Beginning on October 7, Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has a knack for making money, began to sit up and take notice of politics. It was he who first really alerted the X community to those presidents of prestigious colleges who testified before Congress that it depended on “context” whether calling for the mass murder of Jews violated their speech codes. And it was he who pressed for these dreadful women’s firing, including because of Claudine Gay’s plagiarism problem. In revenge, Business Insider (which may have partnered with MIT) alleged that Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, was herself a plagiarizer. That was a very stupid idea, which is becoming plainer by the day.

If you’re familiar with the John Wick movies, which saw John Wick killing something along the lines of 439 bad guys, the killing started because someone killed Wick’s dog. Academia and Business Insider, by attacking Ackman’s wife, pulled the same type of trigger. As Monica Showalter wrote, Bill “John Wick” Ackman declared war, announcing that he would use the power of AI to investigate every administrator, faculty member, and reporter for plagiarism and making it clear that he has the resources to make that happen.

(Having had his eyes opened to the dishonesty and antisemitism permeating academia and the media, Ackman is also waging war generally against the whole of these institutions. I’m sorry he’s so late to this existential ideological battle, but better late than never.)

Before getting to the next phase of this discussion, which is how Business Insider, a hard-left media outlet, operates, let me briefly discuss the plagiarism issues. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, plagiarism is “the process or practice of using another person's ideas or work and pretending that it is your own.” Harvard’s own guide explains,

In academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper. It doesn't matter whether the source is a published author, another student, a website without clear authorship, a website that sells academic papers, or any other person: Taking credit for anyone else's work is stealing, and it is unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident.

In other words, according to Harvard, when an essay gives no hint that what you wrote comes from another source, you’ve plagiarized. It’s worse, of course, when it’s clear through your actions that you intended to hide that other source.

Claudine Gay’s work shows that she often failed to use quotation marks or block quotes when she quoted verbatim from people, which could be either laziness or negligence, even though she did say that she was relying on those people’s sources. That’s a bad quality for an Ivy League president, but not the worst thing ever.

More disturbing, though, is Gay’s apparent failure to make any reference to her source. Instead, in at least one instance, she changed a few words here and there, which seems like something someone would do to hide that she was copying someone else’s work. That practice, in turn, could be read to indicate intent. I won’t reproduce Christopher Rufo’s whole thread with the many examples of problematic material in Gay’s work, but I urge you to review it.

(The New York Times, unsurprisingly, has more anodyne examples, but they’re still problematic.)

According to Ackman, it’s quite different when it comes to his wife’s thesis. She consistently acknowledged the work of others, although she did miss quotation marks on a few occasions, even while acknowledging her sources. In other words, she wasn’t trying to pass off, and did not pass off, other people’s work as her own. She was careless but not dishonest:

Imagine that you were formerly a professor at a university, and you are an entrepreneur now.

One day, a company that you have no affiliation with (other than its CEO is your husband) gets an email from a reporter from Business Insider which says that they have found five…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 7, 2024

From the get-go, one of Ackman’s complaints has been that Business Insider gave him and Oxman no time whatsoever to get a handle on the facts, unlike the long lead-time that Claudine Gay had to investigate the charges against her:

And now let’s pretend you are an intensely private person, fundamentally an introvert

How would this whole experience make you feel?

Would it feel fair and just?

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 8, 2024

And now we get to leftist hubris. Despite having the John Wick of hedge fund managers making it clear that he’s on the warpath, Business Insider decided to double down, which gets me to the meat of this post.

According to Ackman, Business Insider’s Global Editor-in-Chief, Nicholas Carlson, has decided to double down on the paper’s allegations by saying that neither Ackman nor Oxman disputed the plagiarism charge. Also according to Ackman, though, who has the receipts to prove it, Business Insider made it impossible for them to refute the charges before publication—and then falsely claimed that Oxman admitted that she plagiarized other writers:

On Sunday afternoon, Nicholas Carlson, the Global Editor-in Chief of Business Insider stated in an email to his staff that:

"The facts of the stories have not been disputed by Oxman or her husband Bill Ackman.

Ackman and others have raised concerns about our reporting process,…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 9, 2024

Bill “John Wick” Ackman is not happy. He got support from Elon Musk, who had some pithy advice for him:

I recommend a lawsuit.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 9, 2024

Unfortunately, thanks to the Supreme Court, it’s almost impossible to sue a media outlet for defamation, especially when you’re a public figure. The Supreme Court has essentially given the media license to lie. That’s almost certainly why Ackman repeats again and again that Oxman stays out of the public eye, so that she’s not a public figure. However, even if you’re Nicholas Sandmann, a completely innocent young man who did nothing but smile nervously as a creepy guy drummed in his face, you may lose in court. The facts are what they are, but a court may dispute whether Business Insider was merely expressing an “opinion” when it charged Oxman with plagiarism.

Still, a guy like Ackman has options other than lawfare. I am rooting for him as he takes on our utterly corrupt academic institutions and the media itself. They deserve to be John Wick’d—not violently, obviously—but with an intellectual vigor that destroys the ideologies behind them and exposes their operatives as corrupt, hypocritical, fraudulent, lazy, and stupid.

Image: AI’s interpretation of Bill Ackman in John Wick mode—and again, I’m not advocating for any type of physical violence. This is a metaphor.