Chapter Twelve #2
The essay was a racist, antisemitic, and kind of sexist right-wing diatribe fashioned as serious intellectual thought.
I knew that Harvard employed some professors with sketchy beliefs, so I needed to push Laura’s viewpoints a step further than what they still considered acceptable, far enough to justify a rescinding of her offer.
At the same time, I couldn’t push them so far that people wouldn’t believe Laura had written these, or have them think they were meant to be satire.
Of course, it wasn’t hard to think of ideas.
I just repeated the standard arguments from the academic papers and essays written by these ultra-right- wing thinkers, except elucidating their shitty beliefs by stating them bluntly rather than through dog whistles.
In other words, saying the quiet part out loud.
The first blog post was titled “The Attack on Judeo-Christian Values at Columbia University.” The post started out innocently enough, tracing the origins of the term “Judeo-Christian” and detailing the commonalities in the moral teachings between Judaism and Christianity, praising how these values contributed to the Enlightenment, the rise of “rational” thinking, and the subsequent military and economic success of the “West.” Then, the post took on a more sinister note.
“Laura” argued that the people who subscribed to postmodern ideas like multiculturalism, gender equity, and moral relativism were destroying the principles that made America exceptional, and that these very people were taking over college campuses, especially Columbia, which had always been a haven for left-wing activists but was now turning into a truly degenerate force that could undo democracy and capitalism and turn all of Gen Z into America-hating, gender-nonconforming, communist, Marxist idiots.
Of course, nothing I had written so far was sufficient for my end goal; sure, if this got out, Laura would be treated as a pariah on campus, but Harvard probably still wouldn’t do anything out of a commitment to free speech or whatever.
The second half of the essay was where I really took it up a notch.
The blog post argued that in order to reverse the brainwashing of these young, impressionable minds, Columbia should stop accepting students of color, with the exception of those who could prove their allegiance to Western civilization and thought.
Columbia should also only accept naturalized citizens of the United States, as even a white student hailing from a more left-leaning country like the Nordics could infect the campus with ideals that may decay the Judeo-Christian foundation on which the school and country had been founded.
Of course, all of these arguments were bullshit, but I edited the content of the post many times to ensure it struck the right balance between extremism and believability.
Now I just needed to also ensure that the readers, students infuriated by the contents of the piece, would successfully trace it back to Laura.
I dropped in clues like “This semester, I’m taking a class called…
” using what I knew about her course schedule, which I determined by cross-referencing her whereabouts with the course catalog.
I wrote, as the author, that I hailed from a wealthy suburb of New York City and lived in the East Campus dorm.
Also, I dropped in facts that only a Columbia student would know so no one would think the author was only a troll pretending to be a student.
In the next two blog posts, I would drop in more details about the author.
It would appear that the author was starting to get more careless, revealing personal information that would lead to her downfall.
When caught, Laura would say that she couldn’t have authored the post; she had been a staunch liberal all her life.
But that was also easy to work around. I simply included a paragraph about how the author was secretly a conservative, but always posted in support of liberal causes on social media so that she would fit in with her friends and peers.
But before I could upload the second and third blog posts, a security guard was tapping on my shoulder.
“Library closing. Sorry. You have to leave,” he said.
“But this library is open twenty-four hours.”
“There is always an area open at each hour of the day. That doesn’t mean every area is open every hour of the day. This area closes at eleven.”
“Can you just give me five more minutes?”
He pursed his lips and looked at his watch. “No, sorry. My shift ends in thirty and I need to wipe down these tables before then.”
I sighed. I only had time to post the first blog post, not the second or third.
The second was going to be an “exposé” about anti-white racism in prominent student groups like the Columbia Democrats and the Columbia Daily Spectator.
The third was going to be an essay about why Columbia should no longer force students to take Global Core classes to graduate and instead only require that they learn about the history of Western thought, which had been the case for most of the university’s history.
It was fine; I would just come back. I would need to start over: find another person to let me use their log-in for one of the public computers.
But if that’s what it would take, I was willing to do it.