Big Pharma Besieges the Ivory Tower

1,827 words

A recent article from Business Insider, “Pfizer CEO slams Harvard, MIT, and UPenn’s presidents: ‘One of the most despicable moments in the history of US academia,’” has a doozy for a cover photo. On the left is Albert Bourla, CEO of the most wonderful corporation in the world, which of course is Pfizer. He looks like a Space Lizard with an almost passable human disguise. Woe betide any fly that gets too close to that mouth; would his tongue flick out and make a tasty snack out of the hapless insect?

On the right is Claudine Gay, who was fairly recently elevated to Harvard’s presidency because she’s black. I’m unsure of her position on the long-standing women’s suffrage question, but at least to me, the photo just screams “empowered feminist.” (Come to think of it, she could resemble a DC Comics supervillain, too.) Those specs of hers — oh, my! There’s just something about them. At least she can use the lenses to start a fire if she happens to get lost in the woods on a sunny day. Hopefully recent Ivy League presidents also can figure out how to tend a campfire, and not burn down the forest while they’re at it.

Harvard’s new president

Since becoming Harvard’s latest president, Claudine Gay has busied herself attempting to eradicate traces of white influence on campus, such as removing portraits and renaming buildings for being too white. (Just who does she think built the place and administered it long before her Haitian ancestors floated their way to Sugar Daddy Land?) Other than that, her administration promoted cultural Marxism, including the following:

Harvard’s DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] administrators encourage students to internalize the basic narrative of critical race theory: America is a nation defined by “systemic racism,” “police brutality,” “white supremacist violence,” and the “weaponization of whiteness.” In another resource, students were invited to “unpack” their “white privilege” and “male privilege,” and to consider their “white fragility,” which stems from “the privilege that accrues to white people living in a society that protects and insulates them from race-based stress.”

That’s about what can be expected of someone promoted to lead America’s most prestigious university whose major qualification for the job is being black.

Anyway, it’s certainly a plum position, and a step up from her gig since 2007 as Professor of African American Studies at Harvard. Apparently her net worth is a cool $11 million. According to the same source, Haavahd paid her a $970,000 salary in 2023. Sweet! Her picture on that page has a different style, showing her with standard-issue problem glasses more traditionally favored by Leftists. The document also says her zodiac sign is Leo, she likes spicy chicken tacos, and her favorite historical figure is Joseph Stalin. Well, bless her heart!

What’s the story with Albert Bourla?

“Everyone ready for another booster?”

Albert Bourla started as a veterinarian, and from these humble beginnings managed to climb the corporate ladder at Pfizer. Again, that’s the most wonderful corporation in the world. (Hey, must be nice! After faithfully serving corporate Amurrica since I turned 18, and reaching an elite level in a technical field, I haven’t received a single promotion yet. Had I foreseen that, I would’ve dropped out of high school and become a strip club bouncer.) According to the company’s Securities and Exchange Commission filing for 2020, Bourla pulled in a sweet $21,141,800 smackeroos, including salary and bonuses. Now that’s a lot of lettuce!

Other than that, his Face the Nation interview last year, in which he seemed pretty eager to get Pfizer’s new flagship product injected into kids, really warms my heart. Speaking of the same, at least my heart still works, which is more than can be said for quite a number of people. For that reason, I consider Claudine Gay, Harvard’s high priestess of diversity, to be the more endearing of the two.

What’s this Big Pharma chief’s gripe with the presidents of Harvard, University of Pensylvania, and MIT? Perhaps his background might have something to do with it. From his online bio:

After he was awarded the Genesis Prize by Israeli President Isaac Herzog for his leadership in delivering the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, he directed the $1 million prize to Holocaust education and the Holocaust Museum of Greece to be built in Thessaloniki. Bourla also earned a 2022 Double Helix Medal ‘for spearheading the rapid development of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine’.

He has made political contributions to both Republicans and Democrats, in particular to those who oppose controls on prescription drug prices in the United States.

Golly, I never would’ve guessed! You were surprised too, right? Well, weren’t you? Huh?

The bee in Bourla’s britches

The big brouhaha concerns the pro-Palestine demonstrations held on college campuses following the recent flare-up of the Intifada in Gaza. The Business Insider article documents much lachrymose bluster, including the following:

Bourla, who is of Jewish descent, was disappointed by the presidents’ refusal to condemn hate speech despite being “offered numerous opportunities.”

“The memories of my father’s parents, Abraham and Rachel Bourla, his brother David and his little sister Graciela, who all died in Auschwitz, came to mind,” Bourla wrote in his X post, which included a photograph of his late aunt Graciela.

“I was wondering if their deaths would have provided enough ‘context’ to these presidents to condemn the Nazis’ antisemitic propaganda,” Bourla continued.

If I had the ability to do so, I would most assuredly travel back in time, release his nice aunt and other innocent relations from Auschwitz, and hand over Henry Kissinger and some other deserving weasels to the SS in exchange.

Although the reductio ad hitlerum still can pack a wallop, the shtick is starting to wear out. Bringing up events from eight decades ago seems a bit antiquated in light of more recent events. Nice try, though. Moreover, most of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators on Ivy League campuses are more Leftist than Ho Chi Minh, and they got that way in no small part due to the ideological saturation they’re getting from pinko professors. These indoctrinated wokesters are therefore unlikely to have a gilt-edged, 90th anniversary edition of Mein Kampf on their bookshelves, or a Stahlhelm on their hat racks.

The results

The big tizzy about these collegiate jihadi fans is really that it’s a sign that the Israel boosters are losing control of The Narrative. It scares the living daylights out of them, as well it should. Simply put, the golems are becoming self-aware.

What was the aftermath of the controversy involving intemperate pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Harvard, MIT, and UPenn? As we discussed earlier:

Sally Kornbluth, who is Jewish, gets to stay at MIT. Claudine Gay, outed as an affirmative action stooge, still gets a pass for the same reason a moron such as Kamala Harris is the Vice President of the United States. Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, a white gentile, got the axe. QED.

Grand “Big Tent” coalitions can be effective; that’s been the political Left’s specialty for quite some time. Still, there are limitations to how far a united front can grow. If a coalition’s purpose evaporates, or its constituent groups develop significantly opposing interests, or things otherwise become unwieldy, then a realignment will occur. This collegiate kerfuffle portends what may well be the beginning of a landslide in the ethno-political landscape; specifically, the “Queen Bee” status of the Zionist bloc within the Leftist coalition is increasingly being challenged. (Ironically, that’s largely because of forces they set in motion.) Even so, at present, the results– which college presidents kept their jobs and which didn’t –demonstrates that the ethnic pecking order still remains undisturbed.

What’s left unsaid

Life imitates art with Noel Ignatiev as a “Ye Happy Merchant” lookalike.

When noisy campus demonstrators chant intemperate slogans about Israel, all the bigshots get worked up into a lather about it. That’s lèse majésté, after all. The media, politicians, and a gaggle of overpaid CEOs certainly were flipping and tripping about this one. It even resulted in a Congressional inquisition. Funny thing, though: The university system has been dumping bile on white people for decades, and nobody uttered a peep about it outside of the dissident Right and a few of the very edgiest conservatives.

A case in point is the arch-douchenozzle Noel Ignatiev, who taught at Harvard. Much like Howard Zinn, he was one of those Communist activists pretending to be historians. It gets a lot worse than that, though, since this pustule on Harvard was a pioneer of “Whiteness Studies.” Under academic imprimatur, he produced the journal Race Traitor. In an excerpt titled “Abolish the White Race,” hosted at no less a venue than Harvard Magazine, from his book When Race Becomes Real, he gloated:

The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.

He played clever word games based on the “race is only a social construct” shtick that is now popular in academia. He pretended that when he spoke of “abolishing whiteness,” it was about a social structure called “whiteness” which has nothing to do with actual white people. According to similar lines of argumentation, white people don’t even exist. The skintellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates riffs on that quite a bit, but he has no trouble believing that black people exist.

As it happens, they never speak of any other such social structure named after a specific race — wink wink, nudge nudge — which must be “abolished.” Nobody tells the Chinese that they’re afflicted with an oppressive social construct called “Asianism” that should be destroyed by flooding China with non-Asians and ultimately blending the Chinese out of existence. Furthermore, when the anti-white Left blames white people for everything wrong with the world, they drop the act and don’t have any confusion about who they mean. When minoritists demand more free goodies from us, they don’t pretend there’s no such thing as race.

Moreover, Ignatiev’s word games are hard to square with another bon mot from the same excerpt:

Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, “Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed — not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.”

And neurotic Space Lizards such as Ignatiev wonder why nobody likes them . . .

The race agitation was bad enough at my fairly prestigious but provincial alma mater during the 1980s. I’d shudder to imagine what sort of anti-white sewers “elite” Ivory Tower schools have become these days. It’s quite ironic that America’s top-tier universities are lately characterized by an ideological monoculture of dogmatic Leftist groupthink. It seems unlikely that they can coast on their reputations indefinitely; quality has slipped since the Ivy League’s glory days.