Is Bezos Overrated And Out Of Control?

Two weeks ago, Jeff Bezos stepped into one of the biggest PR disasters you could imagine. Aaron Cohen, a PR and brand executive. wrote:

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin may have made history on Monday for sending an all-woman crew into sub-orbit on its New Shepard rocket ship for all the wrong reasons.

From a pure PR perspective, this was a Jupiter-sized faceplant.

. . . It reeks of poorly performed virtue signaling. Showing extremely privileged women taking a magical vacation into space as passengers while leaving common folk grinding away at their hamster wheel does not a good deed make.

. . . It is difficult to imagine any PR team approving this launch without waving flaming red flags.

But just yesterday, Amazon and Bezos stepped in it yet again:

Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday that, according to a source familiar with the matter, the e-commerce giant will start showing the figure added to the value because of the duties right alongside a product’s total price.

The move is reportedly an effort by Amazon to inform customers cost rises have nothing to do with it and everything to do with the Trump White House.

Stephen Green at PJ Media wrote,

Mere hours after a blistering Briefing Room performance from PressSec Karoline Leavitt — who slammed Amazon as a “China-aligned” online retailer — the company backpedaled faster than a skinny-dipper who mistakenly waded into a piranha pool. Leavitt was responding to questions involving a Punchbowl News report that Amazon would break out the "Trump tariff" on the price of imported goods.

Elsewhere, Green linked to this post on X:

This will backfire.

Amazon buys Chinese trash for $0.70 cents. Pays $0.50 tariff. Sells to you for $18 plus $0.50. Customer realizes they’re buying Chinese trash. https://t.co/cowWJ0T0x5

— Rob Schmitt (@SchmittNYC) April 29, 2025

Green continued,

Nick Sortor reported that "minutes after President Trump called Jeff Bezos this morning, Amazon CAVED and backtracked on their plans." Bezos isn't CEO any longer, but he can still jerk some chains.

Whatever the truth is, what a shame Amazon isn't sticking to its guns. As I wrote earlier today, breaking out taxes and letting consumers know up-front where their merchandise is coming from would be a big win. Even that, however, wouldn't be enough to fix what's wrong with the Amazon-China Connection.

The chart below is from last year, before the tariff controversy:

But there are apparently other problems with Anazon's business model:

UPS will cut 20,000 jobs this year, about 4% of its global workforce, the company said Tuesday. But UPS added the decision is unrelated to tariffs and is instead due to increased use of technology and a previously announced plan to trim its Amazon business.

UPS in January announced a “glide down” plan to cut its business with Amazon, its largest customer, in half by the middle of 2026. UPS CEO Carol Tome said Tuesday that most of the Amazon business that it is giving up is “not profitable for us, nor a healthy fit for our network.”

The UPS package volume from Amazon was already down 16% in the just-completed quarter, which was a bigger drop than UPS had forecast for the period. UPS said it will close 73 US buildings by the end of June as the next part of that “glide down” plan.

So UPS is losing money on its business with Amazon. On the other hand, Amazon has its own delivery service, Prime -- so why was Amazon taking business away from itself and giving it to UPS? I've got to assume UPS was cheaper than Prime for Amazon to use it instead. But now UPS is forcing Amazon to use its own higher-cost shipping, because Amazon was ripping it off. These were factors in play before Trump's tariffs. But the tariffs are also just an outcome, not a cause:

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has quietly canceled a number of orders from suppliers in China and Southeast Asia, according to Bloomberg. The move appears aimed at avoiding the rising costs tied to U.S. tariffs but it's left some vendors with goods they can't sell.

. . . A consultant familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Amazon canceled several direct import orders without warning. Because Amazon usually acts as the importer of record, it normally pays any tariffs once the goods arrive in the U.S. But when an order is canceled after shipping, that responsibility shifts to the vendor leaving them on the hook.

In its 2023 annual report, Amazon flagged risks tied to its China-heavy supply chain, warning that global events, security issues, or policy changes could affect results. Around 40% of items sold through Amazon come from these types of vendor relationships showing just how wide the impact could be.

In other words, Amazon was fully aware as early as 2023 of the risks in its supply chain, but it seems to have persisted in that risky business model for as long as it could.

“How'd That Work Out?”

Trump has bveen asking this question in various contexts lately, most recently over Taylor Swift. Of the Philadelphia Eagles' Super Bowl win, he observed at the White House yesterday,

“It was incredible. A little surprising,” the president said of the blowout win.

“I was there along with Taylor Swift,” Trump added before asking rhetorically: “How did that one work out?”

The “You Belong With Me” singer, who is in a high-profile relationship with star Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, was loudly booed — to her apparent surprise — when she was shown on the big screen during the game.

Moments earlier, Trump was greeted with applause and cheers when he was shown during the pregame performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

I've been wondering when Trump will address this question to J B Pritzker:

Illinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, scorched Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday night, calling for “mass protests” and declaring that Republicans “cannot know a moment of peace” during a fiery speech in New Hampshire that immediately sparked presidential speculation.

“It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” Pritzker said to a ballroom filled with Democratic activists, officials and donors. “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.”

But the story goes on with the inevitable setting of context:

The billionaire heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune addressed more than 800 people. . .

There's nothing incongruous about a billionaire rentier shouting "to the barricades!" at a group of wealthy activists, officials, and donors. No, nothing at all. On a web search I also learned that Gov Pritzker most definitely does not wear a toupee.

In an unrelated story,

On Sunday, during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) did not rule out impeaching President Donald Trump if Democrats take control of Congress.

. . . Schumer said, “Well, look, right now, President Trump is violating rule of law in every way and we’re fighting him every single day in every way. And our goal is to show the American people over and over again, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s tariffs, whether it’s Russia and overseas and whether it’s rule of law, how bad he is.

So two prominent Democrats are arguing for basically dusting off and replaying the 2020 strategy -- BLM riots, impeach Trump (twice), Trump is Hitler. How'd that work out? But there's also a confused echo of the 2024 campaign, and that's the odd juxtaposition of white upper-class style and faux revolutionary rhetoric:

A bizarre quote by Vice President Kamala Harris—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”—is going viral once again as she mounts her presidential campaign after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race following his rough debate performance, with supporters and even other politicians adopting coconut emojis and memes inspired by the quote on social media to demonstrate support for Harris.

Harris’ quote: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” which she said at a White House event last year, has become an ironic slogan in support of the vice president as she campaigns for the presidency.

I've frequently noted here Harris's affectation of white upper-class minimalist hair style, wardrobe, and accessories while clumsily mimicking ghetto street argot. Now Gov Pritzker's call for unrest in the streets contrasts again with his own wealthy lifestyle:

Before Pritzker — a venture capitalist billionaire — became governor of the Prairie State, the now-governor and his wife, M.K. Pritzker, allegedly removed the toilets from their second Chicago mansion they bought in 2007 for $3.7 million to write it off as "uninhabitable" on a property tax appeal.

Cook County only taxes vacant properties at 10 percent of their market value. The property was reported by the Chicago Sun-Times as being uninhabited and allowed to fall into disrepair.

A 2018 report from Cook County Inspector General Patrick Blanchard shed some light on the Pritzkers’ porcelain problem: in 2015, the couple hired contracting company Bulley & Andrews to remove five of the toilets from their second mansion, allegedly to take advantage of the county’s low tax rate for uninhabitable properties.

As a result of the mansion’s lavatories being lightened before the inspection, the Cook County assessor’s office "lowered the 6,378-square-foot mansion's assessed value from $6.3 million to about $1.1 million."

Following the assessment, Bulley & Andrews was hired again to reinstall a single toilet in the now-governor’s "hangout/meeting area."

I think what we're looking at is the bitter end of trhe Fabian socialist strategy advanced by the UK upper class in the late 19th century -- to forestall the proletarian revolution, gradually appease the workers with faux referms that are funded by sources other than plutocratic wealth, to wit, taxes, debt, and inflation. Thus we still have some of the wealthiest families in the country, the Pritzkers, Bill Gates and his estranged wife and children, Steve Jobs's widow, and others, clinging to this old strategy, with the Pritzkers in particular claiming now to be the revolutionary vanguard. J B's sister Penny is running her side of the revolution as Lead Fellow of the Harvard Corporation.

Somehow I don't think this will work out.

Not Much Actually New Here

The @nytimes story on the January DC plane crash hides its takeaway until the last sentences: the lady helicopter pilot ignored multiple warnings from her right seat about altitude (and his directly telling her to turn away) and flew straight into a passenger jet.

The end. Ugh. pic.twitter.com/7emtYkZTwQ

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 27, 2025

There's a new fuss over what seems to be a previously unreported excerpt from the cockpit recording of the Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into an American Airlines jet at Reagan National Airport on January 29.

Three months on, new details published by The New York Times revealed that the pilot made more than one mistake leading to one of the worst catastrophes in aviation history.

Not only was Lobach flying her Black Hawk too high, but in the final moments before the impact, she failed to take advice and instruction from her co-pilot to switch course.

. . . Just 15 seconds before colliding with the commercial airplane, air traffic control told Lobach and Eaves to turn left, but she did not do so.

Seconds before impact, co-pilot Eaves then turned to Lobach in the cockpit and told her that air traffic control wanted her to turn left. She still did not do so.

The one bit of new information appears to be the exchange with air traffic control when Lobach was directly instructed to turn left, and the instructor pilot repeated the same instruction. The rest of the recording has been released for more than two months. Without the new exchange reported over the weekend, this was the surmise I had as of February 15:

[NTSB] Chairman Homendy makes the point that the maximum altitude for the helicopter when passing over the Memorial Bridge should have been 200 feet. However, at 8:45:30, the instructor pilot told Cpt Lobach that they were at 300 feet altitude at that location. But at 8:44:27 [of a February 1 news conference], the instructor pilot had already noted to Cpt Lobach that the helicopter was at 300 feet and needed to descend to 200. For some reason, this descent never took place, even though the instructor pilot clearly expressed the need for it.

. . . this gives a two-minute span between the Key Bridge and the Memorial Bridge where at least the instructor pilot understood they were at 300 feet, should have been at 200, but there was no discussion about this. If anything, if Cpt Lobach thought they were at 400 feet, she should have seen even more urgency to descend.

. . . The fact that the collision occurred indicates that the helo's altimiters were close enough, and the pilots were fully aware this was too high, whatever the exact numbers may have been. This would also be irrespective of whether the helo crew had parts of the ATC transmissions blocked when they were keying the mic.

The big question as of the February 1 news conference was whether the helicopter crew heard air traffic control's instruction to "go behind" the jet:

The transmission from the tower that instructed the helicopter to go behind the plane may not have been heard by the crew because the pilot may have keyed her radio at the same second and stepped on the transmission from ATC, the NTSB added.

The whole issue at the time was obscured by the possibility that the crew didn't hear this transmission. But now we learn there was a whole 'nother, even more specific, transmission from air traffic control telling the helo to turn left. This must have been available to the NTSB at the same time as they were able to scan the earlier transmission, but it appears that they left it ot of the February 1 news conference, and it's only been leaked now.

But even without that specific transmission in the record, as of February 15, I still came up with what I think is the only reasonable conclusion:

This was a check ride that Cpt Lobach had to pass. During the ride, more than four minutes before the collision, the instructor pilot doing the check noted that the pilot flying was too high, and indeed, although she had four minutes to get down to 200 feet altitude, she never did this. At the same time, the instructor pilot inexplicably told the ATC twice that he had the jet in sight and was maintaining visual separation, which he clearly was not.

Was Cpt Lobach already failing her check ride even before she ran into the jet? If she wasn't, was the instructor pilot complicit in conducting a silly charade that was going to pass her no matter what?

This, of course, doesn't appear to be anything like a full transcript of the helo's CVR from the whole flight. My surmise, during the two-week period before the NTSB would release even a redacted portion of the CVR, was that its contents would prove deeply embarrassing to the Army and the memory of Cpt Lobach. For now, I think I was right, and I would bet there's still more to come.

Looks like I was in fact right. More pressure needs to be put on Chairman Homendy to explain why this transmission was left out of the February 1 news conference.

The Atlantic Almost Gets It

An Atlantic piece, Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet, was linked on Real Clear Politics this morning. Its complaint:

In Donald Trump’s administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rotates through various costumes—firefighting gear for drills with the United States Coast Guard, a cowboy hat and horse for a jaunt with Border Patrol agents in Texas, a bulletproof ICE vest for a dawn raid in New York City. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany. And FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino spars with agents on the wrestling mats of Quantico.

Kristi Noem is a particular target:

Noem, who has earned herself several dismissive, Mattel-inspired nicknames—“Border Control Barbie,” “ICE Barbie”—is perhaps the most conspicuous offender. She has been photographed behind the controls of both a Coast Guard boat and a Coast Guard plane, donned a helmet and Border Patrol fatigues for an ATV tour along the southern border, and posed in cargo pants and an ICE vest. In a social-media video, she wielded a tricked-out automatic rifle, the M4 muzzle disconcertingly pointed at the head of the agent directly to her left.

But the latest role for Secretary Noem isn't really cosplay:

An illegal immigrant was arrested Saturday for stealing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s pricey Gucci bag containing $3,000 in cash and other personal items – and a second migrant suspect is still on the loose, according to sources.

Noem, 53, was on an Easter outing with her family at The Capital Burger in Washington, DC, when the masked thief stole the luxury shoulder bag, which also contained her driver’s license, passport, DHS badge and apartment keys on April 20.

. . . The perp, who is believed to be part of a large east coast robbery crew, is expected to appear in court early next week as law enforcement hunt for his accomplice, sources said. Officials are also looking for a second suspect who is also reportedly an illegal migrant.

Unless this was elaborately staged as some sort of Reichstag fire-type provocation, Noem simply underwent an all-too-common event-- she was victimized by a criminal illegal -- but then the perp was caught. And all this does is reinforce her own warnings:

Secretary Kristi Noem announced a nationwide and international multimillion-dollar ad campaign warning illegal aliens to leave our country now or face deportation with the inability to return to the United States. . . . “If you are a criminal alien considering entering America illegally: Don’t even think about it. If you come here and break our laws, we will hunt you down. Criminals are not welcome in the United States.”

Merriam-Webster defines cosplay:

the activity or practice of dressing up as a character from a work of fiction (such as a comic book, video game, or television show)

Wikipeida adds,

The term has been adopted as slang, often in politics, to mean someone pretending to play a role or take on a personality disingenuously.

On one hand, we might characterize Michael Dukakis's famous commercial from 1988 riding in a tank wearing a helmet with his name on it as true cosplay, because the message viewers immediately grasped was that Dukakis was not a macho type and wasn't comfortable. It was transparently disingenuous, and it couldn't have been worse for his campaign. But the Atlantic piece complains about Trump,

During his most recent campaign, he sported various working-class costumes to troll his political rivals. In October, mocking then–Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that, as a college student, she had spent a summer working at a McDonald’s, Trump tied on a navy-and-gold apron and served fries through a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s drive-through window. Later that month, in response to mumbled comments then-President Joe Biden made seeming to liken Trump supporters to “garbage,” Trump wore a neon-orange reflective vest and hopped into a white Trump-branded trash hauler in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The problem is that Dukakis's ride on a tank was disastrous, it came off as inauthentic. Trump's brief stint at McDonald's or his ride on a garbage truck in a hi-vis vest were authentic, instantly perceived as such, and were boons to his campaign.

Turn it around. What if Kamala Harris were to have pulled the same McDonald's stunt? On one hand, throughout her campaign she wore the understated hair style, wardrobe, and accessories of an upper-class white woman. On the other, even visiting convenience stores as a customer and not a worker behind the counter, she came off as awkward and staged. The same was true of Biden's visits to ice cream parlors.

Neither would have been seen as remotely authentic serving fries at McDonald's; body language woild have been a key factor. In the photo at the top of tis post, Trump is completely comfortable wearing an apron and is clearly enjoying what he's doing. Certainly part of the enjoyment is recognizing that neither Biden nor Kamala could pull off the same stunt. The fact is that part of politics is shakng hands and kissing babies, and Trump is good at it.

Let's move to the complaint about Pete Hegseth. that he "posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany". Let's look back at prior defense secretaries. Lloyd Austin was a retired general who'd gone on to work in the defense-intelligence private establishment. Robert Gates, who serve under both Dubya and Obama, had a PhD in Russian and Soviet History and had been CIA Director.

Hegseth's role is meant to be in complete contrast, his assignment is to eliminiate DEI and transsexualism fromthe military, restore the confidence of the troops, and increase recruitment. Of course he's going to do things that relate to these tasks. On the other hand, he isn't dressing up as Rambo.

It's OK to wear cowboy hats if you're Lyndon Johnson. LBJ could bring it off.

The Return Of J Edgar Hoover

Alt media so far haan't been happy with either Attorney General Bondi or FBI Director Patel, accusing both of grandstanding on Fox News without making real progress on the Trump agenda.

At the moment, Bondi’s position is much more politically precarious with the right, which might explain her omnipresence on Fox News and Fox Business programming, where she’s repeatedly turned to safely articulate her explanation for the Epstein files mishap — “Everything’s going to come out to the public,” she assured host Sean Hannity — and return to her preferred message of cleaning up the Biden era Justice Department and prosecuting violent crime.

The same story suggests Trump is nevertheless happy with her:

By all indications, Bondi’s position remains secure with President Donald Trump, who called her “fantastic” on Thursday and gave her a glowing review during a visit to the Justice Department Friday. The longer-term question is how much more patience and grace Trump’s base will grant Bondi, who already bears scars as the central figure in arguably the administration’s earliest blunder.

Developments over the past few days suggest both she and Patel are beginning to deliver what Trump seems to have expected they would:

I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan – a county judge in Milwaukee – for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov.

No one is above the law.

— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) April 25, 2025

In other words, high-profile, high-publicity arrests and prosecutions.

🚨BREAKING: First ARRESTS just made —

FBI takes New Mexico immigration judge Juan Cano and his wife into custody… accused of harboring a Tren de Aragua gang member inside their own home.

This is WILD. You can’t make this up.

How deep does this go?

Thoughts? ⬇️ 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/NuPsNWSktM

— Tony Lane 🇺🇸 (@TonyLaneNV) April 24, 2025

In both of these cases, it looks like the FBI alerted media to the upcoming arrests of both judges and made sure cameras were on scene to cover them. It seems to me that what we're beginning to see is the return of the old-time J Edgar Hoover FBI. A book review of the title linked at the top of this post says,

“The FBI gained complete control over how it was portrayed in the media and ultimately it exercised a lot of its power—and it was a powerful agency—in order to maintain that image and essentially to drown out critics,” [author Matthew} Cecil says.

. . . Hoover created an air of romance around the Bureau. There was a television series with scripts and actors vetted by Hoover and his men and a long line of articles that portrayed the agency in nothing less than a favorable light while dissent and dissenters were quickly squashed.

People keep forgetting that Trump had two successful careers before he went into politics -- he was a developer, and then he became a media figure. A big part of his political success comes from what he learned about media. One of those lessons is that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Look at what's come from the FBI arrest of Judge Dugan in Milwaukee alone:

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers issued a statement accusing the Trump administration of undermining the country's judiciary "at every level."

"In this country, people who are suspected of criminal wrongdoing are innocent until their guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt and they are found guilty by a jury of their peers — this is the fundamental demand of justice in America," Evers said.

Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who is the Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, said in a statement that while all of the facts about Dugan's arrest haven't been confirmed, "the implications of this arrest are chilling."

"This Administration has shown brazen contempt for the judiciary," Raskin continued. “Every American should be deeply troubled by this massive escalation."

My guess is that Trump is delighted with this. According to CNN,

The decision by the Justice Department to charge Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan for obstruction and concealing the individual from arrest turned a spotlight on the administration’s decision to exercise immigration enforcement in certain places that have in the past been mostly off-limits to such federal activity, including courthouses, schools and places of worship.

Her arrest Friday morning immediately drew intense criticism from legal experts and Democratic lawmakers, who widely viewed it as the Trump administration’s latest bid to strong-arm courts around the country as it pushes ahead with controversial immigration policies.

. . . Earlier this year, President Donald Trump revived a policy from his first term that allows federal officials to make immigration-related arrests in courts.

But as in so-called sanctuary cities around the US, court officials are not obligated to work with federal officials in such arrests if the warrant being executed is an administrative warrant and not a judicial one.

Such was the case for Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who federal officials were attempting to arrest on April 18, the day he was appearing before Dugan in a criminal matter. After learning that the officials were in possession of an administrative warrant for Flores-Ruiz, the judge allegedly helped him and his attorney leave through a nonpublic area of the courthouse. Flores-Ruiz was arrested by federal agents shortly thereafter.

. . . Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig said that it’s likely Dugan wouldn’t be facing the federal charges had she only declined to cooperate with the agents that day.

For her conduct to result in the charges she’s facing, he said, “there needs to be some affirmative act taken. And here, showing this person the back door, giving this person access to the back door, and then ushering the person out the back door would be an affirmative act.”

What many commentators seem to ignore is that illegal migration is a major issue for the electorate, and Trump's policies have strong support:

Two separate polls released in the past week show strong support for President Trump’s key immigration policies: closing the border and deporting aliens here illegally. In fact, those are the most popular among the new administration’s policies, underscoring lingering discontent over the prior administration’s much more permissive immigration stances.

The more publicity for such arrests, the better -- and the more hard-left Democrats hysterically denounce them, the better for Republicans.

But let's recall that the last FBI hero in the public mind was James Kallstrom, who as assistant director in charge of the in New York field office led the investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. He came into the picture after the FBI's disastrous raids at Ruby Ridge and Waco, and before the FBI's involvement in the bogus Trump investigations that led to Director Comey's firing and Robert Mueller's public humiliation. Kallstrom, the last hero, who began his career during Hoover's final years, said of those developments that he "did not recognize the agency I gave 28 years of my life to".

It looks like Trump's aim -- recall that he's a proven genius at both media and politics -- is to put the FBI visibly back on the right side of things, where Hoover had originally put it. If that's the case, both Bondi and Patel are doing exactly what he expects. The same likely applies to other high-level appointees like Hegseth; there's no such thing as bad publicity where they're concerned.

UPDATE: CNN actulally gets the point:

ROSSI: You have the right to get an arrest warrant, and you have the right to get a summons, and that they got an arrest warrant for a judge shows that they wanted to make this a spectacle. . .

JENNINGS: Why wouldn't you want to make a spectacle of it? I mean, the fact of the matter is, there are Liberal Democrat elected officials, not all are judges, some are mayors and others, all over this country who have said repeatedly since Donald Trump became the president that they would like to obstruct his principles and his program when it comes to deporting illegal immigrants. Here, you have this person, if these facts are proven true, obviously that's exactly what she's trying to do here.

Tren de Aragua Is Back In The News

In posts like this one a few weeks ago, I've tried to trace the ecosystem by which the Biden administration brought in illegal migrants, not just by letting them through the border, but by recruiting them in their home countries, flying them to the US, settling them in designated communities, giving them quasi-legal protected status, and paying for their food, shelter, transportation, and medical care.

What we still don't know much about is who designed this very complex system. We do know that a key part of it was roughly a dozen "faith based NGOs" that received billions in federal grants to implement the settlement program. Although they represented different denominations with different governing structures, they all appear to have operated in a similar way, settling migrants in specific cities and coordinating with for-profit sweatshop employers, slumlords, and car dealers.

One nationality that keeps reappearing in these accounts is Venezuela. This is partly to be expected, because Venezuelans were singled out under the so-called CHNV program:

Under that program, known as CHNV, a total of 532,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela were allowed to fly to the U.S. after securing a sponsorship from U.S.-based individuals. Upon entry, they were granted immigration parole and allowed to work in the U.S. lawfully for two years.

The "sponsors" appear to have been coordinated by, and closely aligned with, the faith-base NGOs that were implementing the strategy. But the information that keeps coming to light is how coordinated each piece of the overall strategy was, from recruitment in home counties to final placement in US communities. For instance, Venezuelans didn't just randomly turn up, one day in Idaho, the next in New Hampshire. The whole program routed them repeatedly to individual cities where the faith-based NGOs operated. We've heard, for instance, about Aurora, CO and El Paso, TX.

In addition, where groups of resettled Venezuelans turn up, the Tren de Aragua gang turns up with them. According to Newsweek,

In its operations in the U.S., it is believed its members mainly target other Venezuelan migrants, although some members have been linked to recent murders, including Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas and Laken Riley in Georgia.

The same report ran a map of states in which Tren de Aragua is thought to be operating, including Tennessee, where the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation indicates it is present in every major city. Yellow is confirmed, orange is reported, red is unknown:

It seems as if the easiest way to find where Tren de Aragua is active would be to identify the cities in which the faith-based NGOs have been settling Venezuelan migrants, but so far, it doesn't seem as if anyone has thought to do this, although the faith-based NGOs themselves must know perfectly well where they're operating. One previously unsuspected location is Mobile, AL:

Thursday, the FBI Mobile division held a press conference regarding recent arrests.

Investigators say six men named Jose Ramon Rivera-Garcia, Alejandro Jose Gomez Rivera, Jose Antonio Garcia Garcia, Jesus Alberto Queva-Vasquez, Keiber Jose Maiz-Martinez and Kendry Alexander Queva Vasquez are all suspected to be members of Tren de Aragua.

. . . Investigators with the FBI said they had multiple leads in the case, however, the main lead stemmed from an arrest made a month ago. The person arrested was a brother to one of the men and investigators said they were able to connect the dots to his siblings being in the gang.

According to investigators, the six men had tattoos that indicate they are in Tren de Aragua and all lived in Mobile, mostly in the same house.

There are other tantalizing suggestions here. What we've been seeing in all the CHNV resettlement programs, for instance, is the placement of migrants in overcrowded conditions in slum type housing. In this case, at least six gang members were in one house, but we have no idea what the total number of people living there was. But this strongly suggests that the Venezuelans' living arrangements were coodinated by the NGO operating in Mobile, and the NGO probably had a good idea of what was going on.

Another report suggests there was an intentionality at work in every aspect of the program:

According to the FBI, some Venezuelan government officials, in order to erode public safety in the United States, “likely facilitate” the migration of Tren de Aragua gang members to the United States.

Tren de Aragua has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration.

. . . The Venezuelan move to destabilize other countries also includes Chile, Ecuador, and Peru, Fox News Digital reported, adding, “The FBI assesses that in the next six to 18 months, Venezuelan government officials likely will attempt to leverage Tren de Aragua members in the United States as proxy actors to threaten, abduct and kill members of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States who are vocal critics of [Venezuala President Nicolás] Maduro and his regime.”

This suggests to me that, for motives that are misguided at best, actors from Venezuela through the US government to NGO workers on the ground in US cities have been making a coordinated, deliberate effort to include Tren de Aragua members among the parcels of migrants that have been flown in under the CHNV program. For instance, what are we to make of this?

The FBI has arrested former New Mexico Magistrate Judge Juan Cano and his wife Nancy Cano for allegedly harboring an illegal alien with suspected ties to Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang known for trafficking, extortion, and violence.

The arrest comes just weeks after Cano resigned from his judicial post following a dramatic federal raid at his Doña Ana County residence, where agents apprehended Cristhian Ortega Lopez, an illegal immigrant now charged with unlawful firearm possession and gang affiliation.

The Gateway Pundit was one of the first outlets to report that longtime Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano — a Democrat and former police officer — abruptly resigned after federal agents arrested an alleged member of the violent Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang at a residence he owns.

. . . Ortega-Lopez, who had unlawfully entered the United States by scaling a barbed-wire fence in Eagle Pass, Texas, was released on so-called “humanitarian parole” due to overcrowding — a tragic consequence of Biden’s wide-open border disaster.

Once in New Mexico, prosecutors allege Ortega-Lopez became acquainted with April Cano, the judge’s stepdaughter, who reportedly owned a cache of firearms and allowed the illegal alien to shoot and pose with the weapons — images that later surfaced on Facebook.

It's hard not to think there's a great deal more to learn here. Is Las Cruces yet another city where an NGO has settled groujps of Venezuelans? Is Ortega-Lopez the only Tren de Aragua member Judge Cano has been associating with? What's going on here?

It Looks Like Krafft-Ebing Started The Craziness

I woke up this morning for some reason with the name Krafft-Ebing hangng in my thoughts like a tune that won't go away. I don't think I'd thought of that name in years. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), an Austrian psychiatrist, was a pioneer of the modern notion of sexuality, so in the context of recent events, it probably shouldn't be a surprise that he'd pop up that way. Let's just do a quick review of recent news stories. On Monday,

Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the former Democratic aide best known for being filmed on the receiving end of a backdoor sex romp in a Senate hearing room in 2023, is finally speaking out about the scandal that cost him his job and prompted him to flee the country.

The Washington Free Beacon exclusively reported in February that Maese-Czeropski had moved to Australia to launch a new career as an independent sex worker who posts pornographic photos and videos on the internet. This week the disgraced Democrat, who was a legislative aide to Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.) when he was busted for (allegedly) being sodomized in the Hart Senate Office Building, spilled his guts in an interview with Gay Sydney News.

On Tuesday:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Tuesday appeared strongly inclined to support the right of religious parents to excuse their children from a Maryland school district’s use of LGBTQ+ storybooks in its elementary schools.

. . . The storybooks currently in use in pre-K and elementary grades are Born Ready; Intersection Allies; Love, Violet; Prince & Knight; and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding—all feature LGBTQ+ characters and themes.

At least one justice appeared to bring copies of the books to the bench, and several quoted passages during the argument. Alito had a bit of a skirmish with Justice Sonia Sotomayor over Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, which tells the story of a young girl who expresses some reservations about her uncle marrying another man before coming around.

. . . [Jusrice Amy Coney] Barrett suggested the school district was going beyond teaching respect for LGBTQ+ students and families with books that were “validating the other world view here, the one that is different from the [religious parents] by saying no, no, no, this is right.”

When [counsel for the school district Alan] Shoenfeld said the goal of the program was teaching “mutual respect,” Barrett asked, “So it was part of the curriculum to teach them that boys can be girls … or that your pronouns can change depending on how you feel one day to the next?”

Two weeks ago, Nashville police released their final report on the 2023 Covenant School shooting:

Nashville police have released their final report on the Covenant School massacre – a targeted March 2023 attack on a Christian school by a transgender shooter who killed three third-graders and three adults.

Rather than a highly anticipated manifesto, the report found that killer Audrey Hale left behind numerous notebooks, art books and computer documents about her plans to commit the attack and gain notoriety, partly inspired by the Columbine school shooting in 1999.

Hale, the 28-year-old attacker and biological female, began "fantasizing" about and researching mass shootings as far back as 2017, according to investigators. A year later, she wrote "detailed fantasies" about shooting up the Isaac T. Creswell Middle Magnet School for the Arts, killing her father and killing her psychiatrist.

. . . "In short, the motive determined over the course of the investigation was notoriety," according to investigators. "Even though numerous disappointments in relationships, career aspirations, and independence fueled her depression, and even though this depression made her highly suicidal, this doesn’t explain the attack. As Hale wrote on several occasions, if suicide was her goal then she would have simply killed herself."

. . . "Most disturbingly, she wanted the things she left behind to be shared with the world so she could inspire and teach others who were ‘mentally disordered’ like her to plan and commit an attack of their own," investigators wrote.

Last month,

A 42-year-old transgender woman who allegedly threw Molotov cocktails at vehicles and spray-painted “Nazi cars” at a Colorado Tesla dealership lives with her mother due to “emotional problems” and calls herself “baby” online.

Lucy Grace Nelson, also known as Justin Thomas Nelson, is accused of hurling incendiary devices at a Tesla dealership in Loveland, Northern Colorado, and vandalizing the business and vehicles on multiple occasions with graffiti “offensive and hateful in nature,” police said.

. . . Nelson, who is listed as female on her driver’s license and Loveland Police’s booking sheet, has since been handed a federal charge of malicious destruction, and freed on a $100,000 cash bond.

Federal authorities who have taken over the prosecution refused to confirm whether Nelson is charged as a male or female, despite requests by The Post to clarify.

On Monday, I speculated that there's a powerful exhibitionist impulse common to the people who vandalize Teslas or firebomb Tesla dealerships, since it's been well publicized that Tesla cars have cameras that automatically record suspicious activity, but beyond that, common sense says that these days, doorbell and security cameras are ubiquitous. More and more crimes are solved with camera footage. That these people know they're filmed in the act isn't a bug for them, it's a feature. They want notoriety.

So does the Montgomery County, MD School District in the latest bizarro replay of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which itself was a publicity stunt. A poster on X said,

In 2025, an attorney for a government school district is able to make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court defending exposing children as young as three years old to books about sexuality. Imagine going back in time to any point—even just a few years ago—and explaining that this is considered a serious argument.

Isn't this in fact exhibitionism masquerading as virtue signaling? But let's go back to the mindset that produced this almost 150 years ago:

The modern notion of sexuality took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll. This modernisation of sexuality was closely linked to the recognition of sexual diversity, as it was articulated in the medical–psychiatric understanding of what, at that time, was labelled as perversion. . . . Against this background both Krafft-Ebing and Moll articulated a new perspective, not only on perversion, but also on sexuality in general. Krafft-Ebing initiated and Moll elaborated a shift from a psychiatric perspective in which deviant sexuality was explained as a derived, episodic and more or less singular symptom of a more fundamental mental disorder, to a consideration of perversion as an integral part of a more general, autonomous and continuous sexual instinct.

So perversion isn't that, it's just the natural expression of the continuous sexual instinct. So why does it have to be associated with notoriety? If it's all OK, why the apparent need to get attention by making it and the proponents transgreswive? Asssuming it's all copacetic among consenting adults, why does it nevertheless have to go on public display for adults and children who don't consent to it? Why do its proponents seem to want to associate it with violence like mass killing and arson, and why do they see the need to let it all hang out in public?

How is it anything but disordered?

A Harvard Student Says Trump's Harvard Is A Straw Man

I'm going back to Harvard, because as usual, the media, alt, legacy, or otherwise. is playing its annual game of extending spring break into Memorial Day, at which point they can check out for summer vacation. The two big stories this week are "Who will be the next pope?" and "Is Trump trying to ease Hegseth out?" which don't have answers and don't require mental effort -- and that comes after a weekend of evergreen bromides saying nice things about Easter. Things likely won't pick up until October.

But I found a piece at the Harvard Crimson that illustrates how Ivy students are insidiously brainwashed into believing the system that's selected them is good because, after all, it selected them in a highly selective, meritoratic process. This is also at the heart of David Brooks's endorsement of the Ivies in Bobos in Paradise. The system is meritocratic because, after all, it selected David Brooks. Just look at him! The Ivy student body is a self-licking lollipop.

As a student here, the charges of pervasive antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and racial bias at Harvard seem ridiculous. But to the average consumer of conservative media, far removed from our campus, these charges are as true as the sky is blue.

. . . As a Jewish student myself, I’ve never been personally attacked for my identity. To me, it seems that this popular perception of Harvard comes mostly from a few confrontations between vocal pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protestors.

Extrapolating that an entire university is antisemitic from these moments is akin to claiming that because David E. Duke is a Trump voter, all Trump voters are racist — it just doesn’t make sense.

Last week I discussed the position of Alan Dershowitz and Jerome Karabel, which is pretty universally acknowledged, that the Ivy admissions system was developed over a few decades beginning in the early 1900s to institutionalize a Jewish quota without overtly screening for Jewish-sounding surnames or aquiline features in application photos. Instead, it established geographical diversity preferences for applicants in the Rocky Mountain and prairie regions or applicants from upper-crust private secondary schools, which were themselves socially conscious in their admissions procedures.

Preferences for legacies, the children of alumni, had an equivalent effect of creating a pre-screened sample with a limited population of Jewish applicants. A more recent group, international students, had a serendipitous quality of also not being very Jewish -- not a whole lot of Jews left in Europe, and not a whole lot of Jews outside Israel anywhere else.

All of these preferences created groups of applicants who were unlikely to be too Jewish, leaving only a limited group of public-school students from the Northeastern suburbs who were selected on meritocraic criteria, test scores, grades, extracurriculars, and general precocity. Some of these -- maybe a lot of them -- would be Jewish, but the other admissions preferences would balance them out. Oddly, Henry F Haidar, author of the Crimson piece, never mentions the admissions process that created a student body with an unspoken Jewish quota built right into it that characterizes Harvard and other prestigious universities. How can it be anti-Semitic? It admitted him, after all!

The idea that Harvard is meritocratic pervades Haidar's argument:

Finally, Republicans are up in arms over the idea that taxpayers are subsidizing massively wealthy colleges and their teaching. After all, why should Joe from Topeka, Kansas, pay for the education of entitled Hamas-Loving-Flag-Burning-Communists?

The problem with this argument is that much of Harvard’s impacted federal research funding takes the form of competitive grants: It just so happens that Harvard affiliates win many of these for their cutting-edge research.

It's all competitive! And It's Harvard! It must be good! If he's lucky, Henry Haidar will have this kicked out of him within a few years of getting his diploma, but that's not guaranteed. Dude, the race is not always to the swift, OK?

In the process of writing last week's posts, I speculated on the relative size of the unlimited-Jews applicant pool allowed in the Ivy admissions system. those from Northeastern suburban public schools. I still haven't found a specific percentage for this category, but I did find that at Harvard, the international students make up 27% of the studemt body, while applicants from upper-crust "independent schools" make up an astonishing 35%. The same source puts the percentage of legacies at 16%.

If we add up just these categories, international students, preppies, and legacies, we get 78% of the admissions pool that is not competitively selected -- but this leaves out the slots reserved for children of major donors, celebrities, and politicians, as well as athletes and DEI. This means that applicants selected exclusively on the basis of academic achievement, test scores, and extracurriculars number at best about 20% of an Ivy entering class, and almost certainly less. But this is the basis on which the Ivies claim their cachet of merit and excellence.

Thinking about this in one way or another for many years, I've kept coming back to the "battle royal" episode in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man:

The narrator . . . recalls being invited to give his high school graduation speech at a gathering of the town's leading white citizens. When he arrived, he discovered that he was to provide part of the evening's entertainment for a roomful of drunken white men as a contestant, along with nine of his classmates, in a blindfolded boxing match (a "battle royal") before giving his speech. . . . After enduring these humiliating experiences, the narrator is finally permitted to give his speech and receives his prize: a calfskin briefcase that contains a scholarship to the local college for Negroes (a term Ellison preferred over "blacks").

That night, the narrator dreams that he is at the circus with his grandfather. . . . His grandfather orders him to open the briefcase and read the message contained in an official envelope stamped with the state seal. Opening the envelope, the narrator finds that each envelope contains yet another envelope. In the last envelope, instead of the scholarship, he finds an engraved document with the message: "To Whom It May Concern: Keep This Nigger-Boy Running."

Poor Henry Haidar. It's going to be a long, strange trip if he ever starts it.

David Brooks Calls For The Bobos To Rise Up!

In an illustration of Glenn Reynolds's thought processes, he posts a link to Matt Taibbi's substack, which is behind a paywall, that contains another link to a David Brooks column in the New York Times, which is also behind a paywall. All the Times will let me see beyond the paywall is Brooks's title, "What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal."

Anyone who's able to get past both paywalls just like that is probably subscribed to a good deal else besides The New York Times and Matt Taibbi's substack -- for starters, maybe The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal, which means they're likely paying hundreds of dollars a year, or maybe expensing it, to get material that's not worth that kind of money. And at least it used to be blogger etiquette not to link to items behind paywalls. But that's Glenn Reynolds and Salem Media these days.

Taibbi quotes a single paragraph from Brooks:

We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place. . . [that] this is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.

Taibbi himself comments,

It’s hard to convey the scale of the comedy in this article, which received a lot of attention. Brooks lifts the opening from Genesis (“In the beginning there was agony”) and the ending from the Communist Manifesto (see below). In between lay a call for “mass civic uprising” which spends much of its time trying to figure out where to find the “civic” part, after drafting corporate lawyers, university administrators, “corporate executives,” reporters, and — what other kinds of people live in America? It’s either the funniest revolutionary manifesto ever, or the most touching. You be the judge:

So, if it's "received a lot of attention", maybe I can find more free bits and pieces elsewhere. I did a web search on "David Brooks normal rebellion" and got not a whole lot, but at the Daily Kos I found an additional two paragraphs:

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault. In their book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan looked at hundreds of nonviolent uprisings. These movements used many different tools at their disposal — lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance.

The writer there says, "he is... IMO... on the spot with this." Mediaite has a more play-by-play sort of summary:

Conservative [sic] New York Times columnist David Brooks has called for a mass uprising to oppose President Donald Trump, going so far as to quote The Communist Manifesto.

In a blistering piece published on Thursday, Brooks wrote that modern civilization is buttressed by several pillars, including “Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities.”

He went on to say that Trump threatens all of these because the president is only interested in the acquisition of power “for its own sake” and is engaged in “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men.”

Noting that Trump has targeted law firms, government agencies, NATO, and global trade, Brooks said these various efforts are part of a singular mission to reverse the “civilizational order.”

. . . Brooks went on to defend universities, which he has criticized for their progressivism.

Nonetheless, he said, “I have seen it over and over: A kid comes on campus as a freshman, inquisitive but unformed. By senior year, there is something impressive about her. She is awakened, cultured, a critical thinker. The universities have performed their magic once again.”

He added that the civic uprising should “have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism — one that offers a positive vision.”

In closing, he quotes Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

“I’m really not a movement guy,” he wrote. “I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

In one instance here, Brooks unintentionally undermines his own point. In an effort at pronoun probity, he says of a college freshman, "By senior year, there is something impressive about her. She is awakened, cultured, a critical thinker." According to the Pew Research Center,

College enrollment among young Americans has been declining gradually over the past decade. In 2022, the total number of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college was down by approximately 1.2 million from its peak in 2011.

Most of the decline is due to fewer young men pursuing college. About 1 million fewer young men are in college but only 0.2 million fewer young women. As a result, men make up 44% of young college students today, down from 47% in 2011, according to newly released U.S. Census Bureau data.

This shift is driven entirely by the falling share of men who are students at four-year colleges. Today, men represent only 42% of students ages 18 to 24 at four-year schools, down from 47% in 2011.

So college enrollment is declining -- wait. Doesn't that mean fewer bobos overall? But of those who are going to four-year colleges now, only 42% are men, which has implications for who will join Brooks's not normal uprising -- mostly women. Women with four-year degrees.

It's also plain that Brooks sees this not as the proletarian revolution that Marx and Engels envisioned, but a revoluton of the bourgeois bohemian class he hinmself invented in Bobos in Paradise: lawyers (especially white shoe types), MBAs, nonprofit administrators, university administrators, legacy media columnists and reporters, scientists, and civil servants. Of these, most will be women. But think about it for a mement. Who are the revolutionary vanguard of the bobo uprising?

Of course. The refined and educated managers, scientists, and civil servants who've been keying Teslas while taking their daily neighborhod strolls from their homes and condos. What they're doing, of course, is damaging the environmentally friendly Teslas that are pricey assets owned by members of their own class. Might it not be more strategic to key, say, gas-guzzling Toyotas? That's what Brooks seems to think Trump voters drive. Nobody's proposed that yet.

Actually, I can only begin to imagine what Toyota owners might do to a non-profit administrator toff who wandered into their neighborhood to key their cars. I'm not sure that sort of revolutionary tactic will take hold anytime soon.

Brooks calls for lawsuits, which we're getting, bizarre as they may be. But he also wants to see "mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance", which we're so far not seeing. What we do see is bobos keying Teslas that are owned by other bobos. Brooks is at least right that this uprising, whatever else it may be, is not normal.

The Demographic Pattern Of Tesla Vandals Continues

Minnesota state employee Dylan Bryan Adams, 33, was allegedly caught on camera keying multiple Teslas.
pic.twitter.com/s5GlRbkhqo

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) April 19, 2025

A week ago, I noted a pecullair demographic pattern among the great majority of perpetrators alleged to have damaged Tesla vehicles or sabotaged Tesla dealerships in protest of Elon Musk's involvement with the Trump administration, namely that they tend either to be members of the "bobo" managerial-professional class, or they tend to be transsexual or queer-identifying males.

In that post, I cited one member of the 500 Queer Scientists organization and three prosperous members of the bourgeois bohemian class. A month ago, on March 21, I cited four trans-identifying males charged with arson against Tesla dealerships in Oregon, Colorado, and South Carolina. The bobos consistently vandalize individual Tesla vehicles, while the trans guys consistently set dealerships on fire.

Three new cases last week oddly demonstrated this consistency in demographic makesup. On April 18, video was released of 33-year-old Dylan Bryan Adams, who was charged with doing $20,000 of damage to multiple Teslas, keying them while walking his dog. Adams is a fiscal amalyst for the State of Minnesota. According to this site, the salary range for a Fiscal Analyst I is $77,876 - $140,177 per year. The "ideal candidate" has a master’s degree in public policy or administration; experience with quantitative research and analysis, fiscal management practices, policy development, and program evaluation; familiarity with the legislative budget process; and knowledge of state government finance and policy issues.

On April 19, the New York Post reported that a Brooklyn psychologist and family therapist, Natasha Cohen, was "accused of leaving a brick scrawled with a swastika and the word “Nazi” on a parked Tesla".

Cohen, 46, has a private practice, working with children, adolescents and their families for more than two decades.

She has advanced training in maternal mental health, according to an online profile, and currently sells different therapy worksheets and resources online for parents of children with ADHD, body dysmorphia issues, and anxiety.

. . . Cohen, who also goes by Carrie, was spotted outside her luxury Kensington apartment building on Tuesday, wearing sunglasses and an oversized hoodie.

She tried ducking Post cameras as she and her teen son shuffled inside the building — where apartments are priced between $780,000 and $1.1 million and feature spacious patios and private backyards.

These two, given their advanced education and income levels, definitely qualify as bobos in the managerial-professional class. A third individual, who appears to be trans but isn't characterized as such in news reports, has been charged with throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Tesla dealership in Kansas City, Missouri. Owen McIntire was on spring break from UMass Boston, where he was arrested on Friday.

Two Cybertrucks and two charging stations were damaged by the fire. The FBI said that the trucks are valued at $105,485 and $107,485, and the charging stations at $550 each.

McIntire had flown home to Kansas City from Boston on March 16 and had returned to Boston on a flight on March 23. UMass Boston's spring break is from March 16 through the 23, according to the academic calendar on its website.

While the media reports of McIntire's arrest don't characterize him as trans, commenters on social media have been quick to suggest this is the case based on his appearance.

On one hand, there's apparent reason for trans people to resent Trump's policies, although Musk himself hasn't specifically associated himself with any such policy stances. According to Newsweek,

Immigration attorneys across the northern border are reporting an exodus of sorts of U.S. nationals seeking asylum in Canada, including a high number of transgender and non-binary Americans.

. . . A number of immigration attorneys in Canada are reporting being overloaded by U.S. nationals, including transgender individuals, who are seeking guidance on whether purported government persecution can be legally claimed as grounds for asylum.

. . . "The concerns I hear from transgender Americans include fear of being unable to access gender-affirming care; fear of being detained by immigration enforcement at the border due to the 'X' marker on their identity documents; increased violence stemming from rising transphobia; [and] anxiety that the U.S. may implement martial law, leading to further violations of their rights," [immigration attorney Yameena] Ansari said.

On the other hand, it's quite a step from being anxious about the potential effect of Trump trans policies to throwing Molotov cocktails at Tesla dealerships, especially when Musk himself seems to show no specific animosity toward trans people, and Tesla dealers still less. In fact, as businesspeople, their instinct would be to avoid unnecessary controversy. Why go out of your way to offend trans people, when one could walk into your dealership tomorrow wanting to buy a Cybertruck?

There's also the continuing conuncdrum that I've already pointed out. The bobos who are arrested for keying or otherwise vandalizing Tesla vehicles are high-income, often highly educated, presumably intelligent people, who must under ordinary circumstances be aware that their actions will be recorded on ubiquitous doorbell and security cameras, even if they aren't aware of the cameras on the Teslas themselves. Yet rhey recklessly expose themselves to potential felony charges that could end their jobs and careers.

In fact, it appears that every one of the Tesla vandals and dealership arsonists arrested up to now has been identified either by the cameras on board the cars or nearby security cameras. Yet the impulse to go on keying Teslas and firebombing dealerships continues unabated.

And the videos clearly identifying them committing these acts go viral: here's Dylan Bryan Adams of Minnesota keying multiple Teslas while walking his dog. There must be some powerful exhibitionistic impulse at work here that simply cancels out ordinary prudence. Deep down it seems as though all these people want to get caught and want to become household names, at least for 15 minutes. There's something deeply out of whack here -- but don't forget that one of these folks is a psychotherapist.

I'll bet she doesn't lose a single client, and in fact, even more will want to sign up with her now. Bobos in paradise.

Harvard Threatens To Euthanize Lab Animals

According to The Daily Beast,

Harvard academics have warned they will be forced to euthanize animals used for medical research because of Donald Trump’s $2.2 billion funding freeze.

This is disingenuous. According to this site,

Animals are typically killed once an experiment is over so that their tissues and organs can be examined, although it is not unusual for animals to be used in multiple experiments over many years.

If the lab animals are going to be euthanized no matter what, why the fuss? The answer is fairly clear, Harvard wants to portray the Trump administration as being cruel to animals, when the Harvard researchers are routinely cruel to animals no matter what, just as long as they get their money. Cutting off their money sounds like it would actually benefit future generations of lab animals.

But this is an indication of how seriously Harvard takes the current threats from the Trump administration. On top of threats to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status and its ability to enroll highly profitable foreign students, there are continuing questions about foreign funds:

The Trump administration is pressing Harvard University to turn over records on the money it receives from foreign sources going back a decade, the latest in a growing pressure campaign against the nation’s most prominent university.

American universities get billions in grants, contracts or gifts from foreign sources, which they must report semiannually to the government. In a Thursday letter to Harvard President Alan Garber, the U.S. Department of Education’s office of the General Counsel wrote that Harvard made “incomplete and inaccurate” disclosures between 2014 and 2019.

In light of all these threats, though, retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz suggests Harvard is taking them very seriously:

You may have expected Harvard's President Alan Garber, a man I know and admire, to be defiant in the face of such an onslaught, and while he is putting up a combative front, he seems to be preparing to negotiate a settlement.

That's something that legions of far-left academicians and advisers may find abhorrent. But it's the reality.

. . . Indeed, Garber has issued a bellicose response to Trump in the form of a letter, publicly refusing to compromise the academic independence of the institution, writing: 'No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.'

. . . But at the same time, Harvard has retained lawyers — Ballard Partners — who are close to Trump and his administration and have a history of arranging complex agreements.

. . . For all of Garber's maneuvering, he surely realizes that he is unlikely to emerge victorious from a long drawn-out courtroom confrontation with Trump. He also must know that the Trump administration would benefit politically from a courtroom fight with Harvard, regardless of the legal outcome which is anything but certain. So, instead, Harvard has sent a more subtle message to the Trump administration by retaining lawyers that he can work with.

. . . Well, reforming our corrupted academic elitist class and fighting antisemitic bigotry is not wrong. That is why I support a negotiated compromise. In fact, it is essential.

The truth is that many of the government's demands are quite reasonable and necessary.

As I've been pointing out, Trump's strategy has been to pull out multiple legs of any stool on which a problem sits. He's threatened Harvard's admission system, which is acknowledged to have discriminated against Jewish applicants for over a century, and if Harvard is forced to change it fundamentally, it could make Harvard and other selective universities unrecognizable -- and there could be ripple effects like reducing the incentive to send children to prep schools.

Most recently, in response to Monday's letter from Harvard President Garber, Trump has threatened Harvard's tax exempt status:

The Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which would be an extraordinary step of retaliation as the Trump administration seeks to turn up pressure on the university that has defied its demands to change its hiring and other practices.

A final decision on rescinding the university’s tax exemption is expected soon, the sources said.

This would be a direct blow to what figures like Ferdinand Lundberg claim is the main purpose of univeristy endowments -- to provide a tax-sheltered means for the very wealthy as members of boards of trustees to control corporations via the endowments' stock ownership. It should be no surprise that Penny Pritzker, sister of Illinois Gov J B Pritzker and billionaire member of the Pritzker family, is "senior fellow" of the Harvard Corporation, what would normally be characterized as chair of the board of trustees.

Removal of Harvard's tax-exempt status would simply remove the incentive for this sort of generational family wealth to donate stock to the Harvard endowment and exercise control over corporations without owning the stock outright. Many board members would resign, no longer having a need to serve, and donations would move to institutions that still had tax exemptions. It would effectively destroy Harvard's institutional influence overnight.

I'm not sure if Dershowitz understands the full implications of this particular threat to Harvard, but President Garber and "Senior Fellow" Pritzker certainly must. Their challenge will be to preserve what they can of Harvard as an institution. Solving the problem will require a lot more than threatening to euthanize lab animals.

Let's Look More Closely At Foreign Stiudents At Harvard

I've noted here that a feature of Trump's strategy is to take away multiple legs of any stool on which a problem sits. The Harvard problem -- which is shorthand for the uber-endowed prestigious university problem in general -- sits on multiple stools, each with multiple legs. The international student problem is one of those stools, and Trump is busily taking away several legs of that stool.

One leg of this stool is the cash cow that international students represent to US universities. According to Karin Fischer, who covers international education for the Chronicle of Higher Education,

Typically, international students and out-of-state students pay more than students who go to college in their own home states, sometimes two or three times as much. International students may also pay special fees for things like visa processing and English language exams. . . . about 80% of international students pay their own way, whether from their own families or by borrowing money.

. . . More than 80% of [undergraduate students] are saying that either their personal or family money, or money that they and their families are borrowing, is what they use as the primary source of funding. I mean, you look at some of these families; some of them are quite wealthy, and some of them are newly middle class. One of the big factors in the real growth of international students has been the boom in the Chinese middle class, for example.

It's also worth pointing out that most of these students aren't European. Europe has its own highly prestigious universities, and Harvard tends to be looked down on. The families Ms Fischer characterizes as "quite wealthy" are in the ruling class of third-world countries, for whom Harvard degrees are social status markers that accompany Rolls Royces, palaces, and private jets.

Harvard, like all other US universities, has come to rely on foreign students, because they're highly profitable. This is another leg of the stool that the Trump administration is threatening to take away -- not just grant money, but the ability to recruit high profit-margin international students at all:

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threatened to revoke Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, the latest broadside from the Trump administration against the Ivy League school.

Noem ordered the university to submit records on what she says is “illegal and violent activities” from international students by April 30, or Harvard would suffer the “immediate loss of Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification,” according to a DHS press release released late Wednesday. The certification program is what allows institutions to enroll foreign students.

My surmise -- I haven't seen direct accounts that describe this -- is that many of Harvard's international students are highly privileged in their home countries and expect to be catered to at Harvard. The ruling classses in their home countries, of which they are members, are likely Mahometan, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel. Because they represent major money to Harvard -- in addition to paying full fees, the families are likely major donors as well, to ensure the continued admission of their offspring -- Harvard treats them with kid gloves.

If Harvard is indulging these students to the extent of looking the other way over anti-Semitic demonstrations and harassment of Jewish students, the Trump administration has a right to step in. And if Harvard doesn't cooperate in reporting and working to minimize these problems, the Trump administration will simply withdraw Harvard's ability to enroll such students. That's just one leg of the stool.

But at the same link, there's a remarkably revealing figure:

International students currently make up roughly 27 percent of Harvard’s total enrollment, according to university data from the 2024-25 academic year.

Let's go back to Jerome Karabel's paradigm of Ivy admissions "baskets". This is saying that international students, who are typically just one "basket" among at least a couple dozen, including legacies, children of major donors, preppies, athletes, and DEI (however that category may yet be fudged) that have specific percentages allocated in each year's admissions process. Of all these "baskets", only a few are made up of applicants from US public schools competitively selected based on GPA, test scores, and extracurriculars, especially from Northeastern suburbs.

And the exact percentages of each have always been a closely held secret, while the Ivies assiduously cultivate the public perception that their admissions process is highly competitive and merit-based. Yet all of a sudden, we have a strong indication that one of the non-competitive "baskets", foreign students who buy their way in, is 27%. That's more than a quarter. We simply don't know what percentage each of the other non-competitive "baskets" represents.

But if we know that one non-competitive "basket" is 27%, then we only need to find one or more other "baskets" to make up another 23% and bring the total of applicants that aren't selected on a competitive basis up to half. My own experience suggests that the number of preppies at an Ivy, at least when I was an undergraduate, was non-trivial; I don't think 20% is unreasonable as an estimate, and it could well be more (UPDATE: this estimate is 35%.). The same applies to legacies. This leaves out athletes, children of major donors, and DEI, however this category may still be weaseled and fudged.

It's also worth noting that Ivy schools have programs like fencing, rowing, and lacrosse that aren't available in most public schools, which tips the balance for athletes toward other applicants with privileged backgrounds. I think it's not unreasonable at all to estimate that the number of "baskets" for admissions categories that favor applicants from highly privileged backgrounds outside any general competition, even if there's some overlap, covers well over half of an Ivy entering class.

Looking back, I could certainly see why I was so puzzled that so many of my Ivy classmates just didn't seem very smart, when the whole assumption under which I found myself in that admissions rat race was that I was competing against people who were supposed to be just as smart as I was. I'm sure the dean of freshmen to whom I took my perplexity knew much more than he felt able to explain to me. But if Trump pulls this particular leg out from under the stool, we may learn much more.