Wokeism is Doomed

[grarpamp]

https://pennforward.com/

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
@Ayaan
11h
I urge you to read both long posts by @BillAckman. Were it not for
Elon Musk taking over Twitter all this rot in education would have
gone on turning the USA to a Third World country. It is also true that
the DEI folks will stop at nothing to cling to the institutions they
have captured. What they are doing to @elonmusk and @BillAckman now is
what they do behind closed doors in class rooms, board rooms, on
campuses, in medical rooms to vulnerable students and professionals
who speak up. They threaten to ruin people by amplifying their
mistakes, pile up on them and cancel them. This is changing now. Let’s
have a full audit!!!! Bravo @BillAckman and @elonmusk. But remember we
are only at the beginning of this fight.


Lex Fridman
@lexfridman
12h
I had the honor of talking to @NeriOxman a few months ago. She is one
of the most brilliant, innovative, and kind-hearted people I've ever
gotten to know. What Business Insider is doing is a disgrace to
journalism, and harms humanity... we should celebrate amazing
scientists, engineers, and innovators like Neri. I'm posting our
conversation here on X so you can hear for yourself. See other
platforms for when it was originally posted. Timestamps: 0:00 -
Introduction 1:49 - Biomass vs anthropomass 16:10 - Computational
templates 36:25 - Biological hero organisms 47:25 - Engineering with
bacteria 55:42 - Plant communication 1:09:05 - Albert Einstein letter
1:12:27 - Beauty 1:17:23 - Faith 1:27:09 - Flaws 1:46:58 - Extinction
1:58:05 - Alien life 2:01:55 - Music 2:03:22 - Movies 2:07:54 - Advice
for young people

@krassenstein
6h
I stand with @NeriOxman as well. I’ve followed her work for nearly a
decade. I founded 3DPrint.com 10 years ago and she was one of the most
creative and intelligent people I have ever Covered within the space,
PERIOD! Attacking her as “payback” for @BillAckman ’s comments on
President Gay is quite low in my opinion .

@BillAckman
Jan 3
In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back
and provide perspective on what this is really all about. I first
became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations,
early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any
military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a
globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely
responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts. How could this be?
I wondered. When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the
massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’
statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as
pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter,
antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s
own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of
Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive,
intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli
students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a
simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset
of students. A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with
my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met
with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in
small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge. I
ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the
problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary
in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting
student life and learning on campus. I came to learn that the root
cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been
promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided
the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate
anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment. Then I did
more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and
the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement
that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at
large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was
not what I had naively thought these words meant. I have always
believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful
organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form:
diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion,
experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s
upbringing, and more. What I learned, however, was that DEI was not
about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political
advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed
oppressed under DEI’s own methodology. Under DEI, 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. Under this ideology which is
the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi
and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such
thing as being “not racist.” Under DEI’s ideology, any policy,
program, educational system, economic system, grading system,
admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on
geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to
unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed
racist. As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced
Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are
racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or
organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that
are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in
the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.
In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to
reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has
permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and
federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to
transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an
anti-racist one. After the death of George Floyd, the already
burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its
problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little
pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question
which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely
impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being
called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and
its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in
this new climate of fear. The techniques that DEI has used to squelch
the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades
past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find
yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will
otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk. The DEI
movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer
permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech.
“Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are
necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that
are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus
speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned,
and cancelled. These speech codes have led to self-censorship by
students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared.
There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for
DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and
other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed
to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities
assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression. When
one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long
to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic
American values. Our country since its founding has been about
creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for
all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to
come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction
leveled by an equality of outcome society. The E for “equity” in DEI
is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. 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).
Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many
not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism.
While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in
many universities around the country. You can say things about white
people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you
switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be
costly and severe. To state what should otherwise be self-evident,
whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether
the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a
majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or
darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is
against groups with darker skin colors. Martin Luther King’s most
famous words are instructive: “I have a dream that my four little
children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged
by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But
here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use
skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal
by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens
nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be
illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the
content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to
the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in
its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the
so-called oppressed. And DEI’s definition of oppressed is
fundamentally flawed. I have always believed that the most fortunate
should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be
designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so
that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer
quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all. America
is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades
toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to
do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an
equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately
impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times. Having a darker
skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman
doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While
slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact
which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t
therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment
of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the
fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day
Italians colonialists. An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of
oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual
identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to
more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by
virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will
generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct
their anger at the favored groups. The country has seen burgeoning
resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the
DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness.
Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is
the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that
contributes to this resentment. I was accused of being a racist from
the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on @X that I had
learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates
that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President
Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had
heard that the search process by its design excluded a large
percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My
statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth
about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring. When former
President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was
instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every
minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in
important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important
moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am
inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring
at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and
iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the
black community. I have spent the majority of my life advocating on
behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities
including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of
philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic
development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction,
healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more. I
have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for
example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the
substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and
Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine,
Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally
to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings,
have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock
or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting
fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping
minority communities. In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into
the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real
value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most
successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion
deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small
banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and
substantive value and for selling their share of the stock. Compare
this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do
effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that
opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The
traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates
resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get
a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative
action. While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller
banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will
hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their
competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see
the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a
large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored
smaller banks. I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a
helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan
by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to
those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in
particular, for someone as fortunate as I am. All of the above said,
it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and
resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a
candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not
qualified to serve in that role. This appears to have been the case
with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the
leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any
questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly
after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was
Dean of the faculty. The result was a disaster for Harvard and for
Claudine Gay. The Harvard board should not have run a search process
which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved
candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men
and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its
president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay? One can
only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s
leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity,
Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into
the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The
search was also done at a time when many other top universities had
similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents,
reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the
increased competition for talent. Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a
side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their
searches to include capable business people for the role of president,
as a university president requires more business skills than can be
gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its
hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a
Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and
academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make
sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of
academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management. The
president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50
billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital
allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction,
and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career
academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of
candidates to include top business executives would also create more
opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university
president. Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been
mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is
out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration
has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be
because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the
last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that
low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the
substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other
high-risk assets. The price of the product, a Harvard education, has
risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it
has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four
years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the
only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and
poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than
by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work
in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances,
particularly if you also attend graduate school. The best companies in
the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a
de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of
students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other
successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers
it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue
growth has come from raising prices? In summary, there is a lot more
work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That
said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically
important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that
decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their
recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other
problems which I have identified above. The Corporation board led by
Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due
diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership
roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social
Studies department. The Board failed to create a discrimination-free
environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous
reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities,
Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss
of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for
all students. And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s
research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it
threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a
story raising these issues. It was only after getting the story
cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form
investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of
the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly
acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism
as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative
language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity
that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and
credibility. The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist
experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work
failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even
greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for
academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to
identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks
thereafter. According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought
to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her
in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection
policies. Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its
full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until
eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a
grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the
Board. In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the
full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group
nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board
nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote
mechanism to replace them. So what should happen? The Corporation
Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual
governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats. The
Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other
members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay,
orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process
for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the
damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should
be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to
the board. The Board should not be principally comprised of
individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new
board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the
assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the
Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the
most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically
diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable
people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much
more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever
have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure. The ODEIB should
be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has
already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on
its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office
operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions
of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist
ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s
legitimacy. Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when
an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing
something fundamentally wrong or indefensible? Harvard must once again
become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or
against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where
diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can
learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty
and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences. Harvard
must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and
free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture
are forever banished from campus. Harvard should become an environment
where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing
their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this
creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership
and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a
massive administrative bureaucracy. These are the minimum changes
necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done. A number
of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new
constitution which can be found at pennforward.com, which has been
signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other
universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new
constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next
president. A condition of employment of the new Harvard president
should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly
abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that
effect. Today was an important step forward for the University. It is
time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that
graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral
standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together,
advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that
will help save us from ourselves. We have a lot more work to do. Let’s
get at it.


Neri Oxman
@NeriOxman
12h
I am Jane Doe. John Doe is my husband.
Bill Ackman
@BillAckman
12h
Imagine that you were formerly a professor at a university, and you
are an entrepreneur now. One day, a company that you have no
affiliation with (other than its CEO is your husband) gets an email
from a reporter from Business Insider which says that they have found
five examples of plagiarism in your 2010 dissertation. The
communication person brings this to your attention and lets you know
that you are being given to 12 pm to respond. You are concerned about
these allegations because even being accused of plagiarism can destroy
your career and life which depend entirely on intellectual property
and your reputation. In the university context, plagiarism allegations
are adjudicated by administrative boards in a process that takes
months. Here, a business publication has determined that you are a
plagiarist, and has given you only a few hours to respond before they
tell the entire world that you are plagiarist. So you have no choice
to respond as quickly as you can with whatever documents you can get
your hands on. After a few hours of review, you determine that it
appears that in four paragraphs of your 330-page dissertation, you
cited the author and the source correctly, but you omitted eight
quotation marks. In the other instance, it appears that you
paraphrased the author correctly, but you failed to cite him. You
featured the author in multiple other places in your dissertation and
you cited him the eight other times, but somehow you missed this one.
Business Insider then runs the story with the headline: John Doe's
Celebrity Academic Wife Jane Doe's Dissertation is Marred by
Plagiarism You immediately respond to the story with a post on X in
which you acknowledge the missing quotation marks for the four
paragraphs, and the missing attribution for the sentence, and you
apologize for your mistake. Business Insider immediately runs another
story entitled: Jane Doe Admits to Plagiarizing in her Doctoral
Dissertation after Business Insider Report This immediately becomes
global news because your husband is a high-profile person and you are
one of the most acclaimed designers in the world with recent
retrospectives at MoMA, and SFMoMA. The next day, at 5:19pm on Friday
night, the same reporter sends an email to your husband's
communication person, which says that Business Insider has identified
28 additional plagiarism allegations identified from "a thorough
review of [your] published work." The email is 12 pages long and has
6,961 words. The first 15 examples identified as plagiarism are all
from Wikipedia entries for definitions of words and terms that you
used in your dissertation, which include weaving, computer graphics,
optimization, heat flux, sustainable design, computer-aided design,
and other similar terms. You are not even sure whether or not this is
plagiarism. You honestly don't know as you have never seen Wikipedia
cited as a source. The other examples that are deemed plagiarism and
included in the remaining 13 examples by Business Insider include
multiple excerpts of text from software manuals for Rhino 3-D modeling
software, from hardware manufacture websites including Stratasys in
the description of their 3-D printer used in their website,, which
prints some of your designs, from patent applications where the linked
reference is unrelated to your dissertation, and may in fact be a
reference to your own patent, but you have no time to check. There is
no time to run down these references, let alone read the 6,961 word
email. Many of the manuals are no longer available and a substantial
number of the references the reporter has given you do not appear to
be correct. In fact, until this moment when you are writing this post,
you never had a chance to read the email in its entirety. At 6:51pm,
one hour and 32 minutes from the time stamp on the reporter's email,
Business Insider publishes a story entitled: Academic Celebrity Jane
Doe plagiarized from WikiPedia, Scholars, a Textbook, and Other
Sources Without any Attribution This becomes the number one story in
the world with global headlines effectively all of which say: Bill
Ackman's Wife Jane Doe Admits to Plagiarism No one reads any further
than the headline. Who reads articles these days anyway? It is now the
number one trending item on X with 35,600 posts versus number two
which is the Princess of Wales with 3,174 posts. Does this seem like
fair journalism to you? Does this seem like a fair way to determine
whether a professor plagiarized in her dissertation 15 years ago? Does
this seem like a fair way to destroy the reputation of one of the most
talented and famous designer/scientists in the world, even if she is
married to billionaire?

Konstantin Kisin
@KonstantinKisin
19h
One of the biggest benefits of @BillAckman's successful campaign to
dismantle discriminatory practices and outright ideological corruption
at elite colleges is it proves something that many of us have been
saying for a long time: all it takes is for a few people with power,
money and influence to start standing up to this crap and it'll all be
over. @elonmusk buying Twitter is the same. More people in positions
to make an impact need to realise there are easy wins to be had. Let's
make 2024 the year when we break the back of wokeness so we can focus
our efforts and thoughts on improving society instead of just fighting
off people who are intent on destroying it.



Bill Ackman
@BillAckman
18h
It has been the case since as far as I can remember in business and in
media that family was off limits, unless of course the family is
directly involved in the business. The code of the road was that you
can attack the protagonist as much as you want, but not his wife and
not his kids. The same is true in business dealings. You never go
after someone’s family to get at a business person. This is a sacred
code that I have never seen violated. Business Insider broke this
sacred code on Thursday and again on Friday when they went after my
wife, @NeriOxman. And they are working on another story about her.
They are calling her former students as we speak. Inspired by the code
being broken, a journalist from Bloomberg reached out to my kids on
their cell phones this weekend for a story she is working on. The
reporter’s name is Kathy Burton. I had respected her until now. Do we
want to live in a world where journalists go after your life partner
and your kids? In that world, one would respond to an attack on one’s
wife and family by going after the owner of the media company and his
wife and family. Ask yourself, who would want to advertise on a media
property where they go after people’s families? No one. Because
eventually they will go after your family. The Editor of the
Investigative group of Business Insider who is leading the attack on
my wife is John Cook. He is a known anti-Zionist. My wife is Israeli.
That might explain why he was willing to lead this attack and others
turned down the source when they were looking for a media outlet. How
would John feel if someone went after his life partner and kids? How
would Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall feel if it was their wives and kids
rather than mine? How would Henry Kravis and George Roberts react to
this experience? How would Mike Bloomberg? We need to decide what kind
of world we want to live in. I want to know the answer to that
question today because it is a really important question, and it
affects society at large and our future.

@gummibear737
Jan 7
The hit job on @BillAckman suddenly makes sense @johnjcook, Gawker ’s
former editor, is the exec editor at Insider Beyond his role in the
disasterous Hulk Hogan scandal/lawsuit, he’s also long been considered
an anti-zionist Some people never learn…