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Bruce Hay: The Left’s Cautionary Tale
It isn’t often that a story comes along that perfectly encapsulates why social conservatism is best for all the parties involved, not to mention society as a whole. But then comes Bruce Hay’s story in NYMag’s The Cut, a tale of a Harvard professor too smart for his own good, so open-minded his brain fell out. Hay’s story is how a life can be destroyed when you let progressivism silence your better judgment and common sense.
It begins at a hardware store in Cambridge, when a woman approached the kind-of-married Hay, a man living with the mother of his children but not totally certain of their level of physical commitment to the relationship. There is any number of ways that this story would have ended in a far less salacious and messy way had Hay behaved as a social conservative, and this is just the first. When you are or were at one point married, have children with someone, when you’re living together, there should be no ambiguity about your commitment to that relationship. But apparently, according to Hay (his wife disagreed later), there was ambiguity, and he found himself physically and emotionally entangled with Maria-Pia Shuman, a French woman visiting the States.
Shuman was living with a male-to-female transgender individual, and Hay bonded with him/her over their shared mental health issues. Hay bent over backwards, ignoring any number of warning signs about Shuman’s relationship with this biological male, even going so far as to accept that he was the father of her child, despite the fact that he never ejaculated inside of her during their sexual encounters. In a rational world a man would question the paternity of a child conceived with a woman with whom he never had a complete sexual encounter with, a woman who was living with a biological male, but this is no longer a rational world.
Fast forward to when their relationship inevitably broke down and it becomes apparent that Hay is the victim of some sort of scam, we see Shuman and her transgender quasi-partner filing a Title IX case against the professor. Because we always now #BelieveWomen, without anything resembling due process or critical thinking, Hay’s career was completely sidetracked. Despite the many crazy aspects of the case (read the whole NYMag story for a full picture of the insanity) that are on record, Harvard is still inexplicably investigating Hay, who has faced hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees because this duo isn’t just taking advantage of Hay’s progressivism resulting in his open-minded to the point of brain prolapse, but Harvard’s and the legal system’s as well. Being a woman and a transgender individual is now a blank check to commit all sorts of fraud and abuses, because questioning these individuals would go against everything these progressives profess to believe.
What is perhaps most amusing about Hay’s case is when the story broke yesterday, the left-leaning mainstream media’s reporters and pundits posted a link with variations of “wow this is a crazy story” and “whoa!” etc, etc. But there was, of course, no acknowledgment that what happened to Hay wasn’t just a fluke, a strike of lightning. The progression of events was a direct result of what happens when an individual lets progressivism replace their common sense… when one’s better judgment is overruled by a need to be open-minded and free-thinking. The complete rejection of all societal norms in the last decades, the rejection of marriage, of monogamy, of biological norms, of due process… all of these rejections erode our social fabric and make stories like Hay’s not just possible, but likely. It turns out our society had all of these guard rails up for a reason, and when they’re taken down, people tend to drive off cliffs.
Published in General
He rejected biological REALITY, not just norms.
Intact biological males are capable of impregnating biological females. That seems to be what he was so open-minded on that his brain fell out. After all, two women can’t impregnate each other, so he MUST be the father …
Haven’t finished it yet, but i’m confused by the statement that 4 years ago he was living with his ex-wife and their 2 young children. Presumably not born yet when they divorced in 1999?!
The party of science.
More than anything else, Hay’s story reminds me of what my grandmother always said: “You can’t cheat an honest man.”
The only alarming part of the story is that he is employed by Harvard. It seems they have no standards.
Bruce Hay’s type can’t survive in any other kind of environment.
Ok, I couldn’t resist. Just went and read the whole long article. Wow. Just wow.
Wonderfully stated.
The article tells an astonishing story. How any man over the age of 12 could fail to see SO MANY signs of fraud is beyond me. But he’s a Harvard professor, and therefore the smartest person in the room…
No, actually, I take that back.
The exterior form of the Haider/Shuman team is different in different social situations. But maybe essentially the same duo can be found, looking for essentially the same prey, in very seemingly different places. They’re not unlike the pimp and prostitute that the character, Holden Caulfield, encounters in J.D.Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye”.
I feel sorry for Hay because, whatever Harvard says, they must now want him gone because he would look like a joke continuing to teach the course he was teaching. The irony in that is that he now finally knows some of what he was talking about, without knowing, all those other semesters he taught the course.
I usually don’t read stuff like this but saw something about it yesterday and decided to take a look. My jaw is still open. There is nothing I understand about it, including why the professor wanted to talk about this.
Who knows ? Maybe keeping these people from doing the same harm to others finally became more important to him than saving whatever was left of his own image. The article briefly describes a few other people they roped in. Or maybe being honest about the whole thing was the only way to keep them from ever being able to blackmail him again.
When people want to believe in something, they believe in that something. The evidence be damned. All the intellect and education in the world doesn’t prevent that from happening.
Con-persons aren’t new. People have been pulling scams like this forever. I think this one just stands out in part because this mark is someone we’d conventionally assume had a brain somewhere in his head, and the fact that the story lays out burning red flag after burning red flag before he finally got it through his thick skull that he was being played.
Ditto
Re: 12
Yes. When people have a certain void, they’ll have a longing to believe something that’s so strong they’ll see all kinds of evidence for it that isn’t there and miss what is there.
Re: 13
Yes, we’re either wrong in assuming that people at Harvard are especially bright or we’re wrong in assuming that intelligence, as opposed to wisdom, can protect you from being scammed this way.
I’m thinking now that it’s also wrong to assume, as I did a few comments ago, that the people at Harvard are especially naive.
The thing that’s so obvious and shocking, from the outside looking in, is that Hay would have been protected from most, if not all, of this just by honoring whatever promise he made to be honest with his own….spouse ? Hay was actually trapped by his own dishonesty.
I’m in general, gentle, agreement with this statement.
But the Bruce Hay story? It’s a story about obsession, fanaticism, criminality, stupidity, and lunacy. The particular brand of which doesn’t matter all that much. If Hay and his cohort were extreme social conservatives, acting out of obsession, fanaticism, criminality, stupidity, and lunacy, they’d be just as wrong, just as criminal, just as stupid, and just as deranged.
I have empathy for the poor kids in this situation. The Maria-Pia character seems to have used hers as nothing but tools and means to an end. It seems as if Hay’s ex-wife (with whom it looks like he didn’t have children until after he was divorced) is a better mother, and something of a sympathetic character, in that she’s done her best (it appears) to save Hay from himself more than once.
She should have saved her breath, marshaled her resources, given him the boot, and got on with her life. It might have been the making of him. Or not. Either way, she’d have been better off.
What a sad and manipulative group of people.
Hay was trapped by his own longing for the freedom and power of a secret life, by his acted on desire to not be accountable to anyone. That also seems like the thing he’s least willing to admit.
For those with a tolerance for profanity (bleeped and unbleeped) and open to ribald humor, the Free Beacon Podcast addressed this topic yesterday. An energetic discussion to say the least.
Hay deserves pity and compassion. He was emotionally vulnerable and was victimized.
I would say have social conservative values, especially faith, can help protect people if they follow the faith.
But, we are all fallen.
This explains almost everything . . .
Re: 18
They’re right, on the Free Beacon Podcast, about making a movie. In fact it would be a sin to waste the opportunity to make a movie based on this story.
Or don’t.
This article was way too long and I think I spent way too much time reading this (before seeing this Ricochet post) with no end in sight and still never learned what the scam was. Thanks for telling me.
Don’t have any pity for this man. He’s a fool. He deserves any investigation or other life ruining result he obtains, because he is beyond stupid. And he taught a class on how to use good judgment.
Sometimes a career Darwin Award is justified. You will get no illuminating life lesson from this story except that Harvard is a morally vacant place.
No. He deserves ridicule, ostracism and little children pointing at him in mockery.
No, we are not all “fallen.” Most of us have common sense, hence the term.
The only reason this story was written is because it involves Harvard. If Jose the construction worker had the same pathetic story, no one would care.
The conclusion is only that fools live in all parts of society, and should never be suffered.
My tother takeaway from the article was Professor Hay was also a FATHER. As far as I could see he more or less abandoned his children to spend time with these nutcases. In addition he caused the children actual trauma by allowing these nutcases to take his house, move in, etc. He had/has problems – and I do not say oh he just had depression because I know how devastating that he can be. BUT his first role was as a father! And I guarantee if he were putting his children first, this would not have happened.
Should be ‘My other’ although ‘tother’ does have a certain ring to it.
Re 24
The conclusion is that we can be fools this way regardless of where we live in society. And nothing Harvard teaches can keep us from doing to ourselves what Hay did to himself.
Re: 25
I don’t think Hay would have been scammed this way if he had been putting his kids first. But I think it might have happened some other way. Some of the 33 parents who ended up trapped when Mr. Singer started co-operating with the F.B.I., in the Varsity Blues case, might have been people who were putting their children first to the best of their understanding of that.
I don’t think it’s a matter of “deserving” pity. One can (if one chooses) pity those who don’t deserve it. And, sometimes I find myself, even against my better judgment, doing so.
Yes, he’s remarkably stupid. And a sad excuse for a man. And he deserves to be called out as such, too. His former wife should have run, not walked, to the nearest exit, years ago.
Re: 29
I didn’t read the story carefully enough. They divorced and then had children together? That’s pretty strange too.
I’d be curious to know what his wife hoped to gain or keep by insisting on, or agreeing to, a divorce and continuing life together that way.