Kevin Morris Reemerges

I'm a contrarian on many things, but I'm especially contrarian on the subject of Kevin Morris, the Hollywood lawyer who's been funding Hunter Biden's lifestyle since the wheels came off in 2019-20 and more recently, as best anyone can surmise, paying Hunter's lawyers and guiding his overall legal strategy. How's that going? Well, this past summer, the tentative plea deal and diversion agreement negotiated by Chris Clark, Hunter's attorney who was apparently paid and supervised by Morris, collapsed in a Delaware courtroom, and apparently at Morris's order, Clark withdrew from the case, replaced by Abbe Lowell.

This controversy forced Attorney General Garland to take the leash off the Delaware prosecutor, David Weiss, and make him a full special counsel with the ability to pursue the case in other districts. Now, as a result,

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig suggested it doesn’t bode well for Hunter Biden that a California grand jury is being used in a special counsel’s investigation into the president’s son.

“It’s bad news for Hunter Biden any way you slice this,” Honig said during an interview on “Anderson Cooper 360″ on Thursday evening. “Let’s remember, he already has a pending indictment in the federal district court in Delaware for the firearms-related charges.”

. . . CNN said the move by Weiss indicates he may be seeking new charges against Biden after previously bringing gun charges against him in Delaware. Honig said Biden may be looking at a second indictment out of California.

Morris has got to be some lawyer, huh? As I've been saying, he's an entertainment lawyer whose career seems to have prospered, at least for a time, because his wife, William Morris partner Gaby Morgerman, is one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood. But the projects he's been asssociated with, South Park (1997) and the musical The Book of Mormon (2011), are old news. He left his former law firm Morris Yorn Barnes & Levine in 2020, oddly at the same time that he became heavily involved in Hunter's business and personal affairs.

But as I posted here, Morris appears to have lost interest in his law practice years earlier. In 2009, he "decided to become a writer" and seems to have worked full time at writing and publishing a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems (2014), and two novels, All Joe Knight (2016) and Gettysburg (2019). By most accounts, he met Hunter in 2019 at a Joe Biden fundraiser, Hunter impressed him, and the rest is history. He seems to have dropped his aspiration to become the John Updike of his generation, as well as his entertainment law career, and undertaken Hunter as his full time project.

The conventional wisdom is more or less as follows:

Kevin Morris, an entertainment attorney and novelist who earned a fortune representing the co-creators of “South Park” and won a Tony Award as the co-producer of “The Book of Mormon,” footed Hunter Biden’s overdue taxes totaling over $2 million — more than twice what was previously reported, a source familiar with conversations between the two told The Post.

Morris, whom Hunter Biden’s friends call his latest “sugar brother,” has also been funding the 52-year-old’s lifestyle in Los Angeles — including his rent and living expenses, the source said.

Plus, now, Hunter's astronomical attorney fees as well. These payments, which by now must certainly be well into eight figures, have been loosely characteried as "loans". As House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer puts it,

It sure seems that the Bidens get a lot of ‘loans’ that raise many questions. Kevin Morris is reportedly helping Hunter Biden pay off his legal bills and China debt, which the Biden team claim are ‘loans.’ These ‘loans’ have occurred both during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and presidency, which raise serious ethical concerns.

The House committees have begun the process of obtaining more information from Morris on what I assume must be the total of his financial support for Hunter and how this is characterized -- adding multimillions in legal fees from nationally prominent lawyers, Hunter's tax debts, which appear to be considerably more than $2 million, other legal fees for his child custody case, lease expenses for a Malibu residence and likely an additional residence for his wife, Melissa Cohen, and payments to his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, it's hard to avoid wondering how anyone at Hunter's age and prospects, and taking into consideration his overall lack of talent, could conceivably pay this off as a "loan".

But now we come to the next question: Kevin Morris, as far as anyone can tell, is no longer working as an attorney, and in any case, the time he's spending running Hunter's life and businesses isn't billable. He failed in his attempt at a literary career and no longer seems to be writing. One recent vignette showed him smoking weed from a bong on an upstairs porch, which suggests he's no longer much more than your average stoner. Leaving aside possibly $10-20 million or more he's spent on Hunter since 2020, his lifestyle, which seems to include major residences in Malibu and Manhattan as well as a pied-a-terre in Santa Monica and a private jet, must be financed entirely by his wife.

$10-20 million isn't mad money. Even a powerful Hollywood agent isn't rich enough to cover that family lifestyle plus Hunter. This money has got to be coming from some other source.

Somebody Agrees With Me On Gavin Newsom

Joe Biden recently reignited speculation on what's up with Gavin Newsom's not-a-campaign for president next year:

President Biden late Wednesday quipped that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) could have any job he wants, including potentially being president, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the governor’s much-discussed White House ambitions.

. . . “Matter of fact, he could be anything he wants. He could have the job I’m looking for,” Biden added, eliciting laughter in the room.

The California governor has widely been considered as a possible presidential contender, and some see him as a potential candidate come 2028. Newsom has repeatedly fended off speculation he could challenge Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024.

Biden, who will turn 81 this month, has faced persistent questions about whether he is too old to run for a second term. Polls have consistently shown large percentages of Democrats would prefer a different nominee in 2024.

Last month I went out on a limb and predicted this:

I suspect Pelosi and other insiders are fuily aware that Joe has multiple skeletons in multiple closets, and they're in the process of hedging against a set of scandals that will force Joe's withdrawal from the race late in next year's primary season, leaving a limited field with no potential Democrat replacement having a clear primary campaign record. This will open the opportunity for Newsom to become the consensus last-minute white guy who isn't either Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg.

He would keep Kamala as vice president.

This theory refines the scenario slightly:

The attacks on Biden from the Democrat Establishment coincide with the ascent of Gavin Newsom.

How could the DNC avoid a messy primary and nominate their preferred candidate (Newsom)?

It’s in the fine print.

Biden is increasingly frail and confused, his dementia is worsening and his economic plan is faltering.

His popularity continues to crumble even among Democrats.

Consider the possibility that he resigns after receiving the Presidential nomination at the DNC 2024 convention.

Why that specific timing?

Because –

Rules adopted by the Democratic National Committee in 2022 leave the DNC as the sole authority to appoint a Presidential nominee where that nominee resigns after the August 2024 convention.

No vote or primary needed.

Although the piece refers to "Rules adopted by the Democratic National Committee in 2022" and quotes them, it's without a link. Here's the text the piece claims to quote:

In the event of death, resignation or disability of a nominee of the Party for President or Vice President after the adjournment of the National Convention, the National Chairperson of the Democratic National Committee shall confer with the Democratic leadership of the United States Congress and the Democratic Governors Association and shall report to the Democratic National Committee, which is authorized to fill the vacancy or vacancies.

The only other place I can find this text is at this site from 2020, which refers to it as the Democratic Party’s Rule F, but the link is broken. On one hand, the rule may or may not be current, but on the other, I'm not sure if we can rely on the Democrats to follow whatever rule is in place in any case.

I do agree with the subtext of the piece, which is that the Democrats don't trust the primary process -- just look at the so-far unsuccessful effort by the Biden handlers to replace the New Hampshire primary with South Carolina as the first in the 2024 cycle. At the same time, Newsom so far is pushing the same buttons as Biden, a continuation of preferential treatment for favored minorities (he established a California commission on reparations), same old-same-old on homelessness, crime, and immigration, preferential treatment for LGBTQ+, full abortion rights, and so forth).

An unfettered primary process might or might not nominate Newsom, but it wouldn't work at all as long as Joe is still in office. Thus there would need to be a swap imposed by the party insiders either very late in the primary season or after the convention.

Right now, the polls showing Trump, or even Nikki Haley, beating Biden are starting not to look like outliers, and other factors may figure in, including the collapse of Joe's Ukraine policy, further revelations of paymnents to the Biden family, a collapse of the Get Trump lawfare strategy via the appeals process, or a collapse of the January 6 narrative with the release of the Capitol security tapes. This leaves aside some utterly game-changing gaffe or a serious health event by Joe himself.

Democrat insiders have got to be gaming the contingencies, and Newsom looks like the most predictable replacement, especially with the supprt of Nancy Pelosi and maybe now Joe himself.

Appeals Judge Stays Engoron's Gag Order

Alan Dershowitz recently remarked that of all the Get Trump cases, the prosecutions have been putting on the weakest ones first. The New York civil case under Judge Engoron is hurning out to be not just weak but farcical. A recent commenter on Xwitter posted on the judge:

Dude! He looks like Mr. Burns off of the Simpsons. And he looks like he drives a van with no windows.

For comparison, here's Mr Burns. Judge Engoron is simply playing into Trump's hands -- in their motion for a mistrial and appeal of the judge's gag orders against Trump himself and his attorneys, they cite in particular evidence from the the judge's comments in his high school newsletter, of all things. He's 74 years old and hasn't left high school, despite his degrees from Columbia and NYU.

The Hill says of the appellate stay of his gag order:

The former president’s legal team requested an interim stay of Engoron’s gag orders — and the sanctions that resulted from his violation of them, which the New York appellate division granted after oral arguments Thursday.

The gag orders stemmed from an online attack Trump made on Engoron’s principal law clerk, who has become an unwitting main character in the fraud trial.

There's the nexus: Trump and his lawyers had been making fun of Engoron's apparent need to consult his principal clerk, Allison Greenfield, almost constantly, whispering and passing notes throughout the proceedings, which makes Engoron look weak and incompetent, and the fact that he frequently pontificates about Trump and his family in his high school newsletter only compounds the risibility. The judge has brought this on himself and doesn't seem able to back out of it. The Hill continues,

The appeals judge raised concerns over restricting Trump’s free speech in his decision to stay the gag order, meaning Trump can now comment freely about Engoron’s staff while the appeals process plays out.

Trump promptly seized this very opportunity:

Judge Arthur Engoron has just been overturned (stayed!) by the New York State Appellate Division (Appeals Court), for the 4th TIME (on the same case!). His Ridiculous and Unconstitutional Gag Order, not allowing me to defend myself against him and his politically biased and out of control, Trump Hating Clerk, who is sinking him and his Court to new levels of LOW, is a disgrace.

This again is, as Alan Dershowitz has also pointed out, the Chicago Seven defense. Engoron has telegraphed his insecurity on the point that he needs Ms Greenfield to sit with him on the bench, so his attorneys have been stressing this in their filings, and now with the gag order stayed, Trump is again hurling bombast at the two of them, which will only enrage Engoron further and elicit further bizarre reactions that soon enough will need to be overturned, and inevitably will make him a greater figure of ridicule.

None of the Get Trump cases has the A team either among the prosecutors or the judges, but the overall problem is that this case is the first one to come to trial, and it's inevitably going to set the tone for the ones that follow. The Trump Chicago Seven strategy seems to have been overall to bait the judges and prosecutors into imposing gag orders that inevitably will be overturned on appeal, and this process is now under way. This will only make the prosecutions seem weak and ineffective.

If the prosecution doesn't have the A team, Trump seems so far to have a much more capable group.

And Back To The White House Baggie

According to the New York Post,

Photos have emerged of cocaine that was found last summer at the White House — before the Secret Service executed a quick investigation into the matter without arresting a suspect. A small baggy containing roughly one gram of the white, powdery substance is visible in locker No. 50 near the White House’s West Executive entrance, according to photos the Daily Mail received after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the protective agency.

The Secret Service concluded its probe just 11 days after the cocaine was discovered by an agent sweeping the West Wing on the night of Sunday, July 2, forcing a brief evacuation and a response by a hazmat team before the substance could be identified.

This at least clarifies one part of the confusion surrounding the story:

1. July 4: The New York Times reported the substance was found in the White House “library.”
2. July 5: Reuters reported the substance was found in a “cubby hole” near the Situation Room.
3. July 13: The Associated Press reported the baggie was found in the “lobby.”

The photos at least depict it in trhe cubby, but Jesse Watters isn't buying the story:

Primetime thinks the coke may have been planted in the cubby after it was found in the library.

In other words, it took the Secret Service several days to get its story straight to take suspicion off the Biden family. Further,

Watters reported that the original narrative stated that no DNA was recovered from a bag of cocaine found at the White House, leading to the destruction of the bag.

However, the FOIA documents suggest the presence of three tubes of DNA, conflicting with the Secret Service’s initial reports. It appears the DNA samples were not only found but also preserved in an evidence vault.

“There’s more evidence that they didn’t destroy: an envelope with three tubes of DNA,” said Watters.

“Where did they get the DNA from? They got the DNA off the baggie. So the Secret Service lied, and so did the White House. They did find DNA on the baggie, and the DNA was processed and has been moved to an evidence vault for preservation.

The current Director of the Secret Service is Kimberly Cheatle, which is an unfortunate surname. She served as head of the the Vice Presidential Protective Division in the Obama administration when Joe Biden was vice president, but she left the Secret Service in 2018 to become senior director of global security at PepsiCo. Joe seemed to think well enough of her to give her a Presidential Rank Award for exceptional performance in 2021, and in September of last year, he brought her back to the Secret Service as Director.

As of September 2022, stories began to emerge of Hunter's art sales, while his legal problems over his tax issues and the gun permit application grew more critical. At roughly that time, although nobody can say exactly when, Hunter moved into the White House, as I discussed in this post. It appears that Ms Cheatle's handling of sensitive issues with Secret Service agents while Joe was vice president, such as his tendency to go skinny dipping in front of female agents, as well as the agent who almost punched Joe out for groping his girlfriend convinced Joe that she was right for the job:

In 2017, the Gateway Pundit exclusively reported that a Secret Service agent was suspended for a week in 2009 for shoving then-Vice President Joe Biden after he cupped his girlfriend’s breast while the couple was taking a photo with him.

The situation got so heated, a source who was a Secret Service agent at the time told TGP, that others had to step in to prevent the agent from hitting the then-Vice President.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the agent asserted that, “we had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses.” The annual party was for agents and Navy personnel who were tasked with protecting the Biden family.

The Secret Service has now inadvertently confirmed our report to Judicial Watch, who has filed a lawsuit after the Secret Service failed to respond to a July 14, 2020 administrative appeal challenging its claim that all files related to the 2009 altercation, “ha[d] been destroyed,” due to “retention standards.”

It appears that the Biden family has consistently created situations with the Secret Service that require extreme sensitivity, including most recently the Biden family dogs that repeatedly attack agents. Somehow Ms Cheatle impressed Joe with her ability to finesse such issues while he was vice president, and he brought her back, possibly in the context of Hunter's move into the White House last year.

My sense of things has always been that the Biden family detail puts agents in difficult situations, especially when they have to accompany Hunter and look the other way when he does drugs. My surmise is that l'affaire baggie prompted even Ms Cheatle to lay down the law: if Hunter stayed in the White House, there would be limits to what the Secret Service could continue to do to cover for Hunter and Joe, and Hunter quietly moved out later this past summer.

If nothng else, the shooting by the Secret Service detail protecting Naomi Biden Sunday night, which as far as I can tell would have resulted in the dismissal of a civilian police officer, gives an indication of the general quality of the agents assigned to the Biden family detail. Those currently assigned have to put up with dog bites and pretending they don't see Hunter snorting coke. Better agents seem to be able to wangle other assignments.

Secret Service Opens Fire

Something's missing from the media coverage of the incident Sunday night when Secret Service agents protecting Naomi Biden "opened fire" on three people trying to break into an unoccupied fedmobile they were using to ferry her around Georgetown. The UK Daily Mail's account seems to be the mopst complete:

Secret Service agents protecting President Joe Biden's granddaughter Naomi opened fire after three suspects tried to break into an unmarked Secret Service vehicle.

The agents, assigned to protect Naomi Biden, 29 and the daughter of Hunter Biden, were out with her in the Georgetown neighborhood late Sunday night when they saw the three people breaking a window of the parked and unoccupied SUV, the Secret Service said in a statement.

Around 11:58 pm ET, one of the agents opened fire, but no one was struck by the gunfire. The incident took place near Naomi Biden's Georgetown home, NBC News reported.

. . . 'During this encounter, a federal agent discharged a service weapon and it is believed no one was struck,' the Secret Service said.

. . . It is unclear if Naomi Biden heard the shooting but she was made aware of the incident afterward, sources told ABC News.

At one point in my career, I was a technical writer for a Los Angeles City agency, in which position I had frequent reference to LAPD policies. As part of becoming familiar with police work, I discovered that law enforcement agencies take any discharge of an officer's weapon under any circumstance very seriously. This can include an accidental discharge while off duty that causes no injury, but it can range all the way to a shooting by an officer in self-defense that leads to a fatality. The circumstances under which a firearm discharge is "in policy" are carefully circumscribed, and every shooting is thoroughly investigated.

Current LAPD policy on use of force is typical of civilian police agencies:

Officers may use deadly force [i.e., shooting] only when they reasonably believe, based on the totality of circumstances, that such force is necessary in defense of human life. Officers who use unreasonable force degrade the confidence of the community we serve, expose fellow officers to physical hazards, violate the law and rights of individuals upon whom unreasonable force or unnecessary deadly force is used, and subject the Department and themselves to potential civil and criminal liability.

The best I can conclude from the media accounts of the Georgetown incident is that the Secret Service protectee, Naomi Biden, was not with the agents at the time the attempted burglary on the fedmobile occurred. She was apparently in no danger and apparently inside a residence while the agents were waiting outside, or something like that. Under typical civilian police policy, just for starters, the use of deadly force wouldn't have been jusified to protect anyone's life in that circumstance, certainly not the Secret Service protectee. Beyond that, the LAPD policy says that "objectively reasonable" grounds for use of deadly force, i.e., discharging a firearm, include, among others,

• The seriousness of the crime or suspected offense;
• The level of threat or resistance presented by the subject;
• Whether the subject was posing an immediate threat to officers or a danger to the community;
• The potential for injury to citizens, officers or subjects[.]

The offense described in media accounts was breaking a window to burglarize an unoccupied vehicle. In California,

PC 459 auto burglary is a second-degree burglary – known as a “wobbler” – which means the prosecutor can charge the case as either a misdemeanor or felony. If convicted of misdemeanor auto burglary, you will be facing up to one year in county jail.

On one hand, District law may differ, but in any case, the Secret Service doesn't enforce the burglary law there; that's up to the Metropolitan Police. It may be a federal crime to vandalize a fedmobile, but again, that would be up to the FBI to investigate. The agent who discharged his firearm had no jurisdiction over the burglars, who objectively were not committing a crime serious enough to warrant use of a firearm in any case. So what happens to a civilian police officer who pops off a round at a guy burglarizing a vehicle? In response to a "shots fired" call:

The supervisor responds to the scene. Other officers take over any involvement the officer who did the shooting may have had with the incident at hand.

The supervisor takes the officer’s firearm from him.

. . . The officer is taken to a hospital or some other facility where blood is drawn for toxicology testing.

. . . The officer may or may not be interviewed or asked to make or write a statement about what happened for purposes of an internal policy investigation. If a statement is not made immediately, an interview may be scheduled in 48-72 hours. The officer cannot refuse to be interviewed. If he does, he can be charged with insubordination and his employment terminated. When the officer is interviewed, he is usually accompanied by legal counsel or a representative from the police officers’ association or union.

The officer is put on administrative leave.

. . . When the internal investigation is complete (this can take anywhere from a few days to months), the officer is required to appear before a “shooting board” to discuss the investigation, clarify any details, and identify any relevant police or training issues for future use. The officer is usually notified whether the shooting has been determined to be within policy or out of policy. If it is out of policy, the officer may be disciplined or his employment terminated. If the shooting is within policy, he may then have his firearm returned to him and any expended ammunition replaced.

From the accounts in the media, this firearm discharge would pretty clearly have been out of policy, and a civilian police officer who popped off a round at some car burglars would almost certainly have been off the force following a due process investigation. In fact, a civilian police officer who did this outside his jurisdiction would probably also have been deemed unstable and, even if he somehow kept his job, no longer eligible to carry a firearm.

So every media account of this episode has completely missed the point: a civilian police officer under those circumstances would have been deemed unfit to carry a weapon and likely off the force. What's happening to the Secret Service agent who shot his weapon out of policy? How was he hired? How was he kept on the force? Is he currently on administrative leave pending investigation and likely to be off the force? While the specifics of the investigation are confidential, the Secret Service should at minimum have announced the circumstances were under investigation, and media should have followed up.

There were two other agents there as well. What was their involvement? Did the supervisor turn up and relieve the one agent of his weapon? What "shots fired" procedures were followed? This whole thing should raise questions about the Secret Service equivalent to the 2012 "Wheels up" scandal.

Why Do Families Put Up With It?

Some years ago, I got to know a guy who had two daughters that were approaching high school age. His lifestyle was a little too bourgeois-rat-race for me to think of him as an actual friend, but it was fun to catch up with him now and then at hobby-related events. Everything changed as his daughters grew old enough for him and his wife to chart their college admissions strategies. As far as I can tell, they went to an Ivy admissions consultant who recommended that their best chance was to aim for a Title IX recruited athlete basket via women's basketball.

So this became the program, except that women's basketball, unlike men's basketball and nearly every other sport, doesdn't have a season, it goes all year, which meant that other than this guy's regular job, he was going to have to spend almost every waking hour taking his daughters to their games, coaching them, monitoring their workouts, and so forth -- and it wasn't going to be just a burst of activity for a few months, but something that would soak up his non-work time and attention for maybe six or seven years straight.

Once he told me about this, I no longer ran into him in connection with our hobby. He wasn't allowed to have a hobby. In fact, I never ran into him again, so I never learned how things turned out for his daughters. I was lucky enough that I was part of the first Ivy admissions rat race that began in the late 1950s when I was still in junior high, and things weren't quite so intense, although at least once a year my mother would make an appointment with the guidance counselors and ask specifically what needed to change on my transcript to get me into Dartmouth.

One of my strangest experiences from junior high, in fact, was soon after my parents had gone in to consult with the principal, Dr Callahan, over some troubling aspect of my 14-year-old behavior. The next day, Dr Callahan called me in to meet with him one-on-one. "I need to explain something to you," he said. "Your parents are in a panic. They have this fixation on getting you into the right college. I've never seen anything like it." He went on to reassure me that this was going to be a tough part of my life, there wasn't going to be much I could do about it, but I should have some perspective.

I was one of Dr Callahan's problem children, but I remember him fondly.

Yesterday I asked why students and their families aren't up in arms that, whatever the sacrifices they may be making to try to get their kids into an Ivy school, the game is rigged, and in fact,it's generally understood to be rigged. The middle-class kids from the suburbs are competing for a particular subset of openings in each elite-school class, while people with the right names or the right DNA or big enough wallets are able to bypass the whole process, but I concluded they never would.

This keeps taking me back to the Dartmouth alumni trustee movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. As I pointed out in this post,

This arose early in the last century when Dartmouth College, facing a financial crisis, asked its alumni to bail the school out, in return for which several seats on the board of directors would be nominated and elected by the alumni. This went unnoticed for decades until, in the 1980s and 1990s, conservative students began criticizing liberal faculty and administration policies. The result was that sympathetic alumni organized campaigns to elect avowed conservatives to the board as opportunities arose.

The movement eventually failed, in part because it never had a specific agenda beyond putting conservatives on the board, and perhaps as a result of that, the trustees it elected before the administration regained control were mostly narcissistic self-promoters. But the main reason it failed was that students, alumni, applicants, and parents complained that any controversy about the College would diminish the perceived value of a Dartmouth degree. Argument over.

In other words, there's a deep compulsion in the US middle class for families to sacrifice healthy adolescence and balanced parenthood in a vain and incredibly expensive effort to play a rigged game. On one hand, a few figures like Mike Rowe are seriously questioning the usefulness of a four-year degree vis-a-vis learning a trade or pursuing some small business opportunity, but nobody seems to be questioning the value of an Ivy degree vis-a-vis one from a less selective and much less expensive state school. I suspect the state school will do a better job teaching the basics of each discipline.

This problem won't be solved by putting conservatives, or even pro-Israel Jews, on Ivy boards of trustees. I had a long and productive chat with the first insurgent Dartmouth trustee, who pointed out that he and those like him would always be flying coach to board meetings, while the other trustees would be flying in on private jets, and they would always outnumber the insurgents no matter what. Even if there are alumni with an insurgent agenda, even a most commendable insurgent agenda, they'll get nowhere, and the strongest resistance will come from the parents, applicants, alumni, and students who are most intent on playing the same old rigged game.

There will need to be a bigger cultural change. Homeschoolers, for instance, are no less focused on getting their kids into an Ivy. Even homeschool won't solve a whole lot.

The Basket Theory Of Ivy Anti-Israel Protests Confirmed

This came up in the news after I made yesterday's post (click on the image for a larger copy):

Pro-Hamas protestors on the campus of MIT were warned that if they didn’t disperse -- they were violating campus policies that prohibited interfering with academic activities and the free movement of students and staff --they would be suspended. The protestors were warned several times and failed to disperse.

Jewish students were prevented from entering the campus through the main entrance and were rerouted.

Once the protestors finally dispersed the administration decided to not follow through on their threats to punish the students for violating the policies of the school.

It was a bit of a surprise because MIT President Kornbluth seemed ready to follow through on her threat.

So why didn’t she?

The piece cites a subsequent letter from President Kornbluth:

After exhausting all other avenues for de-escalating the situation, we informed all protesters that they must leave the lobby area within a set time, or they would be subject to suspension. Many chose to leave, and I appreciate their cooperation. Some did not. . . . Because we later heard serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues, we have decided, as an interim action, that the students who remained after the deadline will be suspended from non-academic campus activities. The students will remain enrolled at MIT and will be able to attend academic classes and labs.

John Hinderaker, who raised the original questions that led to my post here yesterday, posted at the Power Line blog in response to Kornbluth's letter:

There you have it: the pro-genocide students (or many of them, anyway) are non-Americans, most likely from the Middle East. They have brought their unAmerican attitudes with them to this country. MIT doesn’t want them to be deported, likely in part, at least, because they are rich kids who pay full freight. Foreign students are a cash cow for universities, often being nearly the only ones who pay the university’s sticker price.

Foreign students are just another admissions basket for a good many elite universities, for the specific reason Mr Hinderaker gives: they pay full freight. The university likes them even more than, say, the children of big-donor billionaires, because various departments can target them for special programs like English courses at extra cost, which flows to the coffers of the English Department and justifies faculty positions.

Degrees from prestigious US universities like MIT are status symbols for the wealthy third-world families that send their offspring there. In that, they function in exactly the same way that Sam Bankman-Fried's MIT degree functioned: it was a status symbol that gave Sam the cachet of merit that, as a hyperactive adolescent unable to concentrate on routine scientific or mathematical tasks, wouldn't have gained him competitive admission to MIT and thus the credibility he needed to run a financial Ponzi scheme. In this, MIT was complicit.

Like the foreign students who are able to buy their way into an MIT degree, Sam's parents got him in via a special basket, presumably using a network of faculty and administrative insider favors and obligations, that allowed him to hitchhike on the prestige of the very different students who came in via the meritocratic basket.The question continues to be, what are the relative sizes of the different baskets? MIT and other elite schools are selling their prestige and giving the purchasers preferential treatment based on the reputation of an entirely separate applicant group that's admitted on merit.

The first link above continues,

Let’s be clear: nobody at MIT could be considered a member of an oppressed class. They are in the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. An MIT degree is a ticket to the top of the economic ladder, and chances are you are close to being there already.

This applies even more to wealthy families from African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries who send their offspring to MIT for status symbol degrees.

But this raises, or at least ought to raise, another set of questions. There's a significant population of US middle-class families whose lives are preoccupied with the elite-school admissions rat race. Will those students or their parents ever be up in arms that their efforts are exploited by the elite schools that can merchandise their reputations to domestic billionaires or wealthy foreign families to let them buy admission for their offspring because it will give the impression that the wealthy kids have competed for it with the domestic kids working their tails off for an Ivy admission?

They ought to, but they won't. I'll get into this.