The Death of Accountability

The media has long lamented collapsing public confidence in important American institutions, blaming it on everything from “misinformation” to COVID-19. But a more compelling argument explaining this phenomenon is that the predominantly left-wing individuals who run these institutions have avoided any accountability for a string of failures and egregious abuses of power.

For recent evidence of this, look no further than the fact that Claudine Gay is still the President of Harvard.

Earlier this month during a House Education Committee hearing on antisemitism on college campuses, Gay testified that the question of whether calls for genocide against Jews violate Harvard’s rules against bullying and harassment “depends on the context.” Then, just a few days later, reports surfaced alleging past instances of plagiarism in Gay’s published academic work. The number of apparently plagiarized passages in her work is now more than 40.

Despite these multiple scandals and the loss of a number of major donors, Harvard’s board has stood by Gay and even defended her actions. Harvard Corporation, the university’s highest governing body, issued a statement on December 12 affirming “our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”

Gay, it should be noted, is an avowed leftist who has promised to include “anti-racist action and the infusion of inclusive practices into all aspects of our teaching and research mission.” As Kaylee McGhee White argued in an opinion piece for The Washington Examiner, Gay is “unfirable” because terminating her would mean holding accountable the people who hired Gay on the basis of her commitment to leftist dogma rather than academic prowess.

Harvard’s leadership declining to punish Gay for failing to condemn calls for genocide against Jews and engaging in rampant academic dishonesty also likely won’t do much to change the fact that just 36 percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the country’s higher education system.

The failure to hold academia accountable mirrors the death of accountability in the media and government in recent years.

The most glaring example is “Russiagate” and the fact that no one has yet been held accountable for spying on Trump’s campaign or deceiving the public to manufacture a false narrative that Trump was a Russian operative.

In fact, two of the chief Russiagate propagators, FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, have been richly rewarded for their dishonesty.

As Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth extensively detailed in a report for The Columbia Journalism Review, the media has also utterly failed to account for its role in propping up the Russiagate hoax. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post received a Pulitzer Prize for reporting Russiagate as verified fact, and have yet to return the awards or apologize for knowingly misleading the American public.

Is it any surprise, then, that just 37 percent of Americans (and 17 percent of Republicans) have a positive view of the FBI, while confidence in the media has reached a record low of 32 percent?

Confidence in the country’s public health institutions has also collapsed following a series of failures during the COVID-19 pandemic for which no one has been held accountable. Dr. Fauci has still not faced any consequences for discrediting the COVID-19 lab leak theory and potentially lying to Congress about the National Institutes of Health’s role in funding the Wuhan lab from which the COVID-19 virus may have escaped.

Meanwhile, avoiding accountability has been the calling card of Joe Biden and his administration from day one.

When inflation began soaring soon after Biden took office and Democrats passed trillions of dollars in spending, the White House variously blamed Donald Trump, congressional Republicans, COVID-19, “corporate greed,” and the Russia-Ukraine war. When gas prices soared to record highs last year after Biden slashed domestic oil production, the president likewise dismissed his role in the crisis, saying, “Can’t do much right now. Russia’s responsible.”

Biden also infamously failed to take accountability for the botched evacuation from Afghanistan, calling the operation that led to 13 American deaths and the fall of the country to the Taliban an “extraordinary success.” (Relatedly, no one in military leadership was fired for the disaster, likely part of the reason public confidence in the military has now dropped to its lowest point this century and every branch is experiencing a severe recruiting shortfall.)

Biden has also faced no real repercussions for mishandling classified documents long before he was ever president (possibly dating back to his time as a senator), weaponizing the FBI against parents, pro-life activists, and his political enemies, apparently using the presidency to help his son avoid criminal charges, or engaging in a blatant influence-peddling scheme to enrich himself and his family.

Biden’s top lieutenants, taking after their boss, have shirked accountability for their own failures. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is still in his post despite bungling his response to a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that poisoned an entire community, along with at least four other transportation-related disasters that have occurred under his watch.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has similarly escaped accountability for actively fueling the ongoing border crisis – despite insulting the public’s intelligence by giving himself an “A for effort” on dealing with it back in 2021.

Unsurprisingly, Biden appears to be in a terminal polling decline, with his approval rating hovering around 40 percent in the RealClearPolitics average and dipping into the 30s in some polls. Americans are increasingly unwilling to put their trust in a leader who refuses to take responsibility for his decisions and continues to double down on failed policies.

In the case of Joe Biden and his Democrat enablers, Americans will have the chance to pass judgement on them at the ballot box. But for the other institutions suffering from a public confidence crisis, Americans continue to wait for answers and accountability – a prospect which, at the moment, seems unlikely before January 2025.

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @ShaneHarris513.