Harris Faulkner on Claudine Gay’s Harvard Tenure: “That’s Not What Black Excellence Is”

Harris Faulkner, anchor of The Faulkner Focus, host of Outnumbered, and Bestselling Author of Faith Still Moves Mountains: Miraculous Stories of the Healing Power of Prayer, joined the Guy Benson Show today to discuss the latest surrounding the resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay. The media response to Gay’s resignation has been astonishing, and Faulkner asserts that Gay was no model for black excellence. Faulkner and Benson also discuss Biden’s falling poll numbers across the black community and the significance of Charlamagne tha God disavowing the Biden-Harris administration. Listen to the full interview below.

Full Interview:
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Listen to the full podcast:

Faulkner had this to say on black excellence and Claudine Gay:

“You don’t have to cheat, lie and steal to get to the top. That’s not what black excellence is. That’s no one’s excellence. No one owns what excellence is. It doesn’t change. It is what it is. It’s a fact. You’re the best or you’re not the best… If you want to be a part of American exceptionalism, you have to actually do exceptional things.”

Full Transcript:

Guy Benson: And that laugh you just heard belongs to our friend and colleague Harris Faulkner. She’s of course anchor of the Faulkner Focus, co-host of outnumbered bestselling author and she is here in studio with me. It is great to see you. Happy New Year.

Harris Faulkner: Happy New Year. And by the way, every hour with you is Happy Hour.

Guy Benson: That is so kind. We should make that a promo is what we should means.

Harris Faulkner: People drink around you a lot. No, I’m kidding.

Guy Benson: It’s true. Just to. Put up with me.

Harris Faulkner: Your audience can’t tell. But my 14 year old daughter Danica is here today and she’s probably not going to speak at all. But this is so rare. I never bring kids to work because they’re always doing their own thing. Teenagers have their own lives.

Guy Benson: Well, I’ve heard about them. I’ve heard about them so much. And I know to get to meet one of them is very exciting. Let me ask you just on a personal level, because we just had our first in late November.

Harris Faulkner: I know him.

Guy Benson: And he’s just.

Harris Faulkner: Little, teeny tiny, the baby shower.

Guy Benson: And it was so amazing to hold this new person in your arms and say, Wow, I’m now responsible for you, and the nights can be long. And then all of a sudden you blink and we’re five weeks in already. Yeah. How true is the cliche that all of a sudden, like you’ve got an infant in your arms and now she’s 14 at work with you like that?

Harris Faulkner: You mean it? The cliché…

Harris Faulkner: It’s a lie. It goes by much faster than that. I mean, it is faster than a blink. It’s more like an air operated blink. It’s amazing. And then there are times when it really slows down and things get tough because life is like that. And I pray my way through those times and the clock seems to stop. And you say, Well, when is this going to pass? When is this going to happen? When your baby gets his first fever and you want normal things like that to happen because they’re building an immunity. But doctors and those people don’t, you know, they’re so used to it, they don’t think that we lay people with children that came with no instructions. It’s weak. It’s our kryptonite to see our babies. You know, just slow down. Time to be sick for a moment or slow down to cut a tooth, which can feel like an eternity. Cherish those two. Every moment of it. I mean, it is it is God’s blessing on us that we get to be part of new life. Whether we do it as a parent, we do it as an aunt and uncle, whatever it is, we are around new life and that is the hope of the future. And so I’m glad for you. You as parents, do you and your beloved. And I’m glad for your baby because they have two great parents. So enjoy the ride. And it is faster than the cliche, so.

Guy Benson: Well, thank you for that advice. It’s very good advice. HARRIS Let’s talk about a couple of things in the news. In the last hour, I was just discussing the latest permutation of this Harvard scandal and the downfall of the president at Harvard. This op ed she put in The New York Times, ha under her name at least. Who knows if she wrote it, because that’s not really her thing. But she was basically saying, I’m the victim. This was a trap that I fell into. This is other people trying to undermine faith in our institutions in all of that. And some of the people coming to her defense are basically going to the exact same well, saying because she’s a black woman, she was targeted this way. Al Sharpton, who I will just point out, has fomented race riots in his day back in the nineties in particular. He’s decided he’s very upset about this. And he called the ouster of Claudine Gay, quote, an attack on every black woman in America. You are a black woman in America. I wonder what you make of that.

Harris Faulkner: I am a black woman in America. I didn’t know if you’d noticed because I’ve had some tell me that I’m not quite black enough. You know, it’s interesting. I do believe that the name Claudine Gay now will be synonymous with fake. Will be synonymous with the scorch that’s been put upon and now spread from elite colleges in this country. And that is that this this idea of you were a victor when we hired you for your hair texture and your skin color. Now, you must be a victim because you have failed. And we don’t want to own that. That’s where Harvard is today. And by failing, this woman didn’t stand up to the raging anti-Semitism that was happening across her campus. Students hiding out from others who said that they wanted to know where the Jews were. And this happened to what, three campuses that we know of. I believe in MIT. And you, Penn, you Penn’s president, quit shortly after the same Capitol hearing that the Harvard president, Claudine Gay, said, well, you know, if someone’s calling for Jewish genocide. Does that break school policy? It depends on the context.

Guy Benson: Context.

Harris Faulkner: So she’s in that sort of vat of I don’t want to really call out hate when I see it. Because that might not be the current conversation of go find the oppressed and say that you are their queen. So that’s where we are right now. And when she failed in that Capitol Hill hearing, somebody decided to dig deep. You don’t think those plagiarism claims weren’t always there? You don’t think Harvard didn’t do its due diligence? They did, but they normalized that bad behavior.

Guy Benson: You think they knew that she was a plagiarist when they hired?

Harris Faulkner: They’re going to have to prove they didn’t. Because there’s so many there’s so much of it. And and now that Chad Djibouti and other I. Language learning applications and in software out there, it’s pretty easy to put in what people say and have it spit out and tell you where the origins were. So if Harvard wants to hide behind, well, we didn’t have the technology. Do you know that Harvard graduate, a Dr. Daniel Nadler, who came across and his twenties is a graduate from Harvard and sold a company called Open Eye for $700 million a few years ago. He’s not even 40 yet, I don’t think. Yeah, that’s one of their grads. So don’t preach to me about you didn’t even know what A.I. was and you couldn’t put people’s things. You that’s who you’re graduating. So I’m going to think they already had the technology to do it. But I know what they did have. They had a woman who could have told them the truth about what she was doing, because academia ought to be bringing in people who have integrity. So if they failed to find the plagiarism because she lied, that’s another reason not to keep her.

Guy Benson: And if they didn’t do the due diligence necessary because they wanted her as an avatar, that’s another indictment of them. Well, there you go.

Harris Faulkner: And so from Victor to victim now, and that’s not going to be enough for her because she’s no longer the president. I don’t know if she did some sort of a deal. I was surprised that she resigned because you get more money. I think if you if you make them fire you.

Guy Benson: I think that she has agreed and I read I mentioned this last hour that she gets to keep her president’s salary.

Harris Faulkner: A million a year.

Guy Benson: I think it’s not in her career to just be a professor. Now.

Harris Faulkner: That’s a million.

Guy Benson: Yeah.

Harris Faulkner: Yeah, a million a year. And she’ll just hang out for tenure and collect all of that. And I’m sure she had to do something along the lines of just try not to talk about this. So she’s going to now turn that victory of being that chosen black woman. To the victim of being that chosen black woman. Well, everything that happened to me happened because of my skin color. And, you know, if I did plagiarize and I’m not saying I didn’t did or didn’t, if I did, then it was you know, people are picking on me now because I’m black, because of the op ed. I’m paraphrasing it, but that’s basically what it says. And so my question is, when you stole from the scholars and then including blacks, obviously later went back and put quotations around to make it look like you knew that you were stealing and giving those people credit, but didn’t actually give them credit in the copy or a footnote that somehow or another you did that because as a black woman, you felt like you needed to. What is what is Al Sharpton? What are these others talking about when they say an attack on Claudine Gay, as you said, guy. Is an attack on every black woman in the country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling. Well to be the president of Harvard, you put your fist through it. And now we know you didn’t do that alone. You plagiarized your writings. She’s never written a book. She’s written very little in all of her years in academia. But even your rise was fake because somebody had to give you the job not based on merit, but based on the immutable about yourself. I would imagine that does make you feel like a victim. Is it worth paying you nearly $1,000,000 a year? I don’t know. Harvard. What are you trying to hide? That you would keep her on board and keep her quiet? See, I think she ought to tell the other story. I think she ought to tell the story of what they really were telling her to say about Jews on that campus. I’ll put up a seat and serve several cups of tea to hear that. Hmm.

Guy Benson: And I want to explore that a little bit further. Not just her, but some of her defenders. But first, let’s take a quick break. Harris Faulkner with us in studio here in New York on The Guy Benson Show. America is listening to the Guy Benson Show. We continue here in studio with Harris Faulkner on The Guy Benson Show. And we were just talking Harris about Claudine Gay and that whole saga and some of the justifications and defenses that she’s marshaled on her own behalf. I also think. Harris, because you’ve seen other people out there in the media on her side sort of just taking up this torch, saying the fact that she lost her position. It’s an attack on every black woman. It’s an attack on diversity. It’s an attack on all these other things other than just what she actually chose to do. She made decisions. She made choices for herself. And it just seems like there’s a stripping of agency here. I saw one woman say that this is an attack on black excellence. Is she really the person that you want to hold up as the exemplar of black excellence in this country? What is that about?

Harris Faulkner: I have six Emmys. No one is going to come for me and say one of those Emmys is not real. Scratch it and there’s chocolate in it. That’s not going to happen. So you don’t have to cheat, lie and steal to get to the top. That’s not what black excellence is. That’s no one’s excellence. No one owns what excellence is. It doesn’t change. It is what it is. It’s a fact. You’re the best or you’re not the best. Your guy, Benson or your fake guy, Benson.

Guy Benson: There’s a few of those floating around on Twitter, I think.

Harris Faulkner: Yes, we call them. Who? Yeah, they just go by who? You’re the real deal. The fact that she couldn’t be the real deal isn’t my fault as a black woman. Isn’t your fault as a white man. That’s her fault. As an American who failed. If you want to be part of American exceptionalism, you actually have to do exceptional things. So instead of going out and preparing her her own journey now and repairing her own reputation by maybe why not write something that’s your own in academia? Oh, my gosh. She’s got a huge platform. I’m sure Oprah would put it in O magazine and do ours like she did with Meghan Markle on TV with her. I’m sure she could do whatever. She could go out and lift up Jewish students and say, you know, as president, I kind of toed the line. I don’t know if she had to sign an NDA, so she’s not allowed to say whatever Harvard told her to say. But if she can say it, say it and say what? I want those Jewish those Jewish students to know that. I feel bad that if if they got the impression I wasn’t on their side, I am. And if there’s anything that I can do while I’m still on this Harvard campus, making nearly a million a year, be in the same plagiarized person allegedly that I was before. I will do it. I will do it with and for them. I mean, you and I would go out on a campaign to do the right thing. I’ve done it when I’ve had to clarify statements on television, bad sourcing, whatever it was. I didn’t point the finger. I took the hit.

Guy Benson: I wouldn’t count on that from her because I even saw a report yesterday that the anti-Semitism panel that she put together at Harvard as part of their let’s do something. Panic has barely done anything. And she didn’t engage almost at all with them.

Harris Faulkner: I did not know that.

Guy Benson: So I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Harris Faulkner: What was it called again?

Guy Benson: It was like the Combating anti-Semitism Task Force, and a few of them resigned. They were so disgusted with it. And I just saw a report that she basically created it and then had nothing to do with it. So.

Harris Faulkner: Wow, She feels a lot.

Guy Benson: Seems like it.

Harris Faulkner: I mean, that’s amazing. She could almost be the czar of the border.

Guy Benson: Okay. Speaking of. Speaking of. That was my next question.

Harris Faulkner:, By the way, Another black woman. And this time the president of the United States put the be on the lookout for a black woman. He bellowed, and we got her. I mean, Harvard busload. And we got Claudine gay. Yep. And I’m not comparing the two women and their merits because one was the district attorney of California and the other is writing papers that need extra quotations. I don’t know what else she’s done clouding gay. But that’s interesting.

Guy Benson: Yeah. And there’s this fascinating piece, a profile story. It’s very long. And Politico of this podcast and radio show host named Charlamagne Tha God, he’s got a huge following.

Harris Faulkner: He’s big. You know, he’s good friends with Kennedy, too.

Guy Benson: A She’s she knows everyone. She does. She knows everyone. So Charlemagne’s interesting guy, and he was out there for Biden in 2020. He did the rare he took the rare step of endorsing Biden-Harris in 2020. He says this time around he’s not going to do it. He said, I learned my lesson. He’s really unhappy with the administration. He feels like they’re botching opportunities, that they’re not doing a great job. He said the reason that he endorsed last time is because he really felt this confidence in Kamala Harris. And now he says in the interview that she has sort of disappeared. Yes. Since they got elected. And so he’s kind of over it. And he said he expects that there will be a lot of people who just stay at home in 2024. He said the couch might win this election, meaning people not turning out. You mean.

Harris Faulkner: Not outnumbered?

Guy Benson: Not that.

Harris Faulkner: Not that couch.

Guy Benson: Which I’ll be joining on Monday.

Harris Faulkner: Very excited.

Guy Benson: It was someone with that size of a fan base, particularly among black Americans, For him to be going after the Biden team the way he is and even Kamala Harris the way he is. That raised my eyebrows a little bit.

Harris Faulkner: Well, now you’re talking about people in media who are people of color who are trusted. Because they do give a hard interview and they do listen to the answers. And Charlamagne, the God was where Joe Biden previous to 2016 thought he could he could scoop up the black vote because remember, he needed it then. He needs it now.

Guy Benson: And that’s where he said, If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black. That was on that show.

Harris Faulkner: That was on that show. Kamala Harris also went to that show. Remember that her people had to kind of shuttle her off air. And Symone Sanders, I think, has a show. Well, I’d like to get that story from Simon. We had call her because she was in charge of kind of getting her off the air. Ms.. Word salad, Kamala Harris. And that was with Charlamagne tha God at that point. So he’s been known. But here’s the part of the article that you were just reading from that really stuck out to me. I still received backlash over that toe to endorsement. Mm hmm. It’s 2024, he says. And this is a quote When we say those things about people, that we support them and then those people. And then people don’t see her. Meaning Kamala. Holding it down, meaning doing your job that causes issues. So people are holding him accountable for saying she’s great because you know what? Her resume for the job seemed a little thin. That sounds familiar. Claudine Gay. She had a great resume. Kamala Harris, former senator. I mean, the.

Guy Benson: Judge, the.

Harris Faulkner: Attorney general, I think I said district attorney before I was wrong. Attorney general of a state, so on and so forth. But the part that didn’t match up in the black community were all those black men and women that she had put in prison in that state. And they didn’t appreciate that they needed her to be sold to the black community. During the height of the pandemic. A vaccine comes out. And then candidate on the bottom of the ticket with Joe Biden says we’ll have Donald Trump. If that came about on his watch. I’m not taking that vaccine. Do you know how many black people were harmed by that? Maybe they needed that vaccine because they had diabetes or one of the many preexisting conditions that afflict people of color. More on.

Guy Benson: She was casting doubt on it because it was because it was tons of Donald Trump.

Harris Faulkner: Yeah. Operation Warp speed and and I point to things like that because. Are you trying to help America? Are you trying to hurt America?

Guy Benson: Well, it seems like that’s one of the questions that Charlamagne tha God is now wrestling with for this team that he swung his support behind a few years ago. He’s not doing it this time. Quote I’ve learned my lesson from doing that, he said. Harris, we got to leave it there. Really great conversation. Wonderful to see you and to meet your daughter.

Harris Faulkner: Oh, yes. Do you want to say anything?

Danica: Happy New Year. Happy New Year.

Guy Benson: Awesome. So nice to meet you, Danica. Thank you, Don. And I’ll see you on the couch on Monday.

Harris Faulkner: All right. Sounds good. Happy New Year.