"Somalis Gonna Somali. They’re A Deeply Tribal People"?

Intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds posted this on Instapundit, linking to a substack essay by Alex Berenson, who is smarter, although I'm not always sure by how much. Berenson says,

It is impossible to understand the massive chunk of the world that runs from Morocco 4,000 miles east to Pakistan and south across Africa without realizing the importance of tribes.

. . . What it shares more than anything is a commitment to tribe as the center of identity. In Arab and Muslim countries, cousin marriage helps sustain tribal identity; marriages between cousins account for two-thirds of all marriages in Pakistan and nearly as many in some Arab countries.

Wait a moment. Let's rewrite the first sentence: "It is impossible to understand the massive chunk of the world that runs 10,500 miles from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn in the pre-Colombian era without realizing the importance of tribes." This might sound appealing to Ivy Leaguers, but it's a meaningless statement. By the same token, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Did the names of ancient Romans have a tribal component?" It answered,

Yes, formal Roman names included a tribal component, though it was primarily used for administrative and political identification rather than daily address.

. . . The tribe component is distinct from the nomen, which designated a person’s gens or clan (e.g., the Julii or Cornelii).

While early tribes were geographical or based on old family territories, they eventually became administrative units that did not strictly reflect where a person lived.

Membership in a tribe served as prima facie proof of Roman citizenship.

As Glenn Reynolds would put it, Indigenous Americans gonna Indigenous American. Ancient Romans gonna Ancient Roman; any statement like this is a tautology, and Alex Berenson has said precisely nothing, but I'm sure Cornell undergraduates would disagree. And Glenn Reynolds is a brilliant law professor, huh?

If "tribalism" doesn't explain the penchant of Somali immigrants in large groups to commit fraud, what does? Here's another data point, linked just a few posts down at Instapundit:

Nice work @CarleenJohn1970.

One of our local reporters hitting the ground asking questions.

Give her a follow! https://t.co/JJiAq5pmyb pic.twitter.com/6WOuk0NGUS

— PNW Conservative (@PNWConservative) December 30, 2025

The impllcation might be that one group of Somalis in Washington State, many hundreds of miles from Minnesota, is doing the same sort of thing because they're Somalis, which means they're "tribal", or something like that. But this tells us nothing at all, except that like many other groups all over the world and throughout history, they're "tribal". This does nothing to explain day care centers without children.

I think a better approach is what I suggested in yesterday's post, that "faith-based NGOs" appear to have had a uniform agenda of sponsoring large-scale immigration by specific national groups into designated communities in the US interior, to the point that they're disruptive of the communities they target. This includes Venezuelans to Aurora, CO and El Paso, TX; Haitians to Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA; and now Somalis to places like Minneapolis, MN, St Cloud, MN, and Federal Way, WA.

The NGOs' overall strategy, which appears to be uniform across the dozen or so biggest, appears to have been to industrialize the Refugee Act of 1980, which helpfully redefined "refugee" for the purposes of US immigration:

The 1980 Refugee Act aligned U.S. law with language used by the United Nations, defining a refugee as anyone who is unable or unwilling to return to their home country because of “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution” due to race, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, religion, or national origin.

Importantly, this has been our most inclusive definition to date, removing conditions based on people’s nationalities, the timing of their displacement, or the countries from which they were forced to seek refuge.

The Refugee Act created the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) to rigorously vet refugees abroad using consistent criteria, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to ensure that new arrivals are provided with the services needed to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. Funding was provided to contract with a network of vetted and monitored community-based agencies like IINE to provide welcome, housing assistance, connection to federal benefits and local services, English language training, cultural orientation, career support, and legal services.

Before these offices were established, refugee admissions and resettlement could be ad hoc and inconsistent, subject to debate during an active crisis and resulting in different arrangements for different populations. USRAP and ORR were an investment in fairness, better planning, and smoother integration.

In other words, a new, much more inclusive definition of "refugee" was linked with funding, primarily to NGOs, that provided a wide range of social services to "refugee" groups. Some, like Somalis, were identified and brought in en masse to designated destinations where they could efficiently receive benefits via those same NGOs. New groups, like Venezuelans, Haitians, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and so forth, were desingated as a result of the separate Immigration Act of 1990.

This instituted a range of liberalization measures that have recently become controversial, including H1B visas, Temporary Protected Status for certain groups not qualifying as "refugees", and a diversity visa lottery, which admitted the Brown shooter Claudio Neves Valente.

The Immigration Act of 1990 helped permit the entry of 20 million people over the next two decades, the largest number recorded in any 20 year period since the nation’s founding.

TemporarY Protected Status greatly increased the populations of indigent immigrants who would require the industrialized, mass resettlement services the NGOs provided. On one hand, the mass immigrant groups were identified, recruited, flown in, and resettled as cohesive cultural communities in small cities in the US interior that could be given efficiently customized treatment. Another advantage was that, resettled according to this paradigm, they received services in their native language, reducing the incentive to assimilate or learn English.

The services the NGOs offered, as we saw in earlier instances like Springfield, OH and Aurora, CO, were wide-ranging. They included autos made available without licenses, registration, or insurance, and apartment units that could be rented from slumlords without reference to local regulations. They certainly included job training, English language, day care, medical, and legal services that could be billed against federal aid without the need to verify whether the individuals were actually receiving those services.

These are features of the whole NGO industrialized resettlement paradigm, which disincentivize assimilation and maintain migrant populations in a semi-permanent depdendent status, because this benefits the NGOs. Large-scale fraud is going to be an ongoing feature of these programs; it has little to do with the particular qualities of the migrant communities. "Tribal" is a meaningless term that does nothing to identify any specific problem.

The ultimate solution is going to have to be to rewrite the legislation that's created the current environment. Executive orders that stop one or another point problem, or temporary stopping of aid to one or another state, won't solve problems that have 45 or 35 years legislative history.

All Of A Sudden, Everyone's Jumping On The Somali Fraud Bandwagon

🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable

We ALL… pic.twitter.com/E3Penx2o7a

— Nick shirley (@nickshirleyy) December 26, 2025

Just yesterday, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer called for deportations and denaturalizations of Somali fraudsters:

I have three words regarding Somalis who have committed fraud against American taxpayers: Send them home. If they’re here illegally, deport them immediately; if they’re naturalized citizens, revoke their citizenship and deport them quickly thereafter. If we need to change the law to do that, I will. Our nation will not tolerate those who take advantage of our charity and refuse to assimilate into our culture.

But just like cameras are everywhere, the internet is forever. Via the Daily Caller, Minnesotans Begged GOP Rep To Stop The Somalis Over A Decade Ago — He Told Them It Was Impossible:

Minnesotans begged House Majority Whip Tom Emmer more than a decade ago to halt the flood of Somali refugees to the area, but the lawmaker scolded them for their concerns.

Minnesota’s Somali population is back in the spotlight after YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video canvassing multiple Somali-run childcare centers accused of fraud. However, A resurfaced audio clip from “This American Life” shows that voters were concerned about mass Somali migration long before the recent controversy.

In an episode that aired in October 2016, journalist Zoe Chace narrated portions of the story, including a reflection on a July 2015 town hall event at Aces Bar in downtown St. Cloud. Describing the room as packed, Chace said one constituent told Emmer that he believed most people in the bar “are here to find out how you feel about assimilation of immigrants,” before playing a clip from the event.

“We did not ask for those Somalis. Nobody asked us if we, in St. Cloud, want those Somalis. And we understand that social groups, like the Lutheran social service and the Catholic charities, they’re dumping them in areas like St. Cloud,” the man could be heard stating.

. . . In the recorded town hall, Emmer pushes back on the man, with Chace describing the lawmaker as firing “a warning shot at the implicit racism” directed at Somalis. As Emmer argues that Somalis are one of “the fastest-assimilating populations,” prompting audible groans of disapproval.

Although attention to the Somali fraud problem in Minnesota has been building for several weeks, Nick Shirley's 42-minute video, embedded above, put things in clear focus. The Somali immigration problem is starting to look like just another special case of the bigger issues raised most effectively by City Journal during the 2024 presidential campaign:

Among [Charleroi, Pa's] old guard, frustrations are starting to boil over. Instead of being used to revitalize these communities, these residents argue, resources get redirected to the new arrivals, who undercut wages, drive rents up, and, so far, have failed to assimilate. Worst of all, these residents say, they had no choice—there was never a vote on the question of migration; it simply materialized.

This is the same grievance that was raised by the man in the 2015 St Cloud, MN town meeting: nobody got to vote on the migrants. And the St Cloud residents pointed out another problem that surfaced in last year's campaign controversies: the immigrants are settled en masse in selected minicipalities by faith-based NGOs. I askd Chrome AI mode, "Have faith-based NGOs been involved in settling Somalis in Minnesota?" It answered,

Yes, faith-based NGOs like Lutheran Social Services (LSS) of Minnesota and Catholic Charities were significantly involved in helping settle Somali refugees in Minnesota, alongside government agencies and community groups, providing essential services like housing, employment help, and English classes, especially as Somalis began arriving in large numbers in the 1990s.

But even fraud perpetrated by particular immigrant groups is just part of the overall picture. Estimates of the monetary amount are steadily increasing:

It’s a very real possibility that the United States is looking at over $2.5 trillion/year in fraud from state and federal entitlements.

That’s more than next year’s estimated federal budget deficit.

This is a national security issue. https://t.co/6v0erL5IpZ

— TimOnPoint (@TimOnPoint) December 30, 2025

It's a bit odd that a single video by an unknown investigator managed to wake everyone up over the sleepiest of holiday periods. I don't think respectable media had expected to get back to work until Martin Luther King's Birthday, if not President's Day. And an unlikely focus of the story is Minnesota Gov Tim Walz:

One of the things I find most odd about Walz is that he constantly seeks the spotlight, even though that spotlight hasn't been very friendly to him. Walz is one of those politicians who definitely doesn't grow on the public when they get to know him more. The public outside of his home state, that is. I don't know what's in the water in Minnesota that makes him so popular there.

It's indicative of how thin the Democratic bench is that they thought that Walz was a viable national candidate in 2024. I'm still convinced that the reason Kamala Harris chose him as a running mate was that he was the only option whom she could feel smarter than. She said that she just hit it off with him better than his rivals, probably because he seems dumb as a box of rocks.

In fact, legacy media hadn't been covering the Somali fraud story seriously until the Nick Shirley post. As of December 13,

The massive billion-dollar fraud allegedly committed by Somalis in Minnesota is still being submerged by the broadcast networks in favor of performative outrage at President Donald Trump’s statements at public events disparaging the Somalis and Somalia.

Early in the week, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters found ABC and NBC only touched on the Minnesota fraud in 21% of their Somali coverage. The vast majority of verbiage was negative evaluations of Trump. Add in CBS, and the fraud fraction went up to 31%, in part because "Face The Nation" host Margaret Brennan interviewed Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar about it.

The brilliance of Shirley's video is its visual quality: stopping by day care centers with no children, the misspelled "Learing Center" sign, or the Somalis calling the cops on Shirley for trespassing. It's made to be watched on video; print media will never be quick enough to answer it.

For now, the best measure of the story's impact will be how soon Gov Walz either drops out of next year's governor race or resigns entirely -- or if he does anything at all.

If There's A Formula, AI Will Help You Find It

This piece says more than intended about AI:

A study conducted by Anaïs Galdin from Dartmouth and Jesse Silbert from Princeton analyzed cover letters for tens of thousands of job applications on Freelancer.com. The researchers discovered that after the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, the cover letters became longer and better-written. However, this improvement in quality led companies to place less emphasis on the cover letters, making it more difficult to identify qualified candidates from the applicant pool. Consequently, the hiring rate and average starting wage decreased.

I've been out of the job market for some years, but I don't believe that, at least after I went into tech, I ever submitted a formal cover letter with my resume. I either mailed the resume in to the individual listed on the help wanted ad, or I e-mailed it, with at most a note saying something like, "I'm applying for the ___ job you advertised on Monster.com" or whatever other site. What on earth would a fancy cover letter have to do with it?

So I'm not sure what this Ivy study is trying to prove -- a resume, at least in a field like tech, should give detailed information on skills aimed at specific tech jobs. Why pad things with extra BS in a cover letter that they may just toss aside before they go to your resume?

Once I'd been on the job market, I recognized there are certain interviews that aren't going to work out; for instance, if you're interviewing with several other candidates and you see who they are, if there's a DEI type in the group, write that opportunity off. Life 101.

If you're interviewing with a company that's run by the HR department, the HR rep is going to get all antsy that you were at your last job for less than maybe a dozen years. No matter that in the corporate environment for just about anyuone's lifetime at this point, there are mergers, downsizings, acquisitions, and people who sincerely intended to spend a career at one place are out the door without warning -- it's only prudent to have situational awareness and keep your resume and skill set up to date. HR reps will never listen to that.

So I just don't know what this whole cover letter study is all about. Maybe MBA programs teach you to write cover letters. Life 101 isn't about cover letters. The story goes on,

Moreover, with the increased volume of applications, employers are turning to automated interviews. A survey by recruiting software firm Greenhouse in October revealed that 54 percent of US job seekers have experienced an AI-led interview. While virtual interviews gained popularity during the pandemic in 2020, the use of AI to ask questions has not made the process any less subjective.

I'm not sure what an "AI-led interview" is. Are you talking to a screen with a computer-generated image of an HR rep aking you, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" (My standard answer to that one was, "In the tech field, people work at jobs that didn't even exist five years ago. I'm not sure I can predict what job I'll be working in five years from now." I don't think I ever got an offer for a job where the HR rep asked me that kind of question; I just wrote it off. Life 101.

But I'm beginning to see how people can use AI to their own benefit. If I were on the job market and beginning to think I was getting AI-led interviews, I would ask Chrome AI mode, which I don't have to pay to use, what types of questions are in AI-led interviews and what AI expects. So, just for fun, I did just that. I asked, "What is an AI-led job interview, what kinds of questions can I expect, and how can I answer them to my best advantage?" Some of the answers I got included:

• Asynchronous Video: You record video responses to on-screen or verbal prompts; the AI analyzes your word choice, tone, and sometimes facial expressions.
• Conversational Chatbots: Text-based interviews via messaging platforms where an AI agent asks screening questions.
• Voice/Phone: AI agents conduct real-time phone calls, analyzing verbal responses and delivery.
• Role-Specific Technicals: Questions targeting keywords from the job description, such as "Describe your experience with stakeholder management".
• Mirror Job Keywords: Incorporate industry-standard terms and specific skills found in the job description to help the algorithm match your profile to the role.
• Maintain Technical Professionalism: Look directly at the camera (not the screen) to simulate eye contact, speak clearly at a moderate pace, and ensure a neutral, well-lit background.

So all that's really changed here is that you're being interviewed by a human-like robot instead of a robot-like human. We're getting into basic questions of how you want to live your life, whether you're letting human-like robots or robot-like humans tell you what to do. I asked Chrome AI mode, "In what potential fields or jobs am I least likely to have to submit to an AI-led job interview?" The answers included,

• Construction: Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and roofing professionals.
• Specialized Operators: Dredge, pile driver, and motorboat operators.
• Maintenance: Rail-track maintenance, highway workers, and floor sanders.
• Frontline Medical: Registered nurses, surgical assistants, and paramedics.
• Government & Public Safety: Firefighters, police crisis negotiators, and 911 dispatchers often follow rigid, human-led civil service protocols.
• High-End Craft: Artisans, restorers of rare instruments, and jewelry designers whose work depends on unique human judgment.
• Performers: Stage actors, live musicians, and professional athletes.

Somehow I sense a benign Mike Rowe-like figure hovering behind this. If you want to live a worthwhile life, stay away from four-year liberal arts colleges. Go to trade school or get other specialized training, unless you have really unusual talent of some other sort. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of human-like robots or robot-like humans -- but it's never taken AI to explain that to you, although you can get good information if you learn to ask AI the right questions.

If you're polishing your cover letter with AI, you're letting human-like robots and robot-like humans run your life. Learn to run AI, and don't let AI run you.

Is AI A Political Issue?

I notice a piece in Politico, The Democratic Split Over Whether to Befriend AI — or Vilify It, that takes 2800 words to tell us that Demnocrats are split over AI. Well, everyone is split over AI, in part because nobody seems to be able to tell us what AI is. I think what's generally meant falls within the category of "generative AI", which creates "new" content using a combination of natural language processing and massive data search.

For example, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Please write me a 500-word report on George Washington". It answered, in part,

George Washington (1732–1799) was the foundational figure of the United States, serving as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution and as the nation’s first president. His leadership style, defined by a commitment to republicanism and the voluntary relinquishing of power, set the precedents for the American executive branch.

Military Leadership and the Revolution

Washington’s military career began in the Virginia militia during the French and Indian War, but his historical significance peaked in 1775 when he was appointed to lead the Continental Army. Despite facing superior British forces, chronic supply shortages, and internal political dissent, Washington’s primary achievement was the preservation of his army. His strategic patience and decisive victories at Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown eventually forced a British surrender. More importantly, his refusal to accept absolute power after the war—symbolized by resigning his commission to Congress in 1783—cemented his reputation as a "Cincinnatus" figure who prioritized civilian rule over military dictatorship.

This really isn't bad. I wouldn't want to turn it in as a middle-school history assignment, since the vocabulary and concepts are pretty advanced, but I could probably modify the request by adding "as if written by a 13-yeae-old" and get a lot closer. But this simply magnifies the Cliff's Notes problem: back in the day, a graduate assistant needed a set of Cliff's Notes for any texts covered in freshman comp so he could catch plagiarists. Now, it would be a lot harder to allege, "This looks like you got it out of AI", since the range of possible outputs is much wider and harder to prove.

This also goes to the nature of education. If the object of college classes is to produce people who can write papers as though a machine had written them, then AI will replace many four-year degrees at far less cost. Let's face it, this is a major problem. My Google news feed is already aware of it. Instead of linking, say, to the Washington Post, it will embed a video report prefaced by an AI-generated news story. It carries a warning, "This material was generated by AI, which can make mistakes".

But the story is written in complete, grammatical, idiomatic sentences that are on topic and more or less informative. There are human Washington Post reporters who can't do that well. In cases like this, it seems to me that the Washington Post can fire a lot of reporters and editors and produce a better product at less cost. This can be a political issue: maybe we need laws that restrict the amount of news that can be reported by AI and require a certain number of less capable humans. Yeah, that'll work, kinda like DEI that isn't based on race but outright discriminates against talent.

Then I took the next step: I asked Chrome AI mode, "Please write me three paragraphs that look like they were written by David Glann in The New Yorker". It dodged the question, but it did show me how this could definitely be done:

David Glann, writing for The New Yorker, typically examines the intersection of high culture and the quiet indignities of modern existence. His prose is marked by a droll, slightly detached elegance, often punctuated by specific, almost tactile observations of urban life. A piece by Glann might begin with a sensory detail—the precise, metallic click of a turnstile or the specific shade of grey in a Tuesday morning fog—before expanding into a meditation on the shared anxieties of the professional class.

His middle paragraphs often drift into a characteristic blend of erudition and self-deprecation, weaving references to obscure literature or art history into the mundane fabric of a commute. He possesses a keen ear for the performative nature of intellectual life, often skewering the pretensions of his peers while simultaneously admitting his own complicity in them. The sentences are long and rhythmic, carrying the reader through a series of clauses that mirror the wandering, inquisitive nature of a mind trying to find meaning in the architectural sprawl of Manhattan.

Ultimately, a Glann essay concludes by pulling back the lens, shifting from the specificities of a personal encounter to a broader, more philosophical vista. He has a gift for the "melancholy epiphany," where the smallness of the individual is contrasted against the vast, indifferent mechanisms of the city. His final lines often leave the reader in a state of contemplative unease, having been led gracefully to a conclusion that feels both surprising and, in retrospect, entirely inevitable.

I think it's telling me that if I paid it a little more, it would in fact write me a David Glann story, which is another way of saying David Glann is a semi-sophisticated hack who could indeed be replaced by a machine, and you could persuade the upper bourgeoisie to pay for it. So I went one step further: "Please write me the initial paragraph of a hypothetical John Updike story about a middle class guy in midlife crisis". Unbelievably, it came up with this:

Thomas felt the sudden, waxy weight of his own skin as he stood in the fluorescent glare of the suburban hardware store, clutching a brass deadbolt he didn’t know how to install. At forty-four, his life had become a series of quiet, repetitive geometries—the neat diagonal of the morning commute, the predictable cooling of his marriage, and the unsettling realization that his soul was being slowly replaced by the mortgage-backed security of his own routine. Outside, the autumn light slanted across the asphalt with a cruel, golden clarity, mocking the soft, spreading middle of a man who had once dreamed of soaring but had instead learned only how to settle.

You know whwt? This thing has potential. I think I could publish a New Yorker that the same audience would buy for a fraction of the cost, with new writers like Jonathan Christopher, Sarah Beriswanger, Lawrence Fromme -- I'm already working up their Wikipedia entries. This really should be against the law.

UPDATE: Please write the hypothetical first paragraph of a newly-discovered chapter of Moby Dick:

The Great Leviathan, though often portrayed as a creature of mindless malice, possesses a silence more profound than the deepest trenches of the Pacific. It is a quietude not of vacancy, but of an ancient, brooding intelligence that defies the frantic measurements of man’s harpoons. To look upon the unblinking eye of the whale is to witness a mirror of the primordial void, where the turbulent anxieties of the Pequod’s deck are swallowed whole by a vast, watery indifference.

Poppy Bush Nostalgia

I'm convinced that Victor Davis Hanson is actually an AI bot, but the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit are linking to his latest essay, Pseudo-Recessions:

As the 1992 campaign approached, incumbent president George H.W. Bush was seen as a shoo-in for reelection.

The First Gulf War ended in 1991 with a spectacular U.S. victory at the head of a coalition that had expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with few losses.

For much of 1991, Bush’s approval ratings hovered between 90 and 70 percent.

By February 1992, an obscure Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, emerged as the favorite Democratic nominee. But he was written off as having little chance to knock off the popular Republican incumbent president with far more foreign affairs experience.

Bush, however, had just lost his brilliant 1988 campaign manager, Lee Atwater, to cancer. And third-party prairie-fire candidate Ross Perot had entered the race, drawing off conservative Bush support.

I'm even older than Hanson, but my memory of 1992 is very different, as is my memory of 1980, for that matter. According to a 2015 essay by Jules Witcover in Politico,

The first Bush president, George Herbert Walker, never would have reached the Oval Office in 1989 had the 1980 presidential nominee, Ronald Reagan, not chosen him as his running mate. But heading into the convention in Detroit, it was not at all clear that Bush would be Reagan’s pick. . . . In 1974, when Vice President Gerald Ford became president in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation, Ford passed over Bush, regarded by many other party leaders as a quirky lightweight, as VP in favor of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Witcover goes on to outline that in 1980, Reagan hoped to enlist Gerald Ford as his vice presidential running mate on a "dream ticket", but once that idea fell apart, he was forced to fall back on Bush, who'd impressed him as a "wimp" in the primaries. He concludes that Poppy Bush's term, and then the political careers of his sons Dubya and Jeb, were

a wholly unanticipated outcome of an old and bizarre political episode in vice-presidential selection that unexpectedly put the first Bush on the path to the presidency, with his two sons after him. What, one could ask, would Ronnie think today if he knew what he hath wrought?

In 1988, Bush ran on the basis that he would represent Reagan's third term. But by 1992, he'd broken his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge by caving to Democrats in 1990 budget negotiations. This became fodder for his primary opponent Pat Buchanan, and it also gave credibility to Ross Perot's third-party campaign that portrayed Bush as part of a uniparty political establishment. But Bush himself repeatedly supplied episodes that further damaged his standing, like when, at a state dinner in Japan just before the 1992 primary season, he fainted and vomited onto Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's trousers.

During one of the presidential debates, he visibly checked his watch as a woman from the audience asked him a question. Following an episode at a grocers' convention where he appeared to be amazed at a supermarket scanner, media characterized him as being out of touch with everyday life. There was a similar episode on his Cigarette speedboat at Kennebunkport.

And on one hand, although Bush's approval reached 80% in the immediate wake of the First Gulf War in 1991, his failure to continue to Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein laid the seeds for another war a dozen years later, and there was an underlying sense of unfinished business in 1992. Certainly the 1991 Desert Storm victory did him no good by 1992. But Ed Driscoll, agreeing with Hanson, concludes in the Instapundit post,

But with Atwater having passed away from brain cancer in 1991, the following year, Bush looked utterly exhausted on the campaign trail, in sharp contrast to Clinton’s rockstar energy and charisma. While Rush Limbaugh was on the scene by 1992, there was no Fox News, no original era Drudge Report, no Blogosphere, and the DNC-MSM could still shape reality uncontested for millions of voters[.]

. . . One of my favorites was the DNC-MSM, in lockstep with their candidate Bill Clinton, pummeling Bush in the run-up to the 1992 election over a minor recession that Clinton described as “the worst economy in 50 years,” only to turn around and reveal that, as the Charlotte Business Journal wrote in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity.

Lee Atwater could promote Bush as Reagan's third term only as long as Bush was able to follow through, but he wasn't able to do that. Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, gave him something to work with. One take on the First Gulf War was that Bush needed it to distract attention from the fact that he'd had no domestic successes up to the fall of 1991, and without that distraction, he wouldn't be able to run a successful campaign in 1992. That he had a serious primary opponent in Pat Buchanan undescores this, as well as the fact that it wasn't just Bill Clinton who beat him in 1992, it was also the erratic Ross Perot.

Jules Witcover asked what Reagan might have thought of the outcome of choosing Bush as his runnong mate in 1980, but I'm not sure if this matters -- a measure of Trump's effectiveness is that he was able to end the putative Bush dynasty and the related Cheney faction of the Republican party. Witcover didn't anticipate this when he wrote in 2015; he really didn't even anticipate Trump.

The Bottom Of The Ivies

A week ago, I linked to YouTube testimony from a disaffected Brown student, Alex Shieh, who pointed out that applicants from designated prep schools that act as Ivy "feeders" have a big advantage over other applicants, and that the Ivy system is effectively designed around the wealthy and the upper bourgeoisie, whose offspring attend these schools. This simply repeats an observation about the Ivies that's become commonplace.

Then, earlier this week, I began to wonder if the Brown shooting rampage would affect Brown's standing in the US News college rankings. That in turn reminded me that Brown has traditionally been regarded as at the bottom of the Ivies. Chrome AI mode says, "In the mid-20th century, Brown was sometimes viewed as a 'poor relation' or 'on the fringe' compared to the older, more established social prestige of the 'Big Three'". However, this has changed: The bottom of the Ivies is now Dartmouth, which tied with Brown at 13 in the US News 2025 rankings. According to Ivy Coach Daily:

Dartmouth College rose in its US News ranking to [13th], up from 18th the prior year. Still, Dartmouth has the lowest ranking among the Ivies, which is largely the byproduct of the US News ranking methodology, which tends to benefit larger universities that often have a greater population of economically disadvantaged students (Dartmouth is the smallest school in the Ivy League).

The proportion of economically disadvantaged students among the Ivies is relative indeed, as Alex Shieh pointed out. But I'm intrigued that since I was a student at Dartmouth in the 1960s, its reputation has fallen so far, to the point that 2025 was a good year if it could just pull even with Brown. At the same link,

US News downgraded Brown University’s ranking to 13th place nationally for its 2025 edition, down from 9th in 2024.

Whew, Brown had to drop out of the top ten just so Dartmouth could pull even with it! I asked Chrome AI mode, "Has Dartmouth's position in the US News Rankings declined in recent years?" It replied,

Dartmouth College's ranking in U.S. News & World Report has trended slightly downward over the past 20 years, shifting from a consistent top 10 position in the early 2000s to the low-to-mid teens by 2025. 20-Year High: It frequently ranked #7 in the 1990s and maintained a top 10 presence (e.g., #9 in 2011) for much of the subsequent decade.

Current Standing: As of late 2025, Dartmouth is ranked #13 among National Universities, an improvement from its recent low of #18 in the 2024 edition.

So Dartmouth has moved from somewhere in the middle, below Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but above Brown, Cornell, and Penn, to the bottom, below Brown and consistently out of the top ten. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Has the Dartmouth Board of Trustees had any public reaction to Dartmouth's decline in college rankings?" It answered,

The Dartmouth Board of Trustees has not issued a formal, dedicated public statement reacting to recent fluctuations in college rankings. Instead, the administration and Board have generally adopted a stance of downplaying the significance of rankings as a primary measure of institutional success.

Key elements of their collective reaction and messaging in 2024 and 2025 include:

- Redefining Success: President Sian Beilock, in consultation with the Board, has stated that Dartmouth should be evaluated by the "knowledge we contribute" and the "caliber of leaders we produce" rather than "simply by prestige, or rankings, or endowment size". . .

- Focus on Internal Metrics: Recent Board discussions have focused on internal "priorities of impact" rather than external lists, specifically touting improvements in student mental health, campus housing, and financial aid expansion.

Blah blah blah. Nevertheless, I seem to recall there was a brouhaha some years ago when the admissions office, for whatever reason, reduced the proportion of athletes in its admissions quotas. I think it might be reasonable to surmise that this would have the effect of raising average test scores in an entering class, which in turn could impact its ranking. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Did Dartmouth reduce the number of admissions slots reserved for athletes?" It answered,

Yes, Dartmouth has reduced the number of admissions slots reserved for recruited athletes.

Starting in 2020, the college implemented a 10% reduction in the number of recruited athletes per entering class. This policy was established to provide the admissions office with more flexibility in shaping the incoming class and to balance the student body between athletic and other pursuits.

Key details regarding this reduction include:

- Targeted Reduction: The goal was specifically to reduce the number of "recruited" athletes in each class by 10%.

Now we're atarting to get someplace. Regular vistiors know that one of my favorite topics is the relative size of elite-school admissions quotas: if we acknowledge that elite schools traditionally treat public high school graduates applying on the basis of grades, SATs, and extracurriculars as just one admissions category among several, which may also include athletes, preppies, and legacies, what is the actual relative size of the "meritocratic" admissions quota?

The\ short answer is that this is a closely guarded secret among all the nominally "selective" schools. But we can estimate its size if we can get an idea of the relative size of the other major categories. Chrome AI mode gave part of the game away farther down in its answer:

Recent reports from late 2025 indicate that the admission of recruited athletes [at Dartmouth] has become more selective as a direct result of these reduced slots. While the number of recruited spots decreased, athletes still represent a significant portion of the student body, comprising roughly 19% of the undergraduate population as of late 2025.

But if the current proportion of athletes, admitted in a separate quota, is 19%, and this represents a reduction of 10%, then the previous quota must have been something more like 21%. In other words, even with a reduction, something like 20% of applicants to this elite school have always been admitted on the basis primarily of athletic ability, not intelligence, and Dartmouth has been able to increase its standing by slightly tweaking this quota. This is astonishing.

But in this post, I linked to a story in The Atlantic that said,

Less than 2 percent of the nation’s students attend so-called independent schools. But 24 percent of Yale’s class of 2024 attended an independent school. At Princeton, that figure is 25 percent. At Brown and Dartmouth, it is higher still: 29 percent.

So at Dartmouth, we can say with a fair degree of assurance that the quota for preppies is 29%, while the quota for athletes is 19%, or something at least close to those numbers, which puts just those two quotas at 48%, which amounts to nearly half of all those accepted in recent entering classes. But this leaves out quotas for other generally recognized groups, including legacies, foreign students, and children of celebrities, politicians, and major donors, not to mention DEI.

All of these quotas are probably relatively quite a bit higher than we might normally assume; I never would have imagined the quota for athletes would be as high as 19%, much less higher. If we give these others values in the 10-20% range, we can begin to surmise that the quota for public high school students applying on the basis of SATs, grades, and extracurriculars, the "meritocratic" group, is much lower than we might think -- I've estimated this at 20% here, but even that may be optimistic.

As I've said, a question that's been at the back of my mind ever since I was a Dartmouth undergraduate is why my schoolmates turned out to be so unexceptional. I'm still working on a satisfactory answer, but I think I'm making progress.

Brown VP For Public Safety and Emergency Management Placed On Leave

🚨 BREAKING: Brown University just put its police chief on LEAVE after the emergency response was horrifically BOTCHED, letting the shooter get away and kill an MIT professor

Trump administration is also INVESTIGATING.

BROWN MUST CLEAN HOUSE! Don't stop with him!

This was a… pic.twitter.com/RDAn66pvdy

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 23, 2025

Continuing the trend, most of the aggregators haven't picked this up. Via the UK Daily Mail,

University officials announced Monday that Rodney Chatman, the head of public safety at the school, was placed on leave effective immediately, and his day-to-day responsibilities were given to former Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements.

The decision comes amid intense scrutiny over the school's security policies in the wake of the December 13 mass shooting, during which students Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov were tragically killed and nine others left with injuries.

Remarkably, as I noted yesterday, Chatman had been on administrative leave for much of his time in his previous position, chief of the University of Utah campus police. At Brown, earlier this year, two campus police unions issued "no conficence" votes about him. It looks like it took the December 13 shootings to get anyone to listen. The Daily Mail continues,

School president Christina Paxson sent out a detailed letter to the Brown community acknowledging 'the anxiety, fear and stress' in the community on the back of the shooting and outlining the actions officials will make moving forward.

'I understand the gravity of the concerns about safety that follow a tragedy of the magnitude that Brown has suffered,' she wrote.

'I want to assure you of Brown’s deep commitment to take every possible action to increase the safety and security of our campus, with the goal of protecting our community from future harm.'

As I noted last week, the application deadline for the fall 2026 school year is January 5, which leaves families conaidering applying to Browm just enough time to reconsider their choice. I suspect this was one among several factors that gave the Brown Board of Fellows, which is what they call their board of trustees, the vapors. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Will the shootings affect Brown's college ranking?" It answered with remarkable complacency,

Major college ranking systems like U.S. News & World Report and The Wall Street Journal do not currently use "campus crime" or "safety statistics" as direct metrics in their ranking formulas. Consequently, a single tragic event such as the December 13, 2025, shooting at Brown University is unlikely to result in a direct drop in its numerical ranking.

I'm sure the Fellows on the Board found this vastly reassuring. It intrigues me that President Paxson was radio silent for much of last week. She issued a weepy letter on Friday, after the suspect's identity was released:

Nothing can fully bring closure to the lives that have been shattered by last weekend’s gun violence. Now, however, our community has the opportunity to move forward and begin a path of repair, recovery and healing.

. . . We recognize the profound anxiety and fear that members of our community and the surrounding region have experienced in recent days, and we hope this significant development provides some comfort, even as we continue to navigate the impacts of last weekend’s tragic violence. It is my hope that this news also will end the harmful and dangerous online targeting of members of the Brown community, arising from rampant and baseless speculation, some of it based on individuals’ ethnic origin, culture and religion.

. . . As we look ahead to healing and recovery, I am so proud of everything that makes us Brown.

Currrently, Brown is tied for 13 on the US News ranking. Strangely, its graduate engineering program, the poor quality of which was a factor in Neves Valente's shooting rampage, is nevertheless a relatively high 42. The Wall Street Journal ranking, behind a paywall, has Brown at 36, which is probably somewhat more realistic, but still on the high side. Dartmouth, my alma mater, is tied with Brown at 13 in the US News rankings, but at WSJ, it was at 57, probably also much more accurate.

I suspect that Brown's ratings will decline in next year's surveys. Other areas of pressure would include alumni, who'll be less willing to donate if they feel Brown has become a laughingstock, and the problem of lawsuits from victims -- the lack of cameras in the building and nearby campus areas, the slow campus police response, the fact that a homeless guy was living in the basement, and the fact that Neves Valente had been spotted on campus and his suspicious presence reported in previous weeks will be factors in lawsuits.

Add to this the factor that the main duty of any corporate board is to hire, evaluate, and fire the CEO, and the Brown Board of Fellows' options narrow. Nwevertheless, this past May,

A familiar face will continue to occupy the president’s office at Brown University for the next two years.

Brown President Christina H. Paxson’s contract was set to end on June 30, 2026, but the university’s Corporation unanimously approved a two-year extension earlier this month, according to a letter sent by Chancellor Brian T. Moynihan to the Brown community on Tuesday.

. . . “During a tumultuous time facing American higher education, Brown is fortunate to benefit from President Paxson’s steady and principled leadership,” Moynihan wrote. “We are excited that the University will continue to benefit from her strategic vision, boundless energy, unwavering dedication and fortitude during periods of momentous change. Our community has been made stronger by her sincere belief in all the good that Brown can do in the world.”

Townhall commented,

It has taken the university more than a week since the fatal shooting of two students to come to the decision to suspend Chatman.

But I now feel certain that at some point, we'll get another weepy letter from President Paxson, this one announcing her unanticipated decision to retire. I wish I could have listened in on the conference calls among the Fellows on the Board. Brown will have to settle numerous lawsuits, buy Paxson out of her contract, and pay outside attorneys and consultants. This will be an expensive time.