chris ruffo got what he asked for.rt campaign agenda pulled up enough concerted pressure against nicole hannah jones, the cofounder of the 16 19 project, at the university of north carolina denied her tenure. jones had a pulitzer prize of mcarthur genius grant and support from the schools chancellor and faculty, but conservative pressure worked. ruffault then set his sights on florida. he hoped for that governor ron desantis craft legislation on the stop woke act that restricted discussions of race and gender in schools, universities and workplaces. early last year, desantis pointed to ruffle as one of the members of the board of trustees for florida's public university new college. they're, again, ruffault publicized his goal early and loudly. he tweeted, quote, we will be shutting down low performing, ideologically captured academic departments at hiring new faculty. this student body will be composed overtime. some current suitors will sell out. some old graduate. we'll recruit new students, for a mission aligned. a

you collaborated with chris ruffo to look into the writings and alleged plagiarism.? >> basically we found a pattern, a pattern that crossed 20 years of her work, affected almost half of her academic output in her career, and eventually came together as 50 different instances of plagiarism and a list that seems to be growing today. >> john: in this "new york times" opinion piece she acknowledges she did not give proper citation and attribution to the works of other scholars, but says never did i try to claim the work as my own, never did i misrepresent it. but is there a difference between stealing somebody else's idea and quoting somebody else without giving proper attribution, when you were operating particularly at this level? >> well, according to harvard's own policies, what they apply in the classroom to their students, what she did constitutes plagiarism, and she can go through all the orwellian things and say it's borrowing other language, but it's the p word, plagiarism. >> john: academic alleges 40 separate incidents in plagiarism in 11 public works and dis

people like chris ruffo, people like elise stefanik, immediately after a claudine gay's resignation,umpeting that victory on twitter. at least a fonda converted it immediately into a fundraising call, and both of them then went on to say that this was the beginning of an assault on the, quote, wokeness of higher education. this was never about claudine gay. it was never about her scholarship record. it was never about plagiarism. and i think it is telling that there is no serious discussion of what exactly the plagiarism allegations and tales, and how they should actually bear on the university presidents continue tender. it was a pretext tooth and move straight to bad faith smear campaign against harvard's first black woman president, and the criticisms were targeted towards her identity, as well. >> god bless you, tommy barone. january is my senior year in college, i was thinking about where i was going on spring frank. you are -- we are in good hands with men like you in the future. tommy barone, thank you for being here. when we come back, it is an excuse you do not hear often. m