Harvard’s Joan Donovan Demonstrates Extreme Gaslighting

Undergraduate tuition and fees at taxpayer-subsidized Harvard comes to well over $50,000. For the money, students receive instruction from the likes of Joan Donovan, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy. Among her qualifications to teach graduate level classes, we know from her profile picture that Joan Donovan is cool person, because she poses wearing a leather jacket. Those who can’t come up with the money or who can’t get accepted to Harvard due to race quotas can receive education from Donovan for free by reading an essay she published at MIT Technology Review. It begins like this:

When Kyle Rittenhouse shot and murdered protesters in Kenosha…

Stop right there. We saw the video. It is highly unlikely that Rittenhouse murdered anyone. He fired on rioters from whom he had tried to escape. To call him a murderer and his sociopathic assailants “protesters” grotesquely distorts what happened.

From there the piece plunges headlong into a sophomoric alternate reality.

George Floyd was murdered, according to Donovan’s overwrought and irresponsible rhetoric. In reality, he probably died of a fentanyl overdose. The implication that he was deliberately killed by police in front of any number of witnesses is absurd.

The shooting of Michael Brown, which even Eric Holder’s ultra-left Justice Department had to admit was justifiable self-defense, is likewise characterized as “merciless and vicious” behavior by the police.

The violence Black Lives Matter and Antifa hooligans have inflicted throughout the country is astoundingly blamed on those who tell the public about it, thereby encouraging “white vigilantes [to] feel justified in menacing and physically attacking racial justice protesters.”

She castigates Fox News and One America for reporting on the Black Lives Matter violence, surreally accusing them of “flipping the script to suggest that Black protesters—demonstrating because they fear police violence—are themselves a threat to white people.” The capitalization of “Black” versus “white” is repeated throughout, to underscore who deserves respect and who does not.

We are asked to believe that the leftist rioters who have caused $2 billion in property damage, who have destroyed countless businesses, and have killed dozens of people are the victims.

The villains of the story are people like Andy Ngo, who risks his life to bring back video of what the liberal establishment media would prefer we didn’t see. Antifa brownshirts have attempted to silence Ngo with physical attacks, even causing a brain injury. Donavan denounces Ngo’s courageous journalism as “riot porn.”

Then she denounces Mark and Patricia McCloskey for taking a “bizarre stand” by not passively allowing a violent mob to burn their house down and for being “the product of riot porn.”

The entire piece consists of malevolent and obvious lies, like the gaslighting on CNN but targeted at an even more gullible audience. For example,

Several cities and towns have become treacherous terrain, where militias, MAGA groups, and conspiracists are carrying out their civil war fantasies by attacking Black Lives Matter protesters as police look on. The optics are reminiscent of the Freedom Rides in the 1960s, when police turned away as local white vigilantes attacked civil rights advocates.

That’s what Harvard charges the big bucks for. It trains students to believe lies so outlandish and repugnant that no normal person could swallow them. Choking down these lies is the price of admission to the liberal elite.

On a tip from Varla. Hat tip: Campus Reform.

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