On 17 October 1931 Al Capone was found guilty of five counts of tax evasion. This was followed by an 11-year sentence in federal prison, a fine of $50,000 and an order to pay $215,000 in back taxes. He was given the honor of becoming one of the first prisoners at Alcatraz. It was the end of his violent career as the foremost mob leader in Chicago— the feds had finally gotten to him. They hadn’t been able to convict him of violating the Volstead Act, which had brought in Prohibition, even though years of bootlegging had been the foundation of his criminal enterprise, and they hadn’t been able to convict him of bribery, voter intimidation or murder, which he had used in the expansion and protection of his empire. The St. Valentine’s day Massacre, in which seven members of the competing the North Side gang were shot down in a garage, was among the more colorful of his exploits, though his political alliance with Big Bill Thompson, the mayor of Chicago, was perhaps as helpful to him.
A sitting duck with a chink in his armor?
Source: Wiki Commons
Capone was targeted for prosecution not for crimes known, as the lawyers call them, as malum in se— bad in themselves—but for tax evasion, a malum prohibitum crime— a purely statutory offense, not a crime that is an obvious offense to morals, as crimes of violence are. Still, it was helpful to get him behind bars (he played the banjo in the prison band!), but the tactic of putting a gangster in prison for tax evasion instead of for the crimes he’s most dreaded for might seem an admission of weakness, perhaps even faintly illegitimate. The government wanted Capone out of business because he was a dangerous gangster, not primarily because he was a tax criminal, but tax evasion was a chink in his armor.
Now, Claudine Gay has been much in the news lately. Accused of a remarkable number of instances of plagiarism in her meager publication history, she immediately became an object of suspicion— that she owed her position as president of Harvard University entirely to affirmative action—a suspicion that must have been simmering from the start of her presidency. Now, this little essay is not really about her qualifications or lack of them. What is interesting, I think, is that her downfall was brought about, like that of Al Capone, not by a direct attack against her on the ground that she was appointed because she is a black woman, or because she was a devotee and enforcer of DEI policies, but because she plagiarized. Her fall was the result of a sort of tangential attack on another weakness. That was true of the fall of Capone too. Once it was determined that the income derived from criminal activities is taxable (is this a surprise to you?), he had very little defense. He could hardly have declared the income without confessing to his criminal activities, so from the standpoint of tax evasion he was rather a sitting duck.
Gay was in much the same position. She seems to have been unqualified by the usual standards that universities claim to apply when filling their top positions and this led quite naturally to the suspicion that she was chosen to meet an entirely different set of qualifications, those of sex, race and a certain set of ideological positions. The problem is that such criteria cannot be made explicit; they must be masked by explicitly stated criteria that are quite different.
Thus, because Gay had published very little, and her output was riddled with unattributed passages lifted from others, there was really no defense that her supporters could mount on the basis of academic accomplishment or integrity. What was left to them were accusations of racial animus on the part of her opponents. Slurring critics this way is attractive because it has proven an extremely effective technique and, as might have been expected, Gay’s defenders did attack her critics as racists. Even so, Gay was moved to resign her position. Why did this technique fail?
The flaw is this: Harvard’s position was that she was qualified for the position by one set of standards, when it seems that she was judged by an entirely different set of standards. Attacks against her that were predicated on her failure to meet the explicit standards of scholarship and academic honesty could not be met by a defense based upon the ground that she met a completely different set of standards based on race, sex or ideology. As a practical matter, Harvard could not argue that she should retain her position because she met unstated criteria that offend notions of equal protection. The only way to base an argument for her defense premised on these other, unstated, assumptions was to do it obliquely through assertions that her opponents were racially motivated in their criticisms.
Now, it is clear that her opponents were unhappy with her political views, her defense of DEI and other Wokery, and her refusal to denounce antisemitic speech on campus. It seems unlikely that anyone would have bothered to comb through her writings to judge the quality of her scholarship in the absence of this last point. Some did look closely at her writings, though, and their findings were splashed all over the Internet, and the result is that she stepped down from her position under relentless scrutiny.
So, how does Al Capone come into this? It’s simple. Just as Capone made himself impervious to a frontal attack, that is, from prosecution for the crimes for which he was most well known, Gay seemed unassailable in her position as president of Harvard, but she—and Harvard—were vulnerable to a flank attack, an attack that avoided the central question of whether she was an affirmative action hire brought in to enforce Harvard’s current ideological orthodoxy. Both were vulnerable to attacks based on explicit standards of academic achievement and honesty, and that is where the attack came from.
So much for Al Capone. How about Saul Alinsky, the old radical whose handbook, Rules for Radicals, gives recipes for attacking political opponents? We see in the Gay case an application of Rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Because Harvard presents itself as a premier university, it had a dilemma to face— admit that it chose a president who failed to meet its own academic standards (a terrible embarrassment), or ignore those standards (another terrible embarrassment). The mockery that Harvard suffered while it dithered over what to do also brought into play Alinsky’s Rule 5: “Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then reacts to your advantage.” The flank attack on Harvard in the Gay case reveals itself as an effective tactic against institutions imposing affirmative action and Woke ideology, something that may not be lost on the Right now that they have seen it in action. The idea is to attack the problem indirectly where the Woke have no good defense and are open to ridicule: in other words, a combination Al Capone-Alinsky treatment.
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Excellent essay! Thank you for mentioning it on UnHerd. As an Audible subscriber, I will get Saul Alinsky's handbook, Rules for Radicals also.
PS:
My fight is against Australia's absurd crime reality.
It is as hopeless as it sounds.
Having exhausted all legal avenues to stop a stalker ex-coworker's crimes against me in Melbourne, Australia since 2009, fighting back is an alternative to the only solution to stop the stalker's crimes: suicide. I never even dated the stalker. The sole law-enforcement in Australia is police with neither duty of care/accountability, while having a monopoly on what is a crime. Police criminality is wide-spread, deep-rooted and accepted like weather phenomena in Australia.