Never wrestle with a Pig.

Trolling Harvard and asymmetrical warfare.

Let’s take a moment and revisit Bandolini’s Law.

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states the following:

• The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

Or, better yet, one can always rely on George Bernard Shaw to get to the point.¹

Never wrestle with a pig. You’ll both end up covered in shit, and the pig likes it.

Remember: the pig likes it.

If you’re a pig, your priorities are getting everyone else as muddy as possible — and to the point where clearing away the mud to see what’s really going on becomes just too much trouble.

Which brings us to those charges of plagiarism Christopher Rufo leveled against the now-former president of Harvard.

As we’ve been saying, it’s critically important that new and distracting bits of fodder be tossed into the air to distract the herd from what’s really going on, and to keep it’s fear sensors ratcheted into the red-zone. This makes them more compliant.

The past few weeks, as the panic stimuli of Hunter Biden and even the disaster in Gaza have worn off, the Maga Herd cattle-drivers have been busy.

Switching animal metaphors here for a minute, like rabid racoons digging through the dumpster fire of resentments, the Red-Hat-Cult leaders have found another bit of faux-indignation to feed their stampede. Honestly, it must’ve felt like Christmas for them: a woman, an African American, and someone at an Elite University. That’s the trifecta for Red-Hat-Cult neo-plutocrat leadership.

For them it was proof and confirmation to feed their deepest set of resentments: a black (!!) woman (!!!) who got their job on the basis of race and gender (!!!!) and, best of all, was handed this job by the Greatest Enemy of All, an elite university (!!!!!).

Whew. It’s a wonder they didn’t pass out from the excitement.

— except, of course: 1) that’s not how she got her job and 2) the plagiarism, while something to take a closer look at, might’ve been utterly inadvertent and, as it turns out has nothing to do with the fulmination of faux-indignation blown up and paraded like overfilled Macy’s Day Balloons on Fox News.

Now, did she screw up in her answers in front of Congress? Oh yeah… she forgot who the audience was and the reason she was called in. She probably assumed they wanted a subtle and well formulated, intellectually sound answer. They didn’t. They had no interest in her answer. She wasn’t there to address the question of anti-Semitism on campus. She was there to be publicly beheaded — and she was.

Here’s the thing: I haven’t seen anything explaining how the plagiarisms were detected or discovered. Presumably someone ran them through available plagiarism checkers (yep, they exist). But that doesn’t matter. What matters for our purposes as Chroniclers of the Herd, is that someone somewhere took the time, on a hunch and a hope, to pour through the now-former President’s scholarship looking for plagiarism. That is a lot of work and, frankly, exactly the sort of thing her publishers were responsible for — and failed to do.

But the Red-Hat-Cult leaders aren’t interested in plagiarism — they couldn’t care less about that. They were looking for an excuse to drag the conversation, and anyone taking part, into the mud and mire.

When you sling mud it’s the mud that matters, not the justification — and when you’re a pig, any excuse to drag someone into the muck where you can slather them with shit will do.

And here we are.

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1. Okay, so we don’t know for sure that Shaw said it. :^) The phrase has, famously, been attributed to Mark Twain (sounds like him too) and Abe Lincoln. For more fun, have a look here.