No evening of post-Claudine Gay resignation hot takery would be complete without MSNBC’s Joy Reid weighing in. And weigh in she did- by claiming, without evidence, that Gay was “taken out” in order to make room for the guys “who used to have” the presidencies of elite universities in the 50s.

Watch as Reid concocts a theory behind Gay’s resignation that requires neither the words “antisemitism” nor “plagiarism”:

JOY REID: I do just want to pivot to another thing. Because there’s another thing happening, Jelani. There- there is this sort of open war on Black progress, Black history. Um- Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, at least up until she resigned, is now the latest casualty of that. Christopher Rufo, who is out there touting and, you know, high fiving and claiming the scalp of Claudine Gay, telegraphed that this was what they were going to do. They were going to associate these DEI professors of colleges with BLM and decolonization and Hamas in the public mind and get rid of them. He’s now claiming victory. He telegraphed that this was the campaign. Why are these elite colleges capitulating to it and essentially making it so uncomfortable for these women leaders that they have to step down to be replaced by white men? Because that is the goal of Christopher Rufo and his gang.

** Eek. Standard Joy Reid. She finds racism and victimhood in everything. It’s so tiresome. Reid could survive the antisemitism but not the plagiarism. – Karen