The resignation of Harvard’s first Black president Claudine Gay on Tuesday continues to have commentary from the conservative peanut gallery. This time, billionaire and Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman has shared his opinion—and of course it’s wrong and offensive as hell.
After leading the crusade to get rid of Gay as president, Ackman took to X on Wednesday morning to write a 4,000 word essay in which he stated that DEI is the “root cause of antisemitism” at Harvard University. His remarkably asinine writing including the following:
“Under DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion], one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed.”
Ackman didn’t stop there. He also wrote: “The E for ‘equity’ in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity,” and “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out).”
Pulling the “reverse racism is racism” card is not completely surprising, but it is vomit-inducing. He also demanded that the members of the Harvard Corporation who attempted to keep Gay in office to resign like she did, stating that the board “should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views.”
Ackman is upholding white supremacist beliefs by insisting that anti-racist work is really just an attack on white people. This goes back to the very meaning of white replacement theory, in which the advancement of people of color works to eradicate the existence of white people. Ackman is stoking the fear of white people losing their power and authority—and this is only the beginning.