Who dismantled our baloney meters? Biological males excel in women’s collegiate sports

J. Budziszewski, a natural law scholar at the University of Texas, wrote a book titled Written on the Heart, in which he argues that all human beings know the difference between right and wrong. Budziszewski calls this capacity to recognize good and evil  our baloney meters. We know the difference between elemental truth and baloney without being taught. We know that murder is wrong without reading the Ten Commandments. We know child molestation is evil without consulting a psychology article.

Unfortunately, our universities believe that it is their job to dismantle our baloney meters, causing college students to be confused about right and wrong and about reality itself. For example, American universities now permit biological males to compete in women’s collegiate athletic contests. Thus a person with testicles and shoulders broader than Joy Behar’s ass (Greg Gutfeld’s phrase) can collect a trophy for winning a women’s swimming meet. That’s baloney.

Several state legislatures have passed laws banning biological males from competing in women’s sports. President Joe Biden’s handlers, channeling their inner Joseph Goebbels, introduced a federal regulation that permits  biological males to participate in girls’ athletic competition in colleges and schools. More baloney.

What happens to a nation that cannot distinguish between right and wrong? What happens to a society that refuses to recognize basic biology? What happens to a people who allow universities to dismantle our youths’ baloney meters?

America is devolving into an Orwellian society. If we continue down this path, our nation will resemble Russia during the Stalin era or Germany when the Nazis were in power.  Hitler, after all, wanted to create a new national church that would replace the Bible with Mein Kampf.  Now that’s baloney!

We must repair our baloney meters. We must denounce societal forces that distort basic principles of reality and our innate sense of what is right and wrong.  We must stop universities from forcing college students to take out burdensome loans to pay for educational experiences that are intentionally designed to leave them confused, alienated, and morally adrift.

Reality sucks in flyover country

I don’t give a shit about the media elites, the coastal elites, the influencers, the financial moguls, and the assholes, who inhabit Hollywood and our universities. I live in a different world, a world as different from the world of Nancy Pelosi and Don Lemon as Mongolia differs from France. 

I am in a Louisiana rehab hospital recovering from a stroke. Over the past two weeks, I have met the people who do the real work in the United States: the first responders, the nurses, the emergency room staffers, the occupational therapists, the physical therapists, and the medical technicians.

Today, I met an occupational therapy assistant, whose story I would like to share. Laura is in her early 20s and works two jobs. She recently married a man who is a fire department dispatcher and also works as a photographer on the side. They want to have children but they can’t afford the added expense. They are burdened by credit card debt, including the loan that Laura’s husband took out to buy an engagement ring.

In spite of the fact that they’re working four jobs, Laura and her husband barely making ends meet. The payments they make on their credit cards barely cover the interest, so their credit card debt is not going down. In addition, Laura has student loans, which she has not had to pay due to the Covid crisis. If she is required to resume making monthly loan payments, her family’s frugal budget will be completely wrecked.

I gave Laura a little advice. She and her husband have equity in their home, told her that she and her husband should take out a home equity loan and pay off their credit card debt. I warned her, however, that they must have the discipline not to use their credit cards again or their debt will continue creeping up.

I could give Laura no guidance about her student loans because no one knows what federal policy will be.Will students’ loans be forgiven? Will students be forced to resume making monthly payments in a few months? Will the Biden administration‘s new income based repayment plan be good for Laura and her family?

Something is wrong when a young couple working four jobs in high-demand fields can’t make ends meet. Why are we focusing on transgender athletes instead of people like Laura—people living in flyover country in an economy that does not allow them to prosper? Why are we sending weapons and ammunition to Ukraine instead of strengthening our education system, which is near collapse?

It is clear to me now that flyover country is a colony that is being exploited by the coastal elites. The powerful are thriving while the people who do the real work in this country are sinking into poverty. The people dwelling in the heartland are decent people. They are not homophobes, transphobes, or white nationalists. They simply want to reap the benefits of hard work and maintain the lifestyle that their parents enjoyed. 

 What a tragedy that the media elites, the universities, the legal system, and the federal government despise the people who love our country and want to make it better. The smug oligarchs who are prospering now may believe that the status quo will last forever. But it won’t last forever.

They should remember that the Russian nobility were wiped out by the bolsheviks at the end of the first world war, and that the German middle class was obliterated by political violence, inflation, racist hysteria, and finally the Nazis.

Turning adults into infants: Going to college in the era of wokeness

 Early this month, Students at American University petitioned college leaders to place Narcan--an antidote for drug overdoses--in university dormitories. Why? Because an AU student was hospitalized recently from drug poisoning. 

“To wait to implement Narcan at AU is unethical and deadly," the petition argued. "Students will continue to use substances during college, and it is in the interest of their health to prepare for action."

At the University of Houston, a student committed suicide by jumping from an upper floor of a classroom building--the third student to die that way. The solution, student advocates suggested, was to modify the structure with "anti-suicidal infrastructure," such as bars or nets.

According to recent studies, many college students suffer from "food insecurity." They're not hungry, but they're worried about food. 

What to do? Open food pantries where students can pick up free food. Without free food, students might have to switch to cheaper cellphone plans. The horror!

College students have problems. Indeed, they've always had problems. Many are depressed and impoverished, and quite a few experiment with alcohol and illegal drugs.

Whose job is it to deal with college students' daily challenges? University leaders declare that it is their job. They promise to cheerfully deal with all student problems if only they can get enough federal money to hire more well-paid administrators to focus on the crisis of the hour.

I'm okay with that. But here's the thing. College administrators have become so focused on their students' social problems that they've forgotten their core mission: to ensure that students get a solid education that will prepare them to be mature adults who can function in the real world.

As we have seen recently, law students at Stanford University shouted down a federal appellate judge who had been invited to speak on campus. At San Francisco State University, Riley Gaines, an invited speaker who argued that men shouldn't compete in women's varsity sports, was assaulted with threats and obscenities and had to be escorted out of the speaking venue by the police.

Colleges have been converted from learning institutions to nursies for pampered adults who behave like infants. Our universities like this state of affairs because their students have become so stupid that they're willing to take out student loans to be treated like babies.

Riley Gaines was shouted down at San Francisco State University.

Froma Harrop Has Spoken: The Democrats Will Show Kamala Harris the Exit Door

 Syndicated columnist Froma Harrop is a faithful spear carrier for the Democratic Party. It was Harrop who publicly suggested that Bernie Sanders was a racist ("racist lite")when he was battling Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party's presidential primaries in 2016.  Harrop's views seldom depart from those of the Democratic Party's insiders.

Thus, I was startled to read Harrop's scathing criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris in a recent op-ed essay. Harris, Harrop wrote, has a "record of problematic conduct" and gaffes "and doesn't understand that California swagger married to identity politics is not universally loved by American voters."

Harrop professes to be mystified by Biden's choice of Harris as vice president. "Why Biden made her his running mate floors me to this day." 

Harrop even goes so far as to challenge Harris's status as a member of an oppressed minority. "Harris'[s] mother was a medical researcher from India and her father a Jamaica-born professor of economics at Stanford," Harrop observed. "She was hardly a disadvantaged victim of Jim Crow." Ouch!

In my mind, Froma Harrop's flaming denunciation of Kamala Harris is a clear signal that the Democrats are dumping Harris before the 2024 presidential race. I certainly hope so.

Perhaps President Biden could find a quiet post for Kamala to get her off the national stage. She'd make a great U.S. Ambassador to Chad.

69,000 students filed Borrower-Defense Claims Against the Universtiy of Phoenix: Zero Have Been Approved

 Recently, someone filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Department of Education. How many Borrower Defense claims have students filed against the University of Phoenix (UP), the requester asked, and how were these claims resolved?

DOE's FOIA Service Center zipped back a reply, and the response is interesting. More than 69,000 UP students filed Borrower Defense claims against the for-profit school over the past seven years.  Almost 20,000 of these claims were denied, and ZERO have been approved.

Borrower Defense claims are complaints filed by students with DOE claiming that their college misled them in some way about the education the college provided. For example, the college might give false information about:

[T]he transferability of credits, job placement rates, completion and withdrawal rates, graduates' future earning potential, career services, the cost of attendance, the amount of federal student aid, and accreditation status . . . .

If DOE concludes that a student's complaint is valid, it will cancel that student's federal college loans. 

President Biden's DOE has been receptive to Borrower Defense claims and has canceled almost $14 billion in student debts owed by 890,000 people who attended for-profit colleges. 

In Sweet v. Cardona, DOE settled a class action suit by granting debt relief to 200,000 students who attended more than 150 for-profit colleges. The cost of the settlement was $6 billion. 

Several famous for-profit schools were named in that settlement, including DeVry University, Grand Canyon University, and Walden University. The University of Phoenix was omitted. Why?

Perhaps because UP is owned by Apollo Global Management and the Vistria Group, two private equity firms with important political connections. 

Marty Nesbitt is the co-CEO of Vistria. He is a close personal friend of President Obama and served as treasurer for Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Currently, he is the chair of the Obama Foundation, which is in charge of planning the Obama Presidential Center. 

Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management, significantly contributes to both Democratic and Republican politicians. According to a 2021 article, Apollo has made $16 million in political contributions since 1990 and spent $34 million on lobbyists since 1998 (citing OpenSecrets.org).

On the other hand, perhaps the University of Phoenix has never misled anyone or misrepresented anything over the past seven years.  That would explain why 69,000 students or former students filed Borrower Defense claims against UP since 2016, and none have been declared valid by DOE.

Marty Nesbitt, co-CEO of the Vistria Group

Three quarters of a million student borrowers have filed "borrower defense" claims against colleges: They want their student loans canceled

 Dahn Shaulis posted a provocative commentary yesterday on Higher Education Inquirer. He reported on the recent settlement of Sweet v. Cardona, a class-action lawsuit accusing the U.S. Department of Education of mishandling borrower defense claims. 

In essence, the plaintiffs claimed they took out federal student loans to attend schools that misrepresented their offerings or violated various state laws.  As Shaulis pointed out, nearly all the schools affected by the lawsuit are for-profit colleges.

Under the settlement terms, DOE will cancel federal student-loan debt owed by 200,000 borrowers. The cost: about $6 billion. This is in addition to the $ 7.9 billion in loan relief to 690,000 students under the terms of earlier borrower-defense settlements.

Fourteen billion dollars in canceled loans owed by 890,000 students: that's a lot of misconduct. Which schools have been named by students filing borrower defense claims?

DOE attached an appendix to its announcement of the Sweet litigation listing more than 150 schools. The list of accused malefactors--almost all for-profit institutions--includes a for-profit law school and a for-profit Caribbean medical school.

As we might expect, the word has gotten out among student borrowers that President Biden's DOE is much more receptive to borrower defense claims than President Trump's callous crew.  As Mr. Shaulis reported, there are now 750,000 pending borrower defense claims, and they keep rolling in at the rate of 16,000 a month.

I'm all in favor of DOE's generosity toward students who took out federal loans to attend for-profit institutions and didn't get their money's worth. I have no sympathy for the for-profit colleges, many of which are owned by private equity funds that don't give a flip about the quality of education their institutions deliver.

Nevertheless, it is not feasible for DOE to continue entering into large borrower-defense settlements unless it cracks down on the chief offender--the for-profit college industry.

Basically, DOE is behaving like a wealthy parent who repeatedly pays the damages for a profligate son's mayhem without demanding that the kid stop misbehaving.  

Biden Administration's Proposed Income-Driven Repayment Plan for Student Debtors is a Disaster

 Everything Everywhere, All at Once. That's a good description of the Department of Education's handling of the federal student-loan program. From every perspective and by any measure, the program is a disaster.

Even before COVID, the program was in crisis. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos admitted in a 2018 speech that only one out of four borrowers were paying down the principal and interest on their loans. And she reported that about 20 percent of borrowers were either delinquent on their loans or in default.

But why dwell on evil tidings?  Shortly after Betsy resigned from the Trump administration, her speech was removed from the web. 

Then came the COVID pandemic, and the feds paused all student-loan debt collection. Thus, 43 million college borrowers stopped making monthly loan payments without penalty and without accruing interest. This pause has now lasted three years.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the cost of the loan repayment pause was $155 billion as of December of last year. And that cost continues going up as each day goes by.

To add fuel to the flames--the Biden Administration is rolling out a modified income-based repayment plan, which is about as close as one can get to free money.

Under the new plan, undergraduate borrowers will only pay 5 percent of their discretionary annual income on their student loans, which is generously defined as the amount over 225 percent of the federal poverty-level guidelines.

For example, college graduates in three-member households will only pay 5 percent of their annual income over $55,935. Thus, grads making $50,000 a year will make monthly payments of zero, regardless of how much they borrowed!

Our scatter-brained Department of Education estimates this plan will cost the taxpayers $138 billion over ten years--chicken feed!

However, the Penn Wharton Budget Model projects the cost to be more than double DOE's estimate--$333 billion to $361 billion.

Why are the estimates so different? Because Penn Wharton reasonably predicts that more borrowers will sign up for this new easy-peasy repayment plan. 

Currently, about a third of eligible student debtors participate in an income-based repayment plan.  Penn Wharton estimates that 70 to 75 percent of student borrowers will sign up for the new program because most borrowers will only be required to make token payments (or no payments) on their student loans. 

Penn Wharton also predicts that students will take out bigger loans when they realize the new income-based repayment plan is breathtakingly generous.  If that happens, the cost of the program will be even higher.

In short, the Department of Education's new income-based repayment plan is nutso.  It will encourage students to take out ever-larger student loans, which, in turn, will prompt colleges and universities to keep raising the cost of tuition.

DOE's revised income-based repayment plan is nutso.