CNN Panel falls into CHAOS over Claudine Gay and D.E.I.

>> Jonah, the MAGA extremist argument, which is the one that in the fall of 2022 Biden made, worked very well for him and for Democrats in the midterm. What do you think of him going that argument and literally in the speech on Friday talking about nazis and comparing Trump’s rhetoric to Nazi rhetoric, doing it this early?
>> I think that’s the right question. It is a tactical question to me as just a matter of politics. I would have his surrogates doing that now. There’s a real problem, or there’s a real potential of this all sort of becoming background noise and there’s no shock value to it by the time you get to the general election. So it is going to be dismissed by a lot of people on the right pretty early because argument of Hitler is an old tactic of the left, and even if it has more salience now, but I feel it is early to come out of the box like this because it is the point of persuading his own coalition to come home.
>> Where do you go when you start with Hitler? Satan? I’m not sure where you move. One of the problems he has got — one thing he can do is repeat it and keep repeating it. The more we see Trump say crazy things and people pay attention to it —
>> But 11 months is a long time.
>> It is a long time, but it will grow over time. People will go, oh, that guy. I think it is better to say, look at that guy rather than look at me.
>> One advantage is that when Trump gets called Hitler, Trump’s response is to say, hey, I didn’t get this from mein kampf. I came up with this language all on my own. I didn’t plagiarize Hitler, I just used duplicative language.
>> Lulu, what did you want to say?
>> I wanted to say as a tactic, sure, is it going to get old. But this is his central message. This has been his central message since the moment he actually said he was going to try to become president of the United States. It is not unusual for Biden to say, this is why I am here, I am fighting for democracy, I am fighting for this country, and I consider Trump to be an existential threat.
>> Let’s be honest about something. One of the reasons, and I kind of touched on it in the beginning, one of the reasons that Biden is taking this route is because he has spent all fall touting his own record, leaning into ‘'Bidenomics'’ and it didn’t work. Take a look at this latest CNN average of recent polls. At this point 38% approve of the job the president is doing. 58% disapprove. Reihan, I mean, you know, he was making the affirmative case for himself and folks weren’t buying it.
>> Joe Biden’s best chance right now is to have a low turnout election. We are in a very different moment right now in which in the past the assumption was always among progressive activists, we need to get folks to turn out, we do better in presidential years than we do in off-year elections. Now it is very different. Jonah mentioned very astutely in 2022 these tactics worked because you had a somewhat more affluent, more educated electorate. A lot of folks were on the sidelines. What Biden is trying to do here, I suspect, is trying to demotivate some folks, number one. Number two, try to see to it that people that might otherwise go to a no labels candor to Robert Kennedy jr. Stick with him out of the sense that the alternative is so noxious and terrible.

>> 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?
>> I think there’s a broad sense that racial reckoning involved smuggling in ideological ideas that weren’t about diversity but rather were about imposing ideological uniformity. When you're looking at DEI 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 over represented, 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 over representation —
>> Ridículo. Ridículo.
>> What she said.
>> You can say it's ridiculous, you can make that assertion, but the fact that I’m one second-generation Asian American on a panel of four, I’m massively over represented. But I think it is reasonable to say you will judge people based on merits. And
>> Excuse me.
>> When you are looking at high performance organizations —
>> 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, because some white guilt put you there, because there was some dei initiative and you can’t win either way you look at it. What infuriates me is you look at the Claudine Gay thing and everyone is talking about dei. This woman cannot win or lose. If she is there —
>> I’m happy to talk about Claudine Gay, please.
>> Let me finish. If she is there, it is because of dei. That they put her there because she is black. If she loses and they kick her out it is because she was never good enough to be there in the beginning. You can’t win in this situation.
>> Yeah, but —
>> And it is infuriating as a person of color to constantly have this cudgel put on our heads.
>> I get the argument you can’t win but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t celebrate and tout someone was hired and it is a wonderful thing to expand diversity and Harvard went full tilt to talk about hiring the first black woman. and then say all of the sudden-
>> The first black person, it wasn't even the first black woman, it was the first black person.
>> I don’t care. The point is. She was caught obviously plagiarizing. those are the facts.
>> It was ideological, very well-funded —
>> The motives of the attack don’t change the fact she plagiarized.
>> Oh, come on.
>> When I disagree with you, cara —
>> When somebody fails who is white and is a man.
>> You mean like the president of Stanford —
>> Yes, when nobody — in fact, there are books written about this, fail and then come back. You know, look at —
>> Pivot.
>> Pivot, exactly.
>> Nice way to get into your podcast.
>> Thank you. Pivot, and then when a person of color fails all of a sudden it is an indictment of an entire system that the right doesn't like.
>> This is so ridiculous. She was a graduate of exeter and Stanford with a ph.d. from Harvard.
>> Do you know why? You have to be excellent to get where she is.
>> Second generation Haitian American who came from a family who dominated the concrete industry in haiti. She was not the wretched of the earth. She was someone who should be judged on her merits.
>> Wait, I'm sorry, Black people have to be wretched? Is that what you're saying?
>>She was selected because she established the office of diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging at Harvard. She presided over a steep decline in the free speech climate, and she also —
>> All right.
>> — targeted minority professors who dissented from her perspective. That was a problem.