Lisa Cook And The Grievance Elite

I said last week that more would inevitably come out about Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve board member whom Trump fired for alleged mortgage fraud. And in fact, more has. But I keep thinking about remarks by Shelby Steele, who invented the term "grievance elite" to describe the highly prestigious post-civil rights era African-American leadership and examine the conditions that created them. In a 1999 presentation The New Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, he said:

If we go back to the 1960s and the civil rights era, and so forth, there was this, I think, interesting moment, when America on the one hand did something extremely honorable, which was to say, “We are wrong as a society in the way we have treated black Americans. It is immoral what we did.” Almost no other society that I know of on Earth has yet done that other than America.

. . . What happens when you say you were wrong is that you lose moral authority. You just don’t have it any more. It is the price you pay.

. . . the real story of our racial policy in America grows out of this white difficulty. And that most of our policies since the sixties have really been devoted to sort of restoring that moral authority, or trying to reclaim that moral authority. In some cases it is almost comic, it is almost hysterical.

. . . We are trying to prove that we are good—that we are a really good, decent people, and so we’ll give you welfare generation after generation after generation, even though it may be tearing you apart. Welfare has probably done a great deal more damage to the black American family than segregation ever did. But it was a policy based on the principles of deference and license.

Affirmative action, again, is another sort of example. There are many, many varieties of affirmative action that we all know, but at the same two principles are ever present: defer to the suffering and victimization of blacks and then offer them license, that is, lower the standards; ask less, not more.

Everything we're coming to learn about Lisa Cook is that she's been a mediocritry all her life who's nevertheless displayed an astonishing attitude of entitlement. This post on X by investigative reporter Chris Brunet details the saga of her tenure application at Michigan State in 2013:

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: I obtained Lisa Cook’s 85-page Tenure Packet via FOIA. Download link below.

It’s heavily redacted, but here are the big takeaways:

1) Michigan State’s econ dept likely voted against tenure — but were overruled by the Dean. This means she was not even good enough… pic.twitter.com/m9vlRSvLIY

— Chris Brunet (@chrisbrunet) September 1, 2025

The post continues,

2) She got tenure despite her research record, not because of it. The tenure packet emphasizes her teaching ability and downplays her research.

3) She would not have gotten tenure without her now-debunked paper.

4) Her tenure packet lists her AER P&P as an AER, with an asterisk indicating it is peer-reviewed. She is lying about this paper being peer reviewed.

5) Every letter writer recognized her as an econ historian, not a macroeconomist or an international economist, which she self-proclaimed to be in Senate testimony.

One thing that strikes me as remarkable is that Cook, who was born in 1964, would have been 49 in 2013, when she became eligible for tenure. Let's consider that talented PhDs complete their dissertations and enter the tenure-track job market sometime in their late 20s. They typically spend six years in probationary assistant professor roles until they reach the up-or-out promotion threshold to associate professor with tenure, which conveys some level of protection against layoff or termination without cause. (If you aren't promoted, though, you have to leave.)

In other words, an ordinary tenure-track faculty member is going to be up for promotion by about 35. Cook took another 14 years to reach this level -- that in itself says something. But what it also says is that someone, or most likely more than one, was in an extremely powerful position to intervene on her behalf. It wasn't just the dean -- someone had to call someone else, who then called the dean, or maybe it was more than one who called the dean. The dean just did what he was told.

But let's go beyond the basic story of her alleged mortgage fraud and ask how she was able successfully to apply for three primary-residence mortgages within a period of months in 2022, when comments on social media say a normal application wouldn't get past the lenders under those circumstances:

Cook likely could not have tricked the underwriting systems at major banks, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, but was approved for two first mortgages from Bank-Fund Staff Federal Credit Union (“BFSFCU”), where she was somehow admitted by BFSFCU as a member even though she has no known affinity to meet eligibility.

Cook made false statements on two mortgage applications that BFSFCU overlooked and closed the two mortgages as primary or secondary residences in Atlanta, GA, and Cambridge, MA, when instead the loans should have been properly disclosed as riskier, higher down payment, and higher rate and fee rental properties.

Cook already had a primary residence and a first mortgage prior to being let into BFSFCU.

. . . Bank-Fund Staff Federal Credit Union in Washington, D.C., is a community – and employer-based membership credit union with $6.5 billion in assets and over 100,000 members.

Eligible members are employees and families of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, with one exception: membership is open to citizens from terrorist countries on the U.S. Treasury list of sanctioned enemies of America.

How is she eligible for BFSFCU, and why did she slide into their DC offices?

Cook is not an employee of the World Bank or the IMF.

. . . Is BFSFCU violating laws that limit credit union membership to “well-defined local communities” in the Credit Union Membership Access Act that require “interaction and/or shared common interests”?

. . . BFSFCU states it has over 100,000 members, yet the number of employees is approximately 13,000 at World Bank and under 4,000 at the IMF.

We're slowly learning from the cases of Cook, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff that the ability to take out primary-residence mortgages on multiple properties is a corner-cutting measure that's available to certain Democrat insiders. Exactly how such insiders become aware of this has yet to be determined, but it seems to require the indirect approval of powerful patrons, people with the ability to bypass ordinary institutional controls.

Someone was able to place a few calls on Cook's behalf and get the Michigan State dean to override the Economics deparment's decision not to grant Cook tenure. Someone, almost certainly not the same person but with equivalent implicit power, was able to steer Cook to the BFSF Credit Union, even though she wasn't an eligible member, and get them to approve two primary-residence mortgages for different properties, when she already had a third on a different property.

But there's an entirely different question: someone had put Cook on the short list for the Federal Reserve by 2022, clearly someone who could talk to James Clyburn, or maybe someone who could talk to someone who could talk to James Clyburn, who could talk to someone close to Biden and get her Fed nomination set in stone. At that point, the shakers and movers could be certain enough of the outcome to green-light the whole mortgage frammis, which had to have been facilitated by the sure and certain knowledge that she'd be confirmed by the Senate to the Fed board. This was all wired in over a period of months prior even to her nomination.

Who are these people? I'm not sure if we'll ever find out, although I assume that based on the criminal referrals, the Justice Department is following up on these leads. Whatever happens, this is the price we pay for the conditions Shelby Steele outlines: defer to the suffering and victimization of blacks and then offer them license, that is, lower the standards; ask less, not more. Cearly there's an elite that's able both to benefit from this policy and enforce it.