And as usual, you jump in guns blazing before you know what you’re talking about.

For the record, yes, he did. But even if he didn’t, what would your point be? He very obviously went after her aggressively. I spell that out in the article. He goes after all his “leftist” targets aggressively. The question is, did he go after her specifically because she’s black. And even if the answer to that question is “yes” (and you have no evidence that it is) there’s still the question of why he was able to go after her (*spoiler* it’s because she genuinely is guilty of plagiarism and genuinely did a disastrous job during her testimony).

Liz Magill was forced to step down from UPenn for her congressional testimony alone. There was pressure on Gay to resign too. But she didn’t. And Harvard stood by her. Was that racism? And of course it was an issue when Melania plagiarised Michelle Obama. Are you kidding me? It was all over the news for weeks. But Melania isn’t president of Harvard. That speech wasn’t the work which her position in academia was built on. Most people saw her, and still see her as a joke.

Yes, black people in high profile roles have been considered suspect for much longer than Rufo has been around. There are many overlapping reasons for this, chief among them being racism. We probably agree there. And yes, there will always be people on the right who are happy to see a black person fall. I’m not blind to this dynamic at all.

But you seem to be blind to the fact that we do ourselves no favours if our answer to that is to refuse to admit that a black person is ever in the wrong. To insist on a double standard where black people get a pass in cases where we simply wouldn’t care if a white liberal were being fired.

You, I think, want black people to be treated with respect and legitimacy. I do to. But that respect will never come from insisting a black person who committed plagiarism stay in post as the president of Harvard because some of the people who are criticising her are racist.