‘Ridículo!’ Explosive Chris Wallace DEI And Harvard Segment Turns Into Pitched Battle Between Journos: ‘Let Me, Let Me, Let Me Finish!’
CNN anchor Chris Wallace had a segment go nuclear over the subjects of DEI and the ouster of Harvard’s Claudine Gay, with his guests battling it out and repeatedly interrupting in a conversation that then drew a lot of attention on social media.
Journalists Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Reihan Salam, Kara Swisher, and Jonah Goldberg joined Wallace for this week’s edition of CNN’s The Chris Wallace Show and covered the issue of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices after an explosive tweet war between billionaire Mark Cuban and multiple detractors including Elon Musk on X this week.
In the approximately six minutes of argument, Salam and Garcia-Navarro ended up in cross-talk repeatedly, with Swisher and Goldberg adding their commentary where possible, as the discussion became very heated and got a bit personal between the debaters on the subjects of racism, equity, plagiarism, and free speech on college campuses.
After Wallace finally found a stopping point he wryly stated, “Well I am glad we settled this.”
When Goldberg shared the video on X it prompted quite a few reactions, some mocking, some outraged, but all highly engaged on the hot button subject.
SWISHER: Most people feel like we live in a meritocracy, when in a lot of cases we live in a mirror-tocracy. You hire people that are like you, you, and you see that all over the place. And so people don’t quite know where they are. And it’s a very, it’s very easy to attack.
WALLACE: Reihan has, in effect, the country moved on from the so-called racial reckoning we were all talking about after the murder of George Floyd.
SALAM: I think there is a broad sense that that racial reckoning involved smuggling in certain really contentious ideological ideas that weren’t ultimately about diversity, but rather were about imposing ideological uniformity. When you’re looking at bureaucracies, what really is noxious about them is that they actually don’t respect all sorts of diversity, including viewpoint diversity, including the fact that, look, in some cases, you have groups that are overrepresented, and that can be okay. You know, the point that J.D. Vance was making about the Dallas Mavericks is that it can be good and healthy and reasonable in some domains to have –.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ridículo. Ridículo.
SALAM: — over-representation, and under-representation can also be–.
SWISHER: What she said.
SALAM: You can say it’s ridiculous. You can make that assertion. But fundamentally, the fact that, you know — I am one second-generation Asian-American on a panel of four. I am massively, massively overrepresented. But I think it’s reasonable to say that you’re going to judge people based on their merits. And when you’re looking at organizations that–
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Excuse me, excuse me.
SALAM: — high perfromance organizations.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. This is the burden, and I can’t tell you how infuriating I find it. This is the burden that always comes with representation. The idea is that because you are a person of color, suddenly it is, you are only there because it is some noblesse oblige. It is because some white guilt puts you there, because there was some DEI initiative. And you can’t win either way you look at it. I mean, what infuriates me is you look at the whole Claudine Gay thing and everyone’s talking about DEI. This woman cannot win or lose. Either –If she is there.
SALAM: I’m happy to talk about Claudine Gay, please.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: No let me finish. Let me, let me, let me finish. If she’s there, it’s because of DEI. That they put her there because she’s black. If she loses and they kick her out, it’s because she actually was never good enough to be there in the beginning, and she was. You can’t win in this situation. And it is. And it is infuriating, as a person of color, to constantly have this cudgel put on our heads.
GOLDBERG: I get the argument you can’t win, but you also can’t have it both ways. You can’t celebrate and tout that someone was hired, and it’s a wonderful thing to expand diversity. And Harvard went full tilt, talking about how great it was to hire the first Black woman, and then say, all of a sudden–.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The first Black person. It wasn’t even the first Black woman, the first Black person.
GOLDBERG: Okay. I don’t care. The point is, is that she got caught obviously plagiarizing. And that is the, those are the facts that, you know, there’s this massive piece–
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This was an ideological, very well-funded–.
SWISHER: Right.
GOLDBERG: The motives of the attack don’t change the fact that she plagiarized.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh come on.
GOLDBERG: And where I disagree with you, Kara, is when you say that we–
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When somebody fails who’s White and is a man–.
GOLDBERG: You mean –.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let me finish!
GOLDBERG: You mean like the President of Stanford?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yes. When someone, nobody — in fact, there’s books written about this. Fail and then come back, um, you know, look, look at.SWISHER: Pivot.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Pivot. Exactly. Pivot. Nice way to get in your podcast. Um, you know, pivot. And then when a person of color fails, all of a sudden it’s an indictment of an entire system that the right doesn’t like.
SALAM: This is so ridiculous. She was a graduate of Exeter and Stanford with a PhD from Harvard, she-.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And do you know why? You have to be so excellent to get where she was.
SALAM: — Second generation, second generation Haitian American who came from a family that dominated the concrete industry in Haiti. She was not the wretched of the earth. She was someone who should be judged on her merits.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wait, I’m sorry, do Black people have to be wretched in order to attend?
SALAM: Absolutely not. But she was selected because she established the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging at Harvard. She presided over a steep decline in the free speech climate. And she also targeted minority professors who dissented from her perspective. That was a problem. She was a person with ideas, not someone who –.
SWISHER: One thing that strikes a lot of women and people of color a lot. It seems like standards are only applied when it comes to women and people of color. I have seen so many incompetent men on boards of internet companies, and they always talk about what we’re going to bring on a woman to be more diverse when they have basically driven a company into a wall.
SALAM: You remember Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University?
SWISHER: We never judge, use the word standards with White men. We just don’t.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And merit and all these other words. And let me just say one other thing.
SALAM: Ruth Simmons, the exemplary president of Brown University, a celebrated African-American woman. No one questioned her credentials, her excellence as a steward of that institution.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Are you actually saying that what happened to Claudine gay was not a completely engineered — I mean, it was. Chris Rufo said it! He actually admitted to the fact that this was an entirely engineered.
WALLACE: Chris Rufo, we just quickly should explain a conservative activist who led the charge.
SALAM: And my colleague who, who –Look, this was not a concerted campaign out of whole cloth. This was based on ideological predilections.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yes.
SALAM: This was based on the fact that she was entrenching certain ideas. She was someone who was actually doing great damage to an important American institution.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In your opinion.
SALAM: And what he was trying to do was surface the hypocrisy. You know, the idea that we are defending free speech, when in fact free speech — Harvard literally ranked dead last among research universities in the country on the speech climate.
SALAM: It seems to me that Black people, Latinos. We’re always the ones who have to sit here and say, you know what? It’s exactly right. When when we make a mistake, we have to wear the cloak of shame and say, well, you never deserved to be here to begin with.
SALAM: Like the Black Latino Liz Magill, president of Penn?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And now let me, and I’ll say something else. And I just want to say this last thing, when we’re talking about DEI. Which is, you know, there was this big push in 2020 thinking, okay, here we are. We’ve had a big racial, racial reckoning. And you know what happened? All these DEI offices that were created, 75% of them were led by White men. And that’s all I have to say about this.
SWISHER: In any case I would recommend meeting Mark Cuban on this because he really is smart. He’s talking about building a business that’s diverse for the future.
GOLDBERG: I’ve got no problem with diverse businesses.
SWISHER: And to do these little, these little tweets about calling it racism is not useful.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So how do we get there?
GOLDBERG: You can’t you can’t fight. My problem with DEI is it’s illiberal. Right? It’s speech policing. Cladine Gay got attention because she couldn’t figure out how to speak clearly and with with moral seriousness about anti-Semitism while she’s talking about DEI, right
GARCIA-NAVARRO: DEI is not illiberal.
GOLDBERG: She says, well, you know, except for the stuff about Jewish genocide, we believe in all of these other things. That’s what got the attention to her, and she would still be there today if she wasn’t the plagiarist. That’s the fact.
WALLACE: Well I am glad we settled this.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
