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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.
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People don’t deserve to be abused because they’re foolish. I will happily call this guy a fool, but the bad guys here are the two cons, not him.
I don’t think it’s the case here, but there are many legal and economic reasons for doing this, depending on the jurisdiction.
For instance, when there is a disability, especially from old age, a married couple is frequently advised to divorce so that half of the marital estate can be preserved. Otherwise all of it (speaking simply) must be expended before government care can begin.
I have a confession to make. There is something quite schaudenfreudelicious about this story. Perhaps this is unworthy of me, but there it is.
It is unworthy. This guy is a victim. Yes, hes a member of a class of persons we love to hate. Yes, he was foolish and failed to watch out for himself. But he, and his family, have been put through an enormous amount of trauma by the intentional deception of two dishonest, malicious, criminals. The two crooks are same sort of people who prey on the elderly and the unsophisticated. If it was your declining parents would you think it schaudenfreudelicious? I wouldn’t. And given the list of other victims at the end of the article, they were obviously good at it, however transparent the scam seems to us when it’s all laid out in the aftermath. Schaudenfreude is just not the right response here. More like “there but for the grace of god . . .”
I’d have to agree with you on this. My elderly mother came extremely close to being scammed out of thousands of dollars in the IRS scam – I have sympathy for anyone who gets hosed up by the crooks. And I know some very intelligent (not just book smart) people who have been taken.
I will stipulate to all of the above (because I think I’m surrounded by people who might use that term, if I’m even using it correctly . . . perhaps I’ve just watched too much Perry Mason).
I can’t help but point out that the guy’s a professor at Harvard, though (cue mockery and derision). Nevertheless, until not too long ago, he was a respected member of the faculty instructing younger generations than mine on the fine points of the law.
I would lock up Mia-Pia or whatever her name is, and the other one, and throw away the key. And try and see her poor children right somehow. Those adults are vile. He’s just a gullible fool. I reserve judgment on his ex-wife. Love is blind.
All of us are fallen and any one of us can be taken in by a scam.
The first step to be taken, is saying “I am too smart to be scammed”.
We all have moments of weakness. All of us. I will not scorn someone for being a victim.
It’s easy and arrogant to forget there’s almost always something about ourselves, that we don’t see, that a con artist does see.
So true. Us hoi polloi are expected to do stupid things, but not the highly educated PhDeified brains at Haaaaavaaaaahd . . .
But as @bethanymandel said in her concluding point, the social norms (guardrails) that our “social betters” have insisted on tearing down might have helped keep Prof. Hays (and Misters Doe, Roe, and Poe) from being sucked in by the apparent scammers.
As to how a Harvard professor “the smartest person in the room” could fall for a scam like this, I sometimes think academics and other intellectuals are at risk of breaking down situations and decision making into minutiae for analysis that it is easy for them to lose sight of “the big picture.” Each decision is examined in isolation and with such specific focus (in an academic setting they are trying to reduce the number of variables that have to be controlled for in their experiments) that the burning red flags flying in the periphery don’t register.
I suppose I could be accused of “confirmation bias,” but this story once again presents us with a situation in which “transgenderism” comes in a person suffering from a host of other mental illness issues (assuming the transgender claim and other mental illness claims weren’t simply part of the scam). Yet no one in the story seems to consider the possibility that Mr./Ms. Haider’s “transgenderism” may be a mental health issue, nor to question whether physical surgery will actually solve his (Haider’s) problems.
My wife just finished reading the story and, as usual, was much more perceptive than I in understanding its deeper meaning. She said the real lesson is, if you’re buying picture hooks order them from Amazon.
Sure, anyone can get tricked, but he’s not a doddering old lady. He’s a professor at a major university who teaches a class in how to use good judgment. No pity. The scammers are bad. He is a fool and rightly an object of ridicule.
I understand, though I don’t completely agree.
There is something telling here about how his (presumably) radical Leftist ideology led him down this bizarre path with these exceptionally strange (and ultimately malicious, fraudulent, and slanderous) people. From my traditionalist viewpoint, this guy ran through 5-6 obvious “red lights” before things started going wrong — including 2 before he even met the con-woman for the first time, and 2 more at their first meeting.
The situation is also just plain funny. It’s like a weird, dystopian combination of A Fish Called Wanda and Rocky Horror.
I don’t think that the “declining parents” analogy is apt. There is no indication that this professor is lacking in mental capacity.
There’s also the “absent-minded professor” thing. While this tends to apply to PhDs like theoretical physicists, any highly trained intellectual can fall into the same trap.
Frankly, there are people for whom guardrails are invisible . . .
Cato may be right about me, but at least I’m not alone. I just listened to Ben Shapiro’s podcast, and he called the story “politcally delicious.”
That’s just not what the story is about. The fact that Haider is transgender is virtually irrelevant – an interesting detail that has almost nothing to do with what actually happened. Dwelling on his/her mental health issues would have been a distraction from the narrative.
I think his penis led him down this path, not his ideology.
I know.
But I get Jerry/AP’s point. Or rather, I must admit to a tiny bit of schaudenfreude myself. Mostly because I am so absolutely sure (maybe too-absolutely?) that this guy would’ve cheerfully condemned so many people I know and love as stupid/racist/transphobic/Trump-suckers.
Maybe that’s unfair, too? Maybe he was just as open-minded about the Deplorables.
Still, I think the OP has a point. I’m not sure I count as socially conservative, but I’ve seen an awful lot of evidence that when people decide the rules are stupid and don’t apply, bad things happen. And the injured spouse suddenly invokes the old rules, with mere tweaks of vocabulary : “Everyone knows that “boyfriend” and “Baby-daddy” means we’re in a committed relationship!”
I think he was lacking in internalized “cock-blockers.”
Does anyone else think the picture with the article in The Cut is just too deadly perfect and, like me, is at a loss to say why?
It’s something about the pleasant upper middle class house made sinister by the lurid red light coming from two windows and the feeling of night.
It’s an ominous looking photograph, to be sure. That’s got to be intentional. Taken at dusk, eerie shadows. And who has blood red lighting in multiple rooms like that?
That said, it is a creepy story, and it involves the house, so I think the artistic license is reasonable.
I’m surprised that the article gives you enough information to locate the house on Google Maps Street View in about 30 seconds. (I used to live near the area, so I was curious.)
Honestly I doubt he even knows that the “others” even exist. He’s likely so entrenched in his academic igloo that he doesn’t know that there are people out there who don’t wear mukluks.
Oh Please!!! Not mukluks!!! http://ricochet.com/597143/im-barefoot-and-hopping-mad/. Excerpt:
. . .
Apologize for rubbing the wound, but that’s funny!
Solomon made the same point in Ecclesiastes.
I think our lives become a mess, with the rules becoming trip wires, when we choose to make ourselves blind to the spirit of the law (of the rules). I mean, think of it, this guy would have avoided all of this if he had just acted according to how he would have wanted Zach—-the woman he was living with and the mother of his children—-to treat him.