racedonmoynihan.substack.com They are facing both personal attacks and institutional censorship

Cross' website says she earned her degree from Michigan and Rufo says she earned her degree from Michigan - suspicious!

I ran an analysis of Rufo’s writing and found that the letter “e” was the single most commonly used letter, followed by “a”, “r”, “I” and “o”. I then ran the same analysis on the documents he critiques. The same pattern followed. The same exact order. Let that sink in.

British cryptographers during the 2nd World War^

gosh damn it this is my kind of joke

Simply repost it later in the thread

This kind of quantitative frequency analysis serves to expose a much larger conspiracy across all academic research texts in the English language for decades! It all points to a shadowy figure, known only as Etaoin Shrdlu.

I mean you don’t gotta dig deep given his wife literally copies shit from Wikipedia

Different tool, you’re thinking of Bill Ackman

ope

Wait. Are R,S,T,L,N,E not the most common letters? Wheel of Fortune has lied to me my whole life.

Astronaut meme

Can't wait for the NYT piece in which Rufo explains how this is all a grift but that it twill work anyways.

I'm pretty certain he did that already.

Several times

I think you meant more the experience of reading in the NYT "Chris Rufo says he's going to trick the media into persecuting trans people out of public life by lying about them" and then they go on in the same article to help drive trans ppl out of public life by repeating his lies.

This absolutely infuriates me. Her work is so smart and important and nuanced (and so is she).

Has anyone checked Rufo’s work, academic or otherwise?

yes, there were some accusations, but don't recall the details. but the point is that he is not an academic, and the institutions that support him don't actually care about plagiarism

Just one of those “citizen journalists” that fascists like Musk is trying legitimize and lump in with qualified journalists.

As a lesson to the others.

they’re building careers off this shit

“What can I do? I keep getting these tips!” Jesus, what an asshole.

"I never aspired to write so many negative stories about one group of people" yeeeeeah you did

*gimli and legolas meme* “Never thought I’d be fighting side by side with a racist” “Yes you did.”

'I didn't aspire to write so many negative stories, but by putting black people in a position of power you forced my hand.'

"Growing up I never thought I could make a living being overtly racist, because the racists I saw in history books had to cover their heads in hoods." trump gave all these assholes permission to flaunt it.

A Harvard Business professor with tenure, an endowed chair, and a TED Talk seen by millions is being fired, is suing everyone, there's huge drama, weird counter-claims, the whole damned investigation report just went public last week. But this guy is worried how Methods sections get paraphrased.

The fact he specifies "black" scholars should set alarm bells ringing in everyone's heads.

Very sad how the solution to this problem is as simple as administrations trusting their own employees more than they trust a self-avowed culture warrior who already explained that he knows this is all vindictive bullshit

Administrators*

It's fucking disgusting. White men just making shit up trumps the careful and thoughtful work of well-respected women of color and we're all just supposed to fucking accept this

I don't know why anyone takes Rufo seriously, but I really wish they'd stop.

Because the lie is the reason to exist. They love the lie, it's a warm blanket to those trying to gain power.

They are comfortable lying, the ends justify the means.

They haven't realized lying is the ends, too.

This. "Owning" the argument by warping facts is a kind of winning, and Rufo is on record talking about making shit up. He's a shameless grifter, first and foremost.

The lie is a warm blanket to those who haven't worked as hard to have the success of black academics. "They didn't do better than me. That's impossible. They cheated."

Hypocrisy signals who has power.

It's permission to unleash their hatred.

He gives them easy stories, plus big anti-trans, or at least anti-anti-anti-trans, energy in the media.

Remember defund acorn

Always. O'Keefe is such a scumbag

Like a transparent clown of a scumbag moving congress to violate the constitution with a shabby prank video

As I am often reminded: A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower

the instructive thing here is that it bamboozled a dem-controlled congress who just went along with it despite it being obvious shabby bullshit and also despite being incredibly Against The Rules they constantly pretend stop them from doing anything good

At this point, I think we need a reminder of what actual, unethical plagiarism looks like in social science. It's not boilerplate summary of data collection techniques, but narrative, analysis, and interpretation. www.politico.com/magazine/sto...

Trump Pick Monica Crowley Plagiarized Parts of Her Ph.D. Dissertationwww.politico.com An examination of the dissertation and the sources it cites identified more than a dozen sections of text that have been lifted, with little to no changes, from other scholarly works without proper at...

The freaking nightmare of every person who has completed their dissertation—it had to get through the plagiarism checker before it was officially submitted. There truly are only so many ways to define fundamental terms and describe methods.

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