The Bidens, The Ivies, And The Chosen

This piece at the Washington Free Beacon outlines Joe's and Hunter's efforts to get Hunter's underperforming daughter Maisy (shown with Joe in the photo above) into the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania:

Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country.

"I applied early decision to Penn today!!" Maisy Biden texted Hunter Biden on October 31.

Just two days later, Maisy asked her father for an update on her application. In the coming months, Hunter and Joe Biden would mount a full-court press on university administrators to get Maisy's application over the finish line. The Bidens took their case directly to the top: University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann.

On December 13, 2018, the elder Biden texted Hunter that he was "going to try to see [University of Pennsylvania] Pres GUTMANN tomorrow." Two days later, Joe Biden told Hunter Biden that he "had a great talk with Guttman [sic]."

It's worth noting that in 2018, Joe was out of office, while in October of that year, as Maisy sent her application to Penn, Hunter, well into his four-year crack-and-hooker binge, was in the middle of the gun-in-the-dumpster incident with Hallie in Wilmington. By December, Joe and Hunter were working hard with President Gutmann, and Hunter had an inspiration:

Hunter also suggested that Maisy could see her chances improve if she expressed interest in playing lacrosse at Penn. Although it's unclear whether the lacrosse tip was from Joe Biden's conversations with the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Hunter was peeved that the counsel came so late.

This reflects Jerome Karabel's insight into the position of recruited athletes in Ivy admissions in The Chosen, as well as his remarks about them in the Slate piece I linked yesterday where he noted of Harvard,

Even more striking is the extraordinary preference granted to recruited athletes; 79.5 percent of such applicants with a mediocre academic rating of 4 (on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 highest) were admitted, compared to an admissions rate for non-athletes with the same academic rating of less than 1 in 6,000.

It looks as though Penn has a similar policy. The 2019 Varsity Blues scandal suggests that getting an applicant designated a recruited athlete, even if the applicant doesn't even play the sport, is a common admissions dodge:

Thirty-three parents of college applicants were accused of paying more than $25 million between 2011 and 2018 to William Rick Singer, organizer of the scheme[.]

. . . Singer primarily used two fraudulent techniques to help clients' children gain admission to elite universities: cheating on college entrance exams and fabrication of elite sports credentials.

. . . Singer also bribed college athletics staff and coaches. At certain colleges, these personnel can submit a certain number of sports recruit names to the admissions office, which then views those applications more favorably.

. . . In one of the most notable cases, actress Lori Loughlin, famous for her role on the American sitcom Full House and the drama When Calls the Heart, and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli of Mossimo fashion, allegedly paid $500,000 in bribes to arrange to have their two daughters accepted into USC as members of the rowing team, although neither girl had participated in the sport.

As I've noted here before, the problem with the Varsity Blues scandal was not that applicants could use their putative status as "recruited athletes" to bypass the admission process, but it was simply that bribes were paid to the wrong people to accomplish this. It was perfectly legal for Joe Biden to twist President Gutmann's arm to do precisely what Lori Laughlin did -- the only difference was that Joe didn't bribe anyone to do it.

Joe was present at Maisy's graduation from Penn just this past May. I noted yesterday that it will be far more problematic to eliminate this type of privilege in elite-school admissions for the wealthy and powerful than it was to eliminate affirmative action.

As Long As We're On Legacies

There's been a lot of commentary on yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina cases. Just last Tuesday, I posted on the question of legacies, admissions policies that privilege offspring of alumni, in the makeup of Ivy League student bodies and their consequent impact on the US upper class. This is something of a mirror-image view of the affirmative action problem the court addressed, and it was discussed to some extent in the reporting. According to the New York Post,

At Harvard, applicants are initially scrutinized by a “first reader,” who gives the prospective student a numerical score in six categories: academic, extracurricular, athletic, school support, personal, and “overall”, taking race into account for the final number.

But the final decision doesn't really reflect all those criteria:

During a final winnowing process, four factors are considered: “legacy status, recruited athlete status, financial aid eligibility, and race,” with the last factor being “‘a determinative tip for'” a significant percentage ‘of all admitted African American and Hispanic applicants,'” according to the court.

So of the four final criteria, legacy status and recruited athlete status make up two of the four, or half. As I pointed out on Tuesday, recruited athlete status privileges prep school applicants, since athletes are recruited for sports like lacrosse, rugby, golf, and rowing that often aren't available in public school athletic programs. (By the same token, the Ivies don't award athletic scholarships, so that top athletes in public-school sports like football and basketball will go to non-Ivy schools that will give them athletic scholarships and make them desirable to pro teams as a matter of course.) Although the court focused on the presence of race as a final determining factor in admission, legacy status, plus the upper-class bias in athletic recruitment, were mentioned only in passing.

In other words, per the decision, elite universities focus wrongly on race as an admissions criterion, but so far, it's still OK for the schools to privilege applicants with certified class identifiers, such as coming from a family of Ivy alumni or attending a prep school where they develop athletic prowess in upper-class sports.

Tuesday I cited Jerome Karabel's The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. As I noted then, Karabel covered the exclusionary policies in Ivy admissions in great detail, and he's heavily influenced my own view, except that his argument is that the Ivies are entitled to do this, and if they now choose to weight race as a major criterion, so much the better. Karabel commented on the case at Slate last November:

[T]he plaintiffs called for the total elimination of race-sensitive admissions. Their argument in these cases was not the traditional one that affirmative action discriminates against whites, but rather that it discriminates against Asians. One central argument that came up again and again in oral arguments is that just as Harvard imposed quotas in the 1920 to limit the number of academically talented Jewish students, it is now imposing quotas to limit the number of academically talented Asian American students.

. . . The claim that Harvard has imposed a secret “quota,” though, is at the center of the SFFA’s portrayal of Asian Americans as the “New Jews.” But the claim of a quota is not supported by the facts; the proportion of Asian American freshman at Harvard has risen gradually from 3.6 percent in 1976 to 10.8 percent in 1985, to 17.9 percent in 2010, to 27.8 percent in 2022. The contrast with Jewish quotas could not be more stark; at Harvard, Jewish enrollment, which had surpassed one-quarter of the freshman class in 1925, quickly plummeted to 15 percent with the imposition of the quota[.]

Nevertheless, after hundreds of words, Karabel finally acknowledges the real problem:

It has long been known, for example, that Harvard gives preference to the children of alumni (known as “legacies”); what was not known, however, was that they are admitted at a rate of 33 percent, compared to 5 percent for non-legacy applicants, and still comprise 14–15 percent of the freshman class. Even more striking is the extraordinary preference granted to recruited athletes; 79.5 percent of such applicants with a mediocre academic rating of 4 (on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 highest) were admitted, compared to an admissions rate for non-athletes with the same academic rating of less than 1 in 6,000.

In other words, the problem isn't so much that Harvard isn't currently discriminating against Asians quite as much as it used to discriminate against Jews, the problem is that there are basically two privileged groups, the upper class and certain designated racial minorities, that between them make up a significant proportion of admitted applicants. The rest, which we might call "walk ons" that are unable to claim either privilege, are squeezed between the privileged groups.

As a practical matter, the court in its Harvard and UNC decision has taken away the current justification for one of the two privileged groups, the members of designated privileged races. Certainly self-described spokespeople for the privileged racial groups are complaining, and they're likely to continue to press the Ivies and others to maintain or increase their numbers. But if the ivies do that, how can they now satisfy the Asians and other walk-ons who are demanding consideration? (It's worth pointing out, by the way, that "Asians" are a catchall term for people of Indian, Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and a wide range of other heritage.)

Well, for one thing, there are the legacies. Karabel himself says,

[S]ome of the admissions practices of Harvard and similar institutions, including the preference given to the children of donors—witness the case of Jared Kushner—need to change. Some of these changes, such as the abolition of legacy preferences and the reduction of the remarkable weight given to recruited athletes, would almost certainly redound to the benefit of Asian Americans.

A question I still have is how the legacy preference arose in the first place. This isn't much discussed. My reading over several decades suggests this was part of a more or less tacit deal the Ivies made with wealthy alumni donors beginning in the 1930s as applications to elite schools increased, and the schools felt a need to restrict admissions to students who could perform the work best -- but to satisfy the alumni, they quietly agreed to reserve a significant number of slots for their own offspring irrespective of their competitive standing.

Even now, limiting the numbers of these slots would cause alumni dissent far greater than the abortive alumni trustee movement of the early 2000s. I may discuss this further.

Where's Melissa?

People have been commenting on the photos of Hunter boarding Marine One on the way to Camp David with his dad or at the state dinner with Prime Minister Moti, which are taken as a tacit signal that Hunter has been fully rehabilitated following his guilty pleas to various misdemeanors and settlemenmt of his child support case with Lunden Roberts. The question I have, though, is if this is meant to show that things are back to normal with the First Crackhead, where are the First Crackhead's wife and three-year-old son? They were notably absent from the past week's events, as far as I can tell.

The most recent sighting I've beem able to find is in the UK Daily Mail from May 11, where they were in LA together:

The president's son had his little boy in his arms and his wife Melissa Cohen trailing close behind as he left the children's playground and got into a black Suburban under the supervision of security personnel.

But every indication has been that Hunter's been in Washington and not LA, possibly living in the White House, during the past several weeks as he's dealt with his tax case in Delaware, and reports have also indicated that Kevin Morris flew him back and forth to Arkansas from Washington to deal with the child support case in his corporate jet. Are Hunter and Melissa basically living separate lives?

This brings me to the question of Hunter's current lifestyle. Under the plea deal,

the president’s son would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay income taxes, and the government would recommend a sentence of probation. He also would be permitted to enter a pretrial diversion program for a serious gun charge, which would be dismissed if he successfully completes the program.

As far as I can tell, pretrial diversion programs, especially if they involve drug offenses (Hunter's violation was lying on a gun form that he wasn't addicted to a drug) require drug testing, although under federal rules, each US Attorney develops policies for his district. By his own admission, Hunter is an addict, and under normal circumstances, he should be subject to drug testing as part of his diversion program. This almost certainly will be waived as yet another feature of his deal.

Indeed, if Hunter is still using drugs, this would be a problem for LA child protection authorities if Hunter were in the household and using drugs.

But this raises the question of Hunter's past performance when he's been close to Joe. The most recent pair of text mssage revelations involve two instances while he was in Delaware in the summer of 2017. On July 30, he sent sent a WhatsApp message demanding payment from a Chinese businessman while he was "sitting with his father". On August 3, he asked a second Chinese associate, Gongwen “Kevin” Dong, for $10 million in another WhatsApp text, noting the Biden family is best at “doing exactly what the chairman wants.”

While the Biden defense so far against these imputations, insofar as there is one, claims that Hunter might not have been literally sitting in the same room with Joe, and indeed Joe was unaware of what Hunter was doing in his name, this raises at best another question: Hunter's four-year crack-and-hooker binge, which began with his brother beau's death in May 2015, was well under way by the summer of 2017. Whatever the specifics of Hunter's claim literally to be sitting with Joe, photographic evidence places him at the Biden family compound in Delaware at the time these messages were sent.

Among other things, this raises for me the question of how Hunter was getting drugs into the Biden compound during these and other periods, and how he was satisfying his extreme sexual needs while in the family residences. In part, he was continuing his affairs with Hallie and her sister, but these were by no means exclusive, and his affair with Lunden Roberts, a Washington, DC stripper, appears to have begun during late 2017 as well.

It's hard to avoid thinking Joe was at least aware of these issues while he and Hunter were working closely on their business deals and also, at least in part, living in close proximity. But now we have a situation with Hunter rehabilitated, at least in Joe's mind, apparently now often in the White House, and closeted with Joe at Camp David as well -- with Melissa nowhwere to be seen. What, if anything, has changed between the summer of 2017 and the new, rehabilitated, presumably clean, presumably sober, presumably chaste family-man Hunter of 2023? And where's Melissa if things are so great?

I can't help but think there's always beeN a strange pattern of codependency between Joe and Hunter, revealed in periodic messages that show up on the laptop where Joe pleads, "I love you. I need you". The question is how long this can be covered up. Hunter is an addict. His relationship with his father seems to have this factor baked in, and I see no reason for Hunter to change a thing, at least as long as Joe can keep covering for him.

The Poll On Post-COVID Church Attendance

There's been a small stir this week over a new Gallup poll that says church attendance in the United States is lower than it was before the COVID lockdowns. On one hand, this shouldn't be a surprise, as stories have already covered this without the need for Gallup to ask about it again. A Pew Research poll just this past March reported:

There are some indications that in-person engagement in religious services has declined slightly since 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak. The share of all U.S. adults who say they typically attend religious services at least once a month is down modestly but measurably (by 3 percentage points, from 33% to 30%) over that span, and one-in-five Americans say they now attend in person less often than they did before the pandemic.

The Gallup results aren't much different, so I'm not sure why anyone bothered. Per the first link,

In the Gallup survey, 31 percent of respondents said they have attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days.

In Gallup polls conducted from 2020 to the most recent poll — gathered May 1-24, 2023 — an average of 30 percent of respondents said they attended services in the past week.

This data represents a modest decline of an average of 4 points since the four years before the pandemic, when an average of 34 percent of respondents said they attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days.

Neither poll strikes me as meaningful. I could run a survey that asks people if they've flossed their teeth in the past week, and some would probably say they had just to look good to the pollster -- and by the same token, some might say they've been to church when they hadn't for the same reason -- except that these days, there's a growing number of people who'll say they didn't go to church when they did, because they're more and more suspicious of the hidden state devices the pollster potentially represents.

So The Hill, reporting on the Gallup results, quotes Gallup:

“It is not clear if the pandemic is the cause of the reduced attendance or if the decline is a continuation of trends that were already in motion. However, the temporary closure of churches and ongoing COVID-19 avoidance activities did get many Americans out of the habit of attending religious services weekly,” the Gallup survey found.

I had a gut feeling from the start of the lockdowns that they were aimed in considerable part at shutting down churches, or maybe more accurately, putting a coup de grace to something that creeping secularism had already set in a terminal decline. Discussions of the lockdowns' impact certainly include the parishes that were forced to shut down permanently when they lost the revenue from in-person offerings at services.

And it's worth pointing out that the Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts, the philanthropic arm of the Pew family, who made their money from Sun Oil and who, like other uber-wealthy families, are preoccupied mainly with playing life's video game with an invincibility cheat code. In this, they shape the views of legacy media and prosper the operations of state security. On the whole, they would prefer that religious observance fade from the scene, and it's mildly encouraging that their research into the result of the state's effort to stamp it out once and for all was equivocal at best.

One big defect in the polls' methodology is the imprecision of their premise. They're trying to measure "religious observance" or "church attendance" while asking respondents to self-report on whether they've done something good or bad, and this is under conditions where at least some respondents will have come to be reluctant to tell a perceived proxy for state security that they've in fact been to church.

And the polls leave out important context. The lawsuits against California and New York lockdowns that were brought by Catholics, ultra-orthodox Jews, and Pentecostals in 2020 were the first major blows to the COVID lockdown regime. In other words, religious institutions, especially of the more observant type, fought back, and they fought back successfully.

In addition, the post-COVID emergence of the anti-trans movement is based almost entirely on natural law, which is to say natural religion. Insofar as professional athletes have refused to wear Pride totems or endorse Pride nights, for instance, they cite religious belief, and as a practical matter, that's their only option, since the only alternative is simply to say they're transphobes.

This in fact has caused pro-trans bodies like the Human Rights Campaign, which understands "human rights" to include the right of a male to use female rest facilities, officially to declare

a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States for the first time in its more than 40-year history, following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.

The "anti-LGBTQ+" measures the HRC lists include transgender sports bans (21 states); gender-affirming care bans (20 states) restricing bodily mutilations on minors; and bathroom bans (9 states) prohibiting males from entering female rest facilities in schools and sometimes general public spaces. If anything, that the HRC should acknowledge that this is a setback for its agenda suggests that there's a resurgence in a certain type of religious belief, because the philosophical underpinning of this resistance can only be based on the historical undestanding of natural relgion and natural law.

There's a general understanding that people responding to polls are inclined to tell pollsters what they think they want to hear, and this must certainly apply to a pollster who asks people if they've been to church lately. Given the increasing distrust among the general population for the anti-religious bias in institutions like the FBI, the public health establishment, and polls themselves, it seems as though they should be factoring in an increasing willingness in the public to conceal church attendance, to decide politely that it's none of their business (which it isn't), which in turn makes polls like Gallup and Pew on this subject less and less meaningful.

At the same time, crises lke the ones we see building on a national and world level are likely to reinforce the instinct to turn to religion in times of trouble. If I were the powers who'd commissioned Gallup and Pew to find out, in effect, how we did in killing religion with the COVID pretext, the answer would be that at best, any progress was imperceptible in the short term, but over the longer term, it will have proven counterproductive.

Bobos In Paradise, Impostor Syndrome, And Affinity Fraud

At the end of yesterday's post, I said I was still mulling over the question of how the latest crop of famous white-collar crooks had suddenly sprung from the authentic American upper class, or at minimum the prestigious gentry represented by Ivy League faculty, when their earlier equivalents like Ivan Boesky. Jeffrey Epstein, and Bernard Madoff had been middle-class Jews or other ethnics who'd gone to public school and often hadn't finished college.

I'm nowhere near done with that task, but I think I've found three directions from which to approach the problem, outlined in the title here: bobos in paradise, impostor syndrome, and affinity fraud.

The first refers to David Brooks's ploddingly obtuse 2000 book, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Its thesis in brief is that the Ivy League and other top-level universities were traditionally bastions of wealth and privilege, but after World War II, for reasons Brooks never quite explains, they dropped Jewish quotas, adopted the Scholastic Aptitude Test for admission, became selective with a wave of new applicants in the 1950s, and turned the US into a meritocracy. Just like that!

One of my favorite topics over the years I've been blogging has been how the Ivies never did any such thing. I revisited the topic in this post from 2021, where I asked why I found, once I arrived at Dartmouth in the fall of 1965, that so many of my classmates, guys of 17 or 18, were already superficial, psychologically disturbed, alcoholic, or drug dependent. One answer I came up with in that post was that a remarkable number had come from prestigious prep schools, where they'd already gotten that way, which was simply to say they were rich kids from the upper class. As a public school kid in the early 1960s, I knew nothing about marijuana; as soon as I got to Dartmouth, I was encountering experienced stoners from private schools, where the problem was already well established.

Huh? I thouight the SATs would have weeded those guys out and replaced them with achievement-oriented middle-class public school boys -- or did David Brooks have this all wrong? The short answer is, of course, yes, David Brooks had it all wrong. The table at the top of this post illustrates another approach to the same problem, that across the Ivy League, an applicant's chances of admission are three or four times greater if the applicant is a legacy, i.e., someone whose parent or other relative is an alumnus of that school. Harvard, at the top of the table, accepts 40% of legacy applicants, but only 11% of non-legacies. Thus Alissa Heinerscheid.

I've already cited many times Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel's 2005 The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which goes into detail on the many other paths by which the Ivies and equivalent prestige schools jigger their admissions to favor generational upper-class wealth, newer money, and political influence. He outlines how admissions offices categorize applicants into "baskets", which can include legacies, graduates of favored prep schools, offspring or proteges of major donors, and recruited athletes -- remembering that Ivy athletes are recruited for sports like rowing or lacrosse, for which only prep schools normally have programs.

Karabel's point is that prestige-university admissions policies have never been meritocratic, so why is anyone objecting to new policies that privilege minorities in admissions? That's an intricate question. Writers like Alan Dershowitz maintain that the Ivies never actually dropped Jewish quotas, they just disguised them by favoring middle class walk-on applicants from outside prosperous suburbs while continuing to admit rich WASP legacies and preppies. More recently, Asians complain that policies favoring politically correct minorities discriminate against their expectations for merit-based admissions.

While the Ivies have recently been providing -- or have been forced to provide -- glimpses into just how many applicants from their traditional market of old family money continue to be admitted vis-a-vis achievement-oriented public school students, espeically those from Jewish, other ethnic, or Asian backgrounds, the actual total numbers and percentages are still a closely guarded secret. My 2021 post above linked to an Atlantic article that said that from 25 to 30 percent of Ivy entering classes are from prep schools, but this leaves out other "baskets" like legacies, politically correct minorities (who segregate themselves once they arrive on campus), and offspring of other favored groups like politicians, celebrities, and major donors. My surmise is that those from outside these "baskets" are actually a minority in Ivy entering classes, and that this is apparently a deep secret reinforces my impression.

Thus David Brooks's "bobos", the bourgeois bohemians that form a "new upper class" are pretty much the old upper class that has remade itself in the image of a meritocratic, selective Ivy League that's been a fiction from the start. An Ivy degree since the 1950s has been marketed as a seal of approval, a sign that someone has advanced on merit, when a substantial portion of those with such a degree have been skating on the prestige of a much smaller number of achievement-oriented and talented students and graduates, while the skaters themselves continue to be the same old dilettantes, idlers, drunks, druggies, psychopaths, and psychotics.

But this brings me to the next head of my discourse, impostor syndrome:

a psychological occurrence in which people doubt their skills, talents, or accomplishments and have a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as frauds. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon do not believe they deserve their success or luck. . . . they may think that they are deceiving others because they feel as if they are not as intelligent as they outwardly portray themselves to be.

Alissa Heinerscheid, in the wake of the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, has scrubbed much of her social media, but I recall soon after the episode first broke that she said in an interview that she herself suffered from impostor syndrome. As I recall, she reported that once in a corporate environment, she found herself surrounded by marketing geniuses, and her own capabilities would never measure up. I think this is the inevitable result for Ivy types who skate into prestigious corporate positions based on their Ivy degrees, when quite a large proportion of these are awarded to people who were never qualified for admission to their undergraduate, graduate, or professional programs to start with -- and based on the record we have, this included Ms Heinerscheid and likely her Harvard graduate lawyer father as well.

But let's recall that nobody at Bud Light thought to double-check Ms Heinerscheid's choice of the agency-sponsored program that featured Dylan Mulvaney as a brand partner. One may certainly argue that Ms Heinerscheid herself never dreamed up the Mulvaney campaign or the can with their face on it, but she looked at the pitch from the agency and approved it, because she didn't have a clue -- she just thought it might be the non-fratty sort of thing she thought would fly. And her peers and superiors, right up to Harvard MBA Brandon Whitworth, greenlighted the choice. Because all of them came from the same Ivy environment, and like so many of their Ivy forebears, none of them had a clue.

And this brings me to my last point, affinity fraud:

Affinity fraud is a type of investment fraud in which a con artist targets members of an identifiable group based on things such as race, age, religion, etc. The fraudster either is or pretends to be, a member of the group. Often the fraudster promotes a Ponzi or pyramid scheme.

The best known affinity fraudster up to now was Bernard Madoff,

Madoff’s victims were not a random assortment of the well-off; he decimated a segment of the wealthy Jewish community and several Jewish charitable organizations.

Such crimes would not have been possible without the cultural ease and social entre Madoff enjoyed in the Jewish community. To put a name on things, this was one of the worst affinity frauds in Americans history, whereby unscrupulous people exploit their cultural connections and people’s communal identities to rip them off. In that sense, Madoff’s crimes were a warning to everyone about how in-group feelings of trust leave people vulnerable.

What we've seen with FTX, Theranos, and OceanGate has been an Ivy-based version of affinity fraud. A similar dynamic operated with Alissa Heinerscheid and Bud Light, whereby a widespread clique of Harvard and Groton alumni assumed everyone else knew what they were doing because they were from Groton and Harvard, whether or not any of them individually had any confidence in their own abilities -- thus corporate disaster. Elizabeth Holmes exploited a veneer of cultural ease and social entree she'd picked up at prep school to bamboozle a remarkable meagerie of the US upper class into joining the Theranos board and both endorsing and protecting the swindle.

Stockton Rush's target market was something very like the traditional Ivy population, rich, well-traveled dilettantes, skewed perhaps toward a proportion of nouveau wannabes. The world is very slowly coming around to a recognition that this was somewhere between an impossibly hamartic overextension on Rush's part and an outright con, but the efforts he made deliberately to avoid any type of independent review, regulation, or certification for his subs suggest it was closer to a criminal enterprise that he knew, as Madoff also knew, was bound eventually to collapse.

The odd thing is that Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, Elizabeth Holmes, and Stockton Rush either felt the need to, or simply had to, rely on authentic Ivy credentials to perpetrate affinity frauds on the wealthy, when earlier outright frauds like Jeffrey Epstein and Ivan Boesky had no need to do this. But this is just one among the many puzzles I still see in this story.

Why Are Famous Crooks Going Upscale?

One thing I began to notice about this decade's crop of highly publicized corporate fiascos and white-collar crooks is how many people come from the upper echelons of society. Stockton Rush, late CEO of OceanGate, was descended from two signers of the US Declaration of Independence and has degrees from Princeton and Harvard Business School. Alissa Heinerscheid, one of two Bud Light executives put on leave after the Dylan Mulvaney debacle, comes from a wealthy Houston family, went to the upper-crust Groton prep school, and has degrees from Harvard and Wharton.

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, went to the elite Crystal Springs Uplands private school and then MIT; his parents are Stanford professors. His FTX colleague Caroline Ellison went to Stanford; her parents are MIT professors. Elizabeth Holmes, who went to prison for the Theranos fraud this past May, is descended from the Fleischmann Yeast fortune, went to the private St John's School in Houston and then to Stanford, although she dropped out there. Her father is a high-level federal bureaucrat.

Contrast this with Jeffrey Epstein, one of the most famous crooks of the 2000s and 2010s, who went to New York public schools but was only briefly enrolled in undergraduate programs after that and never earned a four-year degree. He was able to convince MIT and Harvard that he was a major donor without apparently donating very much, and he associated himself with their brands, but that was part of his non-profit swindle, and unlike the more recent perps, he never earned an Ivy degree or even matriculated at an Ivy school.

But the farther back we go, the lower the social level of even white-collar scammers. The earliest modern Ponzi schemes I'm familiar with start with Goldstein Samuelson from the 1970s. Harold Goldstein went to prison for the fraud in 1973 (there never was a Samuelson); thereafer, he accumulated an extensive criminal history punctuated by mental disorder. His educational backgound is unknown.

Equity Funding collapsed in 1973 for creating 60,000 bogus life insurance policies that it sold to reinsurance companies for a fee. It was founded by Stanley Goldblum, who pled guilty and went to prison in 1973. He never completed college.

Ivan Boesdky pled guilty to insider trading in 1986 and cooperated with the SEC. He received a prison sentence of 3-1⁄2 years and was fined US$100 million. He attended courses at Wayne State University, Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan but never received an undergraduate degree. Despite this, he was admitted to Detroit College of Law (now Michigan State University College of Law) and graduated during 1965.

Michael Milken was indicted in March 1989 on 98 counts of racketeering and fraud, including allegations that he'd conspired with Ivan Boesky. In 1990, he pled guilty to six counts of securities and tax violations. However, critics of the government's conduct charge that it indicted Milken's brother Lowell to pressure Milken to settle, a tactic some legal scholars condemn as unethical. Over the years, Milken successfully had his sentence reduced and eventally received a full pardon from Donald Trump in 2020.

Milken is a somewhat anomalous figure in this group, as he received a BA from UC Berkeley summa cum laude and an MBA from Wharton. In addition to the fines he's paid, according to Forbes, Milken has given away between 5-10% of his fortune.

Among the figures in the scandals of the early 2000s, the Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling are probably closest to Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison. Lay had degrees from the University of Missouri and the University of Houston, but this wasn't an Ivy-level pedigree. Jeffrey Skilling went to Southern Methodist University and had a Harvard MBA. Nevertheless, these men appoear to have been prosperous middle class, not gentry like Bankman-Fried and Ellison.

Bernard Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom,

briefly attended the University of Alberta and Calvin College before enrolling at Mississippi College on a basketball scholarship. Between schools, he worked as a milkman and bouncer. An injury before his senior season prevented him from playing his final year and he was instead assigned to coach the junior varsity team. In 1967, he received a Bachelor's degree in physical education, with an academic minor in secondary education, from Mississippi College.

On August 27, 2003, Attorney General of Oklahoma Drew Edmondson filed a 15-count indictment against Ebbers. . . . On March 15, 2005, Ebbers was found guilty of all charges.

Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco International, was

convicted in 2005 of crimes related to his receipt of $81 million in unauthorized bonuses, the purchase of art for $14.725 million and the payment by Tyco of a $20 million investment banking fee to Frank Walsh, a former Tyco director.

He attended Seton Hall University.

In December 2008, Bernard Madoff confided to one of his sons that he had been running a Ponzi scheme and pled guilty in March 2009.

Madoff graduated from Far Rockaway High School in 1956.

Madoff attended the University of Alabama for one year, where he became a brother of the Tau Chapter of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, then transferred to and graduated from Hofstra University in 1960 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science. Madoff briefly attended Brooklyn Law School, but left after his first year.

What I can conclude from all these figures is that at best, up to Theranos and FTX, the famous white-collar perps were middle class from at best middle-class families. They went mostly to middle-class universities from public schools, but not all graduated. Michael Milken was the biggest exception, a high-achieving kid from a solid Jewish middle-class family, while at the beginning of the timeline, figures like Harold Goldstein and Stanley Goldblum had more shadowy backgrounds. Up to Jeffrey Epstein's arrest and puzzling death, all these figures came from a range between sketchy and just prosperous middle class.

Now all of a sudden, from Theranos to FTX, we're seeing perpetrators from the gentry and upper classes with family pedigrees, Ivy faculty parents, prep schools, Ivy degrees, and awards for being child prodigy overachievers that put even Michael Milken to shame. What's going on here? I'm still working on it, but I'll discuss this more tomorrow.

Valkyrie Lite

John Sexton at Hot Air didn't even bother to put up a new post. He just edited the title of the same one I linked yesterday, The rebellion in Russia is really happening (Update: It's over). The outcome of all yesterday's excitement turned out to be a hybrid of Valkyrie Lite and the Whiskey Rebellion -- the feckless coup attempt by the Stauffenberg plotters was put down within hours by Hitler on July 20, 1944, but it was followed by ruthless executions of thousands. In contrast, George Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 on terms a lot like Putin's:

Washington himself rode at the head of an army to suppress the insurgency, with 13,000 militiamen provided by the governors of Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The rebels all went home before the arrival of the army, and there was no confrontation. About 20 men were arrested, but all were later acquitted or pardoned.

The bottom line for Hitler, Putin, and Washington was that the various decapitation or resistance attempts against them were thwarted without much effort, and in the cases of Putin and Washington, on remarkably generous terms. Last year, I said the best sources on the Russo-Ukraine War were Reddit r/Ukrainian Conflict and the Daily Kos. I hadn't looked at them for at least six months, but I continue to think this in trying to find out what's up with the weird Prigozhin not-quite coup. The Daily Kos:

There have been mountains of speculation about Prighozin’s one day rebellion and “protest march” towards Moscow, but the simplest and probably best explanation is that his business, the Wagner group, was being taken from him by the Russian military without compensation. The rebellion was about Prigozhin getting paid and getting to keep his business. That’s why he and his remaining forces have gone to Belarus. He was getting pushed out of business by the Russian generals, but now he has a sponsor and a new home.

. . . There could also be another motive. Putin may be using this stunt to gain better control of Belarus.

It's worth noting that the Institute for the Study of War, the neoconservative think tank that's advocated US involvement in the Russo-Ukraine War from the start, published no campaign update on its site for yesterday, June 24, although it normally posts seven days a week, and it heavily covered the opening of the Prigozhin campaign on Friday.

I think this is a problem, because the overwhelming feeling I had during yesterday's early reports of an armored column racing toward Moscow without resistance was that if this succeeded, it would be complete vindication of the neoconservative rationale for supporting Ukraine, that a relatively minimal level of assistance in a proxy war would result in dismantling the Putin regime and potentially the Russian state. But this fails the reasonability checks that have emerged since last fall: Russia may be degenerate and corrupt, but it's a big place with a lot of people, a lot of ammunition, and a lot of tanks.

In spite of that, there are people who continue to try to put the best face on developments:

If in fact Wagner is standing down it is likely because Army Chief of Staff Gerasimov & Defense Minister, Shoigu are being replaced by officials loyal to Prigozhin & that would make him the most powerful man in Russia now

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 24, 2023

The day after Prigozhin's capitulation, there are rumors of changes at the top in Russia's military, but so far, nothing concrete and no indications that Prigozhin allies would be installed whatever changes might be made. The best conclusion we can draw is that either Prigozhin's actual goals were so small that he could accomplish them with a one-time motorcade -- for instance, he simply wanted some money -- or they were so unrealistic that when it became clear that the Russian army would remain loyal to Putin, he had no choice but to give up immediately. Neither suggests Putin is weak or that Prigozhin has won some sort of effective victory.

The takeaway is that we had a brief, bright pseudo-event that burned itself out within 24 hours and left everything unchanged. Its only effect was very briefly to give the impression that Ukraine hawks' wishful thinking could be vindicated.