AI-generated phishing emails, including ones created by ChatGPT, present a potential new threat for security professionals, says Hoxhunt.
by Lance Whitney in Security for Tech Republic
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Amid all of the buzz around ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence apps, cybercriminals have already started using AI to generate phishing emails. For now, human cybercriminals are still more accomplished at devising successful phishing attacks, but the gap is closing, according to security trainer Hoxhunt’s new report released Wednesday.
Phishing campaigns created by ChatGPT vs. humans
Hoxhunt compared phishing campaigns generated by ChatGPT versus those created by human beings to determine which stood a better chance of hoodwinking an unsuspecting victim.
To conduct this experiment, the company sent 53,127 users across 100 countries phishing simulations designed either by human social engineers or by ChatGPT. The users received the phishing simulation in their inboxes as they’d receive any type of email. The test was set up to trigger three possible responses:
Success: The user successfully reports the phishing simulation as malicious via the Hoxhunt threat reporting button.
Miss: The user doesn’t interact with the phishing simulation.
Failure: The user takes the bait and clicks on the malicious link in the email.
The results of the phishing simulation led by Hoxhunt
In the end, human-generated phishing mails caught more victims than did those created by ChatGPT. Specifically, the rate in which users fell for the human-generated messages was 4.2%, while the rate for the AI-generated ones was 2.9%. That means the human social engineers outperformed ChatGPT by around 69%.
One positive outcome from the study is that security training can prove effective at thwarting phishing attacks. Users with a greater awareness of security were far more likely to resist the temptation of engaging with phishing emails, whether they were generated by humans or by AI. The percentages of people who clicked on a malicious link in a message dropped from more than 14% among less-trained users to between 2% and 4% among those with greater training.
The results also varied by country:
U.S.: 5.9% of surveyed users were fooled by human-generated emails, while 4.5% were fooled by AI-generated messages.
Germany: 2.3% were tricked by humans, while 1.9% were tricked by AI.
Sweden: 6.1% were deceived by humans, with 4.1% deceived by AI.
Current cybersecurity defenses can still cover AI phishing attacks
Though phishing emails created by humans were more convincing than those from AI, this outcome is fluid, especially as ChatGPT and other AI models improve. The test itself was performed before the release of ChatGPT 4, which promises to be savvier than its predecessor. AI tools will certainly evolve and pose a greater threat to organizations from cybercriminals who use them for their own malicious purposes.
On the plus side, protecting your organization from phishing emails and other threats requires the same defenses and coordination whether the attacks are created by humans or by AI.
“ChatGPT allows criminals to launch perfectly worded phishing campaigns at scale, and while that removes a key indicator of a phishing attack — bad grammar — other indicators are readily observable to the trained eye,” said Hoxhunt CEO and co-founder Mika Aalto. “Within your holistic cybersecurity strategy, be sure to focus on your people and their email behavior because that is what our adversaries are doing with their new AI tools.
“Embed security as a shared responsibility throughout the organization with ongoing training that enables users to spot suspicious messages and rewards them for reporting threats until human threat detection becomes a habit.”
Security tips or IT and users
Toward that end, Aalto offers the following tips.
For IT and security
Require two-factor authentication or multi-factor authentication for all employees who access sensitive data.
Give all employees the skills and confidence to report a suspicious email; such a process should be seamless.
Provide security teams with the resources needed to analyze and address threat reports from employees.
For users
Hover over any link in an email before clicking on it. If the link appears out of place or irrelevant to the message, report the email as suspicious to IT support or help desk team.
Scrutinize the sender field to make sure the email address contains a legitimate business domain. If the address points to Gmail, Hotmail or other free service, the message is likely a phishing email.
Confirm a suspicious email with the sender before acting on it. Use a method other than email to contact the sender about the message.
Think before you click. Socially engineered phishing attacks try to create a false sense of urgency, prompting the recipient to click on a link or engage with the message as quickly as possible.
Pay attention to the tone and voice of an email. For now, phishing emails generated by AI are written in a formal and stilted manner.
Santa Clara County, California, imposed some of the harshest Covid restrictions in America. A church and its members defied them — and became the targets of an unprecedented surveillance operation
Calvary Chapel San Jose, in Santa Clara County, CA. Pastor Mike McClure, center.
Long famous as the core of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County, California, also earned the distinction in the last three years as perhaps the most aggressive and punitive enforcer of pandemic restrictions in the country. On March 16, 2020, Santa Clara, along with a half-dozen other Bay Area counties, was the first in the nation to announce a shelter in place order, commanding all citizens to remain at home other than for specific activities that the county deemed essential, such as food shopping or medical care. It wasn’t until mid-October — seven months after the initial order — that Sara Cody, the head of the county’s public health department, began allowing indoor gatherings at churches, provided they were no more than 100 people or 25 percent of a facility’s capacity, whichever was fewer. At these limited gatherings face coverings and social distancing were required, and singing was banned.
San Jose’s Calvary Chapel, led by its pastor, Mike McClure, brazenly defied these orders. On May 24, 2020, McClure stated publicly that he would reopen the church the following week, regardless of the health department’s orders, and that he would never close the church again. After two months of isolation, many congregants were teetering toward despair. They were suffering greatly from loneliness, depression, and crippling anxiety — the church was their community, and returning to the normalcy of its rituals and in-person fellowship was vital for their mental, spiritual, and physical well-being.
True to McClure’s word, at the end of May Calvary began holding indoor gatherings, often with hundreds of worshipers, a large portion of whom were without masks, in breach of distancing rules, and singing. This set off a collision between the openly defiant church and the county that culminated in two lawsuits. One, in federal court, in June 2020, by the church against the county, claiming the restrictions violated a list of constitutional rights, and the other, in state court, in October 2020, by the county against the church, for “flagrantly and repeatedly” violating public health orders and nonpayment of fines.
Both cases are still in litigation, but extensive legal documents, totaling more than a thousand pages, reveal a county, and its health department, that went to extraordinary, and potentially unlawful, lengths to enforce its decrees. These efforts include levying more than $2 million in fines against Calvary, and a multi-faceted surveillance program of the church and its members, breathtaking in scope and reminiscent of totalitarian regimes, rather than an American county health department — the spy operation included stakeouts, forced in-person monitoring of prayer groups and other intimate activities, and tracking the cellular mobility data of churchgoers.
The county’s public health orders, which were applied incongruently to different entities, and its enforcement mechanisms raise important legal and ethical issues about government infringements on citizens’ rights related to privacy, assembly, and religion that run well beyond the context of the pandemic and have potential implications for Americans regardless of their religious or political affiliation.
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AN AGGRESSIVE COUNTY, AND ARBITRARY RULES
From the outset, Santa Clara had an unusual fervor for enforcing its health orders, and for punishing those who didn’t comply. By one analysis, as of March 2021, the county had issued an astonishing $4.9 million in fines to nearly 400 businesses and entities for pandemic rules infractions. By comparison, six other Bay Area counties combined had collected just $82,000.
Santa Clara’s aggressive stance can be traced back to August 11, 2020, when the county established a “civil enforcement program” for its public health orders. As part of the program, a Business Compliance Unit was created, composed of as many as ten or more enforcement officers, tasked with investigating potential violations of the health department’s orders. In public communications, the county asked residents to report on people and entities not in compliance with the health orders through a special hotline and website. To encourage citizens to rat out offenders, an explicit part of the enforcement system, detailed in the county’s Urgency Ordinance, was granting confidentiality to those who filed complaints.
On August 21, 2020, in response to one such complaint, Calvary was served with a cease-and-desist letter for holding indoor gatherings, for failing to ensure everyone wore masks, for failing to ensure social distancing, and for failure to ensure there was no singing. Two days later, enforcement officers arrived at the church and reported observing at least 100 unmasked people gathered inside, not distancing, and with some of them singing.
So began a series of issuances of fines for violations every single day, beginning in August, and running through the spring of 2021. The fines began at $1,000 each. Per the terms of the public health order, there was no grace period, and the amounts doubled each day that the violations were not corrected until a maximum of $5,000 per day was reached. By October 27, 2020, the county had already fined Calvary $350,000.
As I read the legal filings and reviewed the various public health decrees issued by Santa Clara authorities, something struck me as very odd. The church was accruing fines like John Bender racking up detentions in the Breakfast Club for breaching various orders; yet other aspects of society during that same time had very different restrictions.
In September, Santa Clara churches were still prohibited from any indoor gatherings, yet, by contrast, shopping malls could operate at fifty-percent capacity. By October 14, when county churches were then allowed the lesser of 100 people or twenty-five percent capacity, museums could run at fifty percent, and stores had no capacity limits placed on them at all.
Much of Santa Clara’s restrictions early on were tied to state requirements, which were harsher on churches than stores. But Santa Clara expanded the chasm between houses of worship and retail establishments beyond what the state prescribed. (Through multiple exchanges with a county communications officer, asking why malls had looser conditions than churches, I was not given an explanation.)
The seeming illogic and unfairness aside, the county was determined to steadfastly enforce its orders on Calvary and impose financial penalties with terms that would shame a loanshark. To achieve these goals the Compliance Unit sought to document — with exceeding care, and through multiple forms of surveillance — the infractions of the outlaw chapel.
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STAKEOUTS, AND ON-SITE SURVEILLANCE
On August 23, enforcement officers from the county’s Business Compliance Unit began regular surveillance of the church. On the first visit they entered the premises, observed the congregants, and then left to write up a Notice of Violation for masking, gathering, singing, and distancing violations. When the officers returned shortly after to deliver the Notice they were denied entry and told to get off the property. From then forward, each Sunday the enforcement officers were locked out of Calvary. But this did not stop them.
Barred from the premises, the Unit struck an agreement with the law-abiding church next door to Calvary for the officers to set up camp there for their operations. Enforcement officers, often working in pairs, conducted dozens of stakeouts, spying on Calvary staff and members by peering at them through a chainlink fence from the adjacent property.
Among the hundreds of court documents filed in the state case are extensive declarations from multiple county enforcement officers. It is in these declarations where they describe in granular, mundane detail the illegal goings on at Calvary Chapel. Masking and distancing infractions of church greeters and of attendees being welcomed into the building were documented over and over again. The officers also surveyed the church’s several parking lots each week, counting the number of cars to estimate how many people were inside.
Note was even made of traffic directors, who obviously were working outdoors, for not wearing masks. And hugging — presumably a distancing violation — was also documented.
This scenario played out every week, each instance described with the same particulars in a Groundhog Day type cycle. Yet all this meticulous documentation seems strangely superfluous since Calvary recorded its services and made them available online, providing all the evidence the enforcement officers needed.
Every Sunday, for months, the officers went through the same drill. The chainlink fence, the tallying of cars, the watching the livestream of maskless churchgoers singing, congregating. It is hard to believe this was an actual law enforcement operation that went on for months on end. The sheer absurdity of it all — the hyper specificity, the repetition, the mundanity. Instead of envelopes of cash being handed off and tucked into suit jacket pockets or shots taken with a telephoto lens of steel briefcases containing contraband, the reports consisted of people hugging or not wearing a mask while directing traffic in a parking lot. The declarations recounting the surveillance read like stakeout scenes from a screenplay of a police comedy — earnestness played as farce, with the officers as the classic straight man.
Things took a turn in November, when a judge issued a temporary restraining order, which empowered the enforcement officers to enter the property, which they did on numerous occasions purposefully timed with scheduled church events.
It is here where the details of the declarations take on a more creepy quality. Often intimate activities, with people sometimes at their most vulnerable — mothers in small prayer groups; children in daycare — were subject to observation. Officers described being escorted to an event called Manna for Moms.
The officers said they did not want to disturb the gathering, and favored observing through a window. But they were there, surveilling a private event: 17 women, one infant, and two children were in the room where the gathering was held. Most maintained six feet of distance, but some were not wearing masks, and one person was singing.
Pastor McClure offered the officers a tape measure, but this was declined. (He also tried to gift them his wife’s book at one point, which was also “politely declined.”) Officers noted that “a gentleman who identified himself as ‘Chris’ recorded us with his mobile phone. Chris also was not wearing a face covering.”
The officers returned repeatedly, often specifically on days and at times they knew there would be gatherings, such as bible study classes, youth events, and on Sundays for services. The cataloging of church members, their actions, and violations continues in the declarations ad infinitum. Women drinking coffee in a hallway. In the church cafe 11 young adults gathered, not wearing masks or distancing. Another youth gathering was noted for having chairs “arranged in a manner that did not allow for social distancing.” The officers observed baptisms, describing McClure touching the faces of baptismal candidates and pinching their noses as he submerged them in water (presumably this was marked down as a double violation of not masking and not distancing).
I am generally unacquainted with court declarations, and found much of the tone and content to be of such awkward literalness about such pedestrian circumstances, that it achieved a sort of high art of dry humor. And yet, these were often personal, intimate moments that were being monitored by force. I ultimately found myself increasingly uncomfortable reading the declarations, thinking about government officers intruding, over and over, on these private ceremonies and gatherings.
* * *
THE MEMBERS
Anthony, a 29-year-old county social worker, was one of the many people being observed at Calvary. [Some names have been changed to protect members’ identities.] Why was he there, knowing that it was against the rules?
“I was having some really dark moments,” he told me. Around the time the pandemic started he had gone through a breakup, which devastated him. And then the restrictions kicked in and his depression began to spiral downward. Thoughts of suicide entered his mind.
The pandemic in the spring was “a scary time for everyone,” he said. “We were getting swamped with cases in May and June. People were hurting.” While he tried to help others, he desperately needed help himself. “It was hard for me to regulate my emotions,” he said. Going to church, an activity that had centered him for his whole life, spending time with the other congregants, conversing face to face with the pastors, was the one thing he had to keep himself from doing something truly awful. “Those two hours I spent there were the best two hours of the week. It brought comfort. Despite everything that was going on.”
While he recognized that Covid presented risks to himself and society, he didn’t understand why people could go to a liquor store but not church. He tested himself every other day, used hand sanitizer, and, at least initially, wore a mask. In part because most everything was closed, he generally kept his distance from people. He didn’t see how he was endangering anyone. And everyone at church chose to be there. As a healthy young man Covid posed a real but extremely small risk to him, he said. Whereas without the church he was in serious trouble.
In the spring of 2020, Bryan Wells, aged 37, lost his job selling motorcycles up in Marin County, where he lived, because the dealership closed when the economy shut down. “I was in a big motorcycle community, but even that ended,” he said. “No one wanted to go anywhere. My sister and brother in law didn’t want to meet in person.” Wells struggles with addiction and relies on his faith to keep himself from swaying. “Christ turns off the taste for the things you want to do but that are bad for you,” he said.
Wells got a new job at a dealership in San Jose (businesses related to transportation were allowed to stay open), and began commuting close to two hours each way before eventually moving to San Jose. Several customers told him about this church that was open, and he began to attend. For him, more than the isolation that the new norms created, was that everyone around seemed to be living in constant fear. For Wells, fear is toxic. Going to Calvary, being with people unafraid, gave him the strength he needed to stay off drugs and alcohol.
For Katie Truman, going to Calvary didn’t save her, but she believes without it her son, Jonathan, 21 at the time, would be dead. When the restrictions hit he lost his job as a plumber’s apprentice. He had an alcohol problem before this happened, but after “his drinking got so bad, we worried for his life,” she said. Katie and her husband didn’t know what to do or how to help him. They were alone, at home, and weren’t talking with anyone, and didn’t know how to find resources.
I asked her why she couldn’t have just called the pastor for advice. She seemed surprised at or confused by my question. The topic wasn’t something she and her husband could even conjure up to discuss. It was only after being in the church, in person, having fellowship, that she shared with others what was happening with her son. “When you have no hope for your child who you love so much, to know where to go for that hope when almost everything is shut down, it was . . .” she drifted off.
One of the pastors then told Katie about a program for her son. She gave Jonathan an ultimatum and he agreed to go. She believes the program saved his life. He stayed in it for a year, and is now living in the Northeast and got married.
* * *
TRACKING MOBILITY DATA OF CHURCHGOERS
For their work monitoring and documenting the crimes of Katie and her husband, Bryan Wells, Anthony, and hundreds of others, each enforcement officer was paid $219 per hour. Between November 25, 2020 and January 3, 2021, alone, there were 51 hours of on-site surveillance.
But the county did not stop there. As if the outside surveillance from the stakeouts, the on-site visits, and the freely available video evidence of services wasn’t enough, the county also had another, far more sophisticated tool at its disposal.
The Santa Clara County health department used cellular mobility data to track how many people were attending Calvary Chapel on any given day. I found this information in a remarkable declaration amid the legal documents, from a professor at Stanford Law School named Daniel Ho. A research team, led by Ho, was hired to analyze the data for Santa Clara county health officers.
Ho, who has an expertise in statistical inference and quantitative data analysis on public health, explained in his declaration how the process worked. The county paid to acquire the data from a firm called SafeGraph, a company that “aggregates information from 47 million mobile devices across the United States.” SafeGraph aggregates these data on points of interest (POIs), including daily visit counts.
A geofence — a virtual geographic boundary — was set up around Calvary Chapel’s property.
Aerial image of Calvary Chapel and geofence
SafeGraph matches Global Positioning System (GPS) data to individual POIs by using “geographic shapefiles” — the red boundary runs the perimeter “shape” of the Calvary property, and the yellow boundaries indicate individual building shapes within the property. The data was so granular that Ho’s team differentiated daily visits to both the overall parcel of land, and to specific structures within the Calvary building complex. Once a device was in the geofenced area for four minutes it was counted as a visit.
Of the 47 million devices tracked by SafeGraph, approximately 65,000 during the study period were in Santa Clara County. Since this only represents a portion of all mobile devices, Ho’s team used statistical modeling to extrapolate the actual number of people coming to Calvary. Ho estimated that before the pandemic Calvary maxed out at 670 people visiting in one day. In early 2021 that number had exploded to a 1,700 person daily peak.
Should the lawsuit ever get to trial, the county plans to use Ho’s analysis of the SafeGraph data to show that Calvary was an outlier among POIs in general, and specifically among religious organizations, for daily visits. But it’s hard to imagine how this information bolsters their case beyond what was already known from the declarations recounting what was observed on the innumerable stakeouts and on-site visits. Moreover, the church has never disputed that it held services and other events. On the contrary, it has been overtly public about it.
The SafeGraph data ostensibly does not provide personal information on individuals. Yet I spoke with a scientist who utilizes similar data in their work who said it would, of course, be easy to identify an individual user. You can track the location at one POI, in this case the church, and then follow the device back to its home address. This isn’t to suggest that Ho or Santa Clara did this or had access to the movement data. But the point is an entity could easily figure out individuals’ identities if SafeGraph gave them the data.
Santa Clara was using SafeGraph data as early as November 2020 for general purposes as part of its pandemic initiatives. According to a member of the County Board of Supervisors, the Health Department wanted to track people coming in and out of the county to try to predict the impact of Thanksgiving. In a December 2020 meeting, where the data were reviewed, the member expressed concern about the data showing many Santa Clara residents traveling for the holiday to Southern California, where Covid rates were higher than in the Bay Area.
(It is not clear to me what was actionable about learning this, since the review was after the fact. And one can only conjecture about what the authorities could do with this information. Presumably the Health Department, under Cody’s direction, for example, was not considering an attempt at closing the County’s borders. Perhaps if they saw too many residents going somewhere they felt was dangerous, like LA, and then returning to the county, they would consider imposing harsher lockdown measures.)
Unsurprisingly, the top six POIs on the day after Thanksgiving were shopping centers and malls. It is worth noting that during that time churches were barred from any indoor gatherings.
For any readers who may think all of this data tracking is fine, especially so of the churchgoers, since they were breaking the law, you may want to take a breath here. Because surveillance is never limited to the people you disagree with.
According to a Vice exposé, SafeGraph also sold mobility data of people visiting abortion clinics, including more than 600 Planned Parenthood locations. The data showed “where groups of people visiting the locations came from, how long they stayed there, and where they then went afterwards.”
The CDC, along with a number of municipalities and researchers also track mobility data for epidemiological and other purposes. How these data are being used in every instance is unknown. The Santa Clara lawsuit, however, gives a rare window into a particularly egregious example of an American municipal government monitoring the whereabouts of its own people without their knowledge.
* * *
TO WHAT END?
Daniel Ho’s analysis of the SafeGraph data — for which the county paid him $800 per hour — appears to be correct. When I spoke with Pastor Mike McClure he confirmed that Calvary’s attendance exploded during the pandemic, roughly matching the numbers from Ho’s report. At a certain point Calvary began holding two Sunday services, with close to a thousand attendees in each. McClure also said that prior to 2020, he performed fifty to 100 baptisms a year. During the pandemic, and continuing now, he has averaged 1,000 each year. The church wasn’t just attended by its own members, but also by hundreds of people, like Bryan Wells, who weren’t members but came because it was the only spiritual place open.
The Calvary attendees I spoke with were not firebrands and provocateurs. They were not demanding on March 17, 2020 that barbershops be allowed to give haircuts. McClure told me the church membership runs the gamut from blue collar workers, to doctors and lawyers, construction contractors, and grocery store cashiers. These are everyday people who, after months of being denied what they felt they needed to thrive — and for some, to survive — were pushed to act, even though it was against the rules decreed by a county official.
None of the people I interviewed thought Covid was a hoax, or that the vaccine was a conspiracy by Bill Gates, or any other nonsense that has so often been ascribed to anyone who didn’t want to follow every Covid rule without questions. They just had a different risk benefit calculation than those made by the authorities, and after some time they felt backed into a corner to the point where they could no longer comply.
“We are law-abiding people,” Katie Truman told me. “And it was hard to think that people would think we didn’t care about them and that we were being defiant and disrespectful of them.” She said she couldn’t understand how banning the indoor gathering at the church made sense when casinos were open.
Each of the congregants I spoke with mentioned that while they were not dismissive of the harms of Covid, they were in church week after week, with hundreds, or more than a thousand other people, and there was nothing noticeable happening. In Calvary’s declarations they point out that there is no evidence that church attendees had a higher rate of Covid infections than the community at large.
In 2006, D.A. Henderson, a doctor who led the program to eradicate smallpox, and who was considered, before his death in 2016, perhaps the world’s most celebrated epidemiologist, wrote the following: “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”
Ironically, the SafeGraph data confirms the failure of Santa Clara’s public health orders. Government-imposed interventions only work to the extent that people are willing to follow them. One must question whether official rules are effective or reasonable when they compel a large number of good people to become criminals. The authorities said it would be two weeks, and didn’t adequately check in with the public to ask, “Hey, is it cool if we continue with this?”
In February 2021, the US Supreme Court struck down California’s ban on gathering in churches. As a result, Santa Clara has dropped its complaint against Calvary for gathering violations, and instead is only suing for masking violations. As is well-accepted now by nearly all public health officials, there is no evidence that cloth masks — the only kind that were mandated — have any meaningful benefit at the population level. Currently, the county is seeking $2.78 million, and a decision is expected this spring.
* * *
Producing an investigative feature of this depth and complexity requires extensive research, cultivating sources, interviews, writing, editing, and fact checking. I made this piece free for anyone to read because I believe it’s important for it to reach the widest audience possible. You’re not going to find this reporting in legacy media outlets.
This past year, The College Fix identified 14 campus hate crime hoaxes and six questionable claims of racial animus. Last year, The Fixidentified 11 hate crime hoaxes.
The hoax that attracted the most widespread attention in 2022 is the claim by Duke University volleyball player Rachel Richardson that someone at a game against Brigham Young University kept yelling the n-word at her.
This is actually two hate crime hoaxes, because her godmother also claimed that someone yelled the word every single time the black volleyball player went to serve.
The hoax led the University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach to cancel a game against BYU, even after the hoax had been debunked.
The University of Pacific canceled its game against BYU after the debunked hoax as well. Credit goes to BYU student and current College Fix reporter Thomas Stevenson for investigating this further on his campus.
Another Utah university remains at the center of a hate crime hoax, with activists continuing to claim the Ku Klux Klan recruited at the University of Utah.
A black student at the University of Utah melded together two claims to assert that the KKK recruited on campus and smeared poop on a black student’s door. Records obtained show that the KKK recruitment had no merit – the only source was one student who overheard other students talking about the Klan being on campus. Still it did not stop student CJ Alexander from citing the KKK’s “parading” on campus as proof the university had “failed the black community.”
This also is two hate crime hoaxes, because Hanna Thandiwe, who made up the incident and posted about it on social media, created one hoax in addition to the original claim of the Klan on campus. The black female who allegedly had poop left at her door said she did not want to talk about the incident further, and it is not clear from the police reports that it was racially motivated.
Black students at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville may have thought the KKK was on campus, after notes reading “BLACK PEOPLE DON’T BELONG” were found in a residence hall on campus. But the main suspect turned out to be a black girl named Kaliyeha Clark-Mabins, charged by the county prosecutor in February with three counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report.
If saying black people don’t belong is threatening, even worse is writing “All [n-words] should die,” which is what two black girls were caught on camera doing at Rosemont High School in Sacramento.
Be careful not to confuse that incident with the black student at a New York Catholic high school who wrote “[t]his school is filled with a bunch of [n-word]. Get out or else,” nor the other Sacramento-area high school that had “colored” and “white” written above water fountains by a black student.
Another key to identifying hate crime hoaxes, in addition to requesting the police reports, is to find cases where the university won’t release details on the suspect.
That is what happened at the University of Virginia where a black female in a “head scarf” named Zaynab Bintabdul-Hadijakien was charged for an attack on the Black Cultural Center. UVA officials would not identify the suspect, and even a police report redacted her race, but The College Fix dug around and found out she is a black female.
Other race hoaxes this year include: the juvenile allegedly behind the bomb threats against historically black colleges and universities, a black man who trashed the University of Florida’s Institute for Black Culture sign, and the “unable to verify” claim that white students surrounded a black female student at Sam Houston State University and poured water on her.
Roxbury, Massachusetts police also debunked claims of racial taunts against black and Hispanic high school football players. Law enforcement in Michigan also disputed the claim by a black Michigan student that the tearing down of his posters was “racially motivated.”
Not confirmed, but seems questionable
This year also saw questionable claims of hate crimes which were never confirmed or disproven.
For example, LGBT individuals at Harvard University claimed they received an email, echoing the language used by hoax perpetrator Jussie Smollett, that Cambridge was “MAGA Country.”
Former Harvard student government president Michael Cheng alleged he received notes on his dorm that called him a “c****,” a slur against Chinese people. The police only would say that the investigation was “closed” and refused to provide further details.
Curry College in Massachusetts, along with local police, also refused to provide any details on the suspect accused of leaving swastikas around campus. Sonoma State University likewise refused to release photos of two nooses.
The city of Grinnell’s police department was more forthcoming with information about investigations into racial incidents at local Grinnell College, though black students never reported the vandalism of “14 vehicles” to the police department, though campus safety was informed.
A noose investigation at Stanford also remains up in the air, though the rope itself had been there for years.
Other questionable claims include: a Wright State University student who stopped talking to the police about an alleged vandalism against her dorm room and a Central Michigan University student who had no evidence that “F*** this n-word” was written on her dorm room door.
That did not stop campus officials from quickly condemning the incident.
However, sometimes hate crimes, or at least hateful acts between two races or religions, do occur.
A black individual and two white friends wrote a racial slur on a black student’s dorm, although the police never charged anyone with a hate crime. Alston Willis was charged with harassment while the other individuals were given a warning for trespassing.
In a more serious crime, three black teens were charged with misdemeanor battery charges for assaulting a Chinese University of Wisconsin Madison student.
Likewise, a Muslim alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faced a hate crime charge for throwing a rock near Jewish students.
And a Chico State University janitor named Kerry Thao pleaded “no contest” after he advocated that Asians “kill whites and blacks.”
Special mention
While not strictly a campus hate crime in the sense that it was perpetrated by a student or professor or occurred at a school, special mention goes to the academics who rushed to blame a deadly attack on an LGBT club on the “right-wing” — but the main suspect turned out to be mentally ill not just in his violent activity but in his identification as “non-binary.”
“I have no doubt in the coming days we will learn that the motive of the 22 year old young person who turned to violence was influenced by hateful rhetoric online and within right-wing media,” University at Buffalo Professor Ben Fabian commented soon after the shooting in a message to his peers.
But The Fix’s extensive reporting on hate crime hoaxes should engender some “doubt” the next time allegations arise.
What happens when you put a unqualified affirmative action clown in charge. Riots and Vandalism. What made this clown go out and attack the speaker hours before the event?
I get it that he’s at some obscure no name college. Was this his way of hoping he would get out of that dump? Hours before a Turning Point USA event that turned violent thanks to Antifa agitators who smashed windows and tried to storm into the event, the chancellor of University of California Davis condemned Charlie Kirk as a purveyor of “hate” and “misinformation.”
Thank you for sharing your distress at a student group hosting a speaker who is a well-documented proponent of misinformation and hate, and who has advocated for violence against transgender individuals. as a campus that is committed to our principles of community. UC Davis stands with our transgender and non-binary Aggies in opposition to this hateful and divisive messaging. UC Davis did not invite this individual and is not sponsoring this event.
Because of him, riots broke out and Antifa caused vandalism.
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 9: CDC Director Rochelle Walensky speaks during a news conference at HHS headquarters March 9, 2023 in Washington, DC. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra and other agency heads discussed President Joe Biden’s fiscal year 2024 budget request for the Department of Health and Human Services. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Now they’re claiming we can’t trust the Vaers database they themselves set up.
U.S. health authorities have responded to the warning from Florida’s surgeon general about a spike in reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination.
Drs. Rochelle Walensky and Robert Califf claimed in the response that Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the surgeon general, was misleading the public by focusing on the increase in adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
“The claim that the increase of VAERS reports of life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere represents an increase of risk caused by the COVID-19 vaccines is incorrect, misleading, and could be harmful to the American public,” Walensky and Califf said in the missive.
The COVID-19 vaccines were given emergency authorization in late 2020. Under the emergency authorizations, vaccine companies and healthcare workers are required to report certain adverse events through VAERS, “so more reports should be expected,” Walensky and Califf said.
“Most reports do not represent adverse events caused by the vaccine and instead represent a preexisting condition that preceded vaccination or an underlying medical condition that precipitated the event,” they said.
They did not cite any studies or other research to support the claim.
While anyone can lodge reports with the system, authorities request medical records and other documentation in an effort to verify reports of certain events. Out of 1,826 reports of heart inflammation after Pfizer or Moderna vaccination in adults through May 26, 2022, for instance, the CDC verified 72 percent.
The CDC also identified hundreds of safety signals for the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines through analyzing VAERS data in 2022, according to records obtained by The Epoch Times. A safety signal is a possible sign of a side effect. Only a handful of adverse events are definitely caused by the vaccines, according to the CDC, including myocarditis, or heart inflammation, and severe allergic shock.
Ladapo said in February that in Florida, the number of reports to VAERS after the COVID-19 vaccines were authorized spiked by 1,700 percent, while the increase in vaccine administration rose by just 400 percent.
“We have never seen this type of response following previous mass vaccination efforts pushed by the federal government,” Ladapo said in a letter to Walensky and Califf.
“These findings are unlikely to be related to changes in reporting given their magnitude, and more likely reflect a pattern of increased risk from mRNA COVID-19 vaccines,” he added, calling for “unbiased research … to better understand these vaccines’ short- and long-term effects.” The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines both use messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.
Florida officials pointed to a study that found in the original clinical trials that the vaccinated were more at risk of serious adverse events, as well as otherpapers that found an increased risk of adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination.
Florida currently recommends against COVID-19 vaccination for young, healthy males who have been shown to be at the highest risk of myocarditis. Vaccinating the population “doesn’t make any sense” from a risk-benefit standpoint, Ladapo, appointed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, told The Epoch Times. The heart inflammation causes serious problems and can even lead to death in some cases.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert Califf testifies during a Senate Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 28, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Officials Differ
Walensky and Califf, both appointed by Democrat President Joe Biden, told Ladapo that their reference information supports vaccinating virtually all people aged 6 months and older with not only a primary series of the COVID-19 vaccine, but boosters.
“Based on available information for the COVID-19 vaccines that are authorized or approved in the United States, the known and potential benefits of these vaccines clearly outweigh their known and potential risks,” they said. “Multiple well conducted, peer-reviewed, published studies and demonstrate that the risk of death, serious illness and hospitalization is higher for unvaccinated individuals for every age group.”
The officials cited studies from the CDC, including papers published by the agency’s quasi journal. According to the CDC, some papers published by the journal aren’t peer reviewed. All of the studies are shaped by agency officials to align with its messaging, which during the pandemic has been aggressively pro-vaccination, even as awareness of confirmed and possible side effects has grown.
The messaging was on display in the letter.
“As the leading public health official in state, you are likely aware that seniors in Florida are under-vaccinated, with just 29% of seniors having received an updated bivalent vaccine, compared to the national average of 41% coverage in seniors,” Walensky and Califf said. “It is the job of public health officials around the country to protect the lives of the populations they serve, particularly the vulnerable. Fueling vaccine hesitancy undermines this effort.”
The officials said that they “stand firmly behind the safety and effectiveness of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which are fully supported by the available scientific data.”
“Staying up to date on vaccination is the best way to reduce the risks of death and serious illness or hospitalization from COVID-19. Misleading people by overstating the risks, or emphasizing the risks without acknowledging the overwhelming benefits, unnecessarily causes vaccine hesitation and puts people at risk of death or serious illness that could have been prevented by timely vaccination,” the officials continued.
The letter came after the CDC’s recent risk-benefit assessment of the new, updated boosters was criticized by independent medical professionals for downplaying risks and exaggerating benefits.
Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo. (York Du/The Epoch Times)
Reaction
Walensky’s and Califf’s response to Ladapo featured citations to flawed studies, Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, told The Epoch Times via email, “The CDC routinely conducts cross-sectional studies and inappropriately analyzes them as if they were case-control studies, which substantially overestimates their reported vaccine efficacy measures.
“In this letter, these doctors cherry pick studies and ignore, for example, reliable Public Health UK data showing the exact opposite of what they claim,” Risch said.
“As much as they claim that the VAERS data are not quantitatively useful, these data indeed show a major COVID-19 vaccine rollout-period mortality signal that cannot be ignored or handwaved away by the lack of a population reference. These agencies continuously proclaim their data monitoring of several other information sources, yet they have not been transparent with these data,” he added.
Risch noted that insurance data shows a jump in COVID-19 deaths after the vaccines were authorized and that, according to a recent survey, many Americans know of at least one person who has suffered an adverse event after vaccination.
“FDA and CDC have lost credibility with much of the American public, and accusing Dr. Ladapo of misinformation when they themselves are the official purveyor of misinformation is unconscionable,” Risch said.
Nikki Whiting, a spokeswoman for Ladapo, said that the surgeon general would be sending a response letter to the officials.
“The response from the federal government is just another redundant display of the same apathetic talking point of ‘safe and effective.’ Googling their fact sheets would have achieved the same result,” she told The Epoch Times in an email.
“While the Feds gaslight the American public, Florida pushes for the truth. Three inquiries remain unanswered: 1. Access to raw patient-level data to allow for unbiased research. 2. Adequate attention surrounding the risks detected by numerous researchers around the world. 3. Public transparency from the CDC, FDA, and Big Pharma.”
Award winning stove found at the MC Home. MC Photo.
Yes Virginia they are coming after your gas stoves.Yes, it’s real: Joe Biden’s Department of Energy just moved to ban nearly all gas stoves.
The legacy media and the Left attempted to brush off the initial gas stove controversy and outcry from the Right as nothing more than an unsubstantiated, irrational conspiracy theory. The White House even insisted that President Joe Biden does not support a ban on gas stoves after one of his federal consumer safety officials suggested that such a ban was on the table.
But, as we are seeing in so many other instances, Republicans were right all along. President Joe Biden’s Department of Energy is, in fact, pushing an extreme regulation that would effectively eliminate nearly all gas stoves.
The Department of Energy is conducting this gas stove grab through a rule that would impose extreme energy performance standards on residential cooktops. The department’s proposed rule sets requirements for gas cooktops at the maximum technologically feasible or “max-tech” level. Based on the Department of Energy’s own analysis, gas cooktops at the max-tech level represent just 4% of current market share and exclude all conventional free-stand ranges.
Any rule that causes 96% of the products available today to be eliminated from the market is an extreme regulation. In fact, it is essentially an outright ban on gas stoves.
With this latest rush-to-green policy, the Department of Energy has also failed to take consumer preference into consideration when it comes to gas stove design. To accommodate the DOE’s proposed standards, manufacturers are going to have to make dramatic design changes that result in smaller burners and longer cooking times, as well as smaller grates that could be less stable. Consumers in the kitchen are unlikely to approve of these changes.
Comically, Biden’s Department of Energy is justifying this proposed requirement based on estimated savings to the consumer for gas cooktops of $21.89 over the next 14.5 years, which equates to a savings of just $1.50 per year. People are not willing to trade such substantially decreased functionality and features for minuscule savings.
Once again, the Biden administration proves it is out of touch with the average American.
This radical proposal from the Department of Energy is open for public comment. The public should tell the Biden administration to keep their hands off gas stoves. Comments can be submitted via Regulations.gov through April 3, 2023.
Debbie Lesko is the representative for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District and serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
We’re beginning to learn what Meta’s “year of efficiency” means in practice: fewer employees.
Yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta plans to lay off 10,000 employees, just four months after it laid off 11,000 staff members. That round of layoffs, impacting 13% of Meta’s workforce, represented the biggest job cuts in the company’s history.
Not only is Meta laying off 10k employees, but it’s also closing 5,000 open roles. This is not a company that wants to onboard many people right now.
Why is that?
Meta is looking to reduce costs as part of what Mark Zuckerberg calls the “year of efficiency.” Last year was “a humbling wake-up call,” Zuck said, citing economic uncertainty and increased competition (aka TikTok) for denting the company’s ad revenue.
But Meta made plenty of unforced errors, too. And by dubbing 2023 “the year of efficiency,” it’s acknowledging that previously, things were not very efficient.
That starts with hiring. Meta has been criticized for growing its headcount so rapidly that many employees had nothing to do.
In a viral TikTok video, one former Meta employee said, “we were just sitting there” and “you had to fight to find work.”
A report in Wired argues that Meta’s headcount got bloated due to “ghosts in the machine”—employees who were brought on to launch new products and stayed on the payroll even when those products failed.
Putting the recent layoffs in context: Even after shedding 21,000 jobs, Meta will still have a higher headcount than it did before the pandemic. In the boom times of 2020 and 2021, it hired more than 27,000 employees.
Zoom out: While the US labor market remains strong, layoffs have spiked in 2023. Companies announced 180,713 job cuts in January and February—the most to start any year since 2009, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. About one-third of the layoffs took place at tech companies.—NF
A Russian fighter jet crashed into a US drone. In the first known physical contact between US and Russian aircraft since the invasion of Ukraine, a Russian fighter jet collided with a US surveillance drone in international airspace above the Black Sea, damaging a propeller and forcing the US to bring the drone down. At least that’s what the US claims happened: Russia denied that the plane came into contact with the drone. According to one US official, drones have been intercepted in the area before, but this incident was particularly “unsafe and unprofessional.”
ChatGPT is old news. OpenAI released its much-hyped GPT-4 AI language model yesterday, representing an advancement over the tech that powers ChatGPT. GPT-4 is wowing reviewers with its ability to understand not only text but also images (even complex memes). Plus, it crushes its predecessor GPT-3.5 on academic assessments: On a simulated bar exam, GPT-4 scored around the top 10% of test takers, while GPT-3.5 scored around the bottom 10%.
EPA moves to get “forever chemicals” out of drinking water. The EPA proposed regulations yesterday to limit the amount of six types of industrial chemicals allowed in drinking water. PFAS, as they are known, cause health problems including cancer. Though many companies have begun phasing out the chemicals, a 2020 study found that 200 million Americans are exposed to PFAS in tap water.
We’ve written at George R. R. Martin-length about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the second-largest banking collapse in US history. But did you know that the third-biggest bank failure happened just two days after SVB imploded? The deets are juicy.
On Sunday, regulators seized the assets of NY-based Signature Bank and gave senior management the boot, but they assured its depositors that they could access all of their money. Signature was deemed a threat to the US financial system after panicked customers reportedly withdrew 20% of its total deposits.
But leaders inside the bank say authorities overreacted, led by none other than Barney Frank, the former US representative on Signature’s board. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Frank crafted key banking regulations in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis (the Dodd-Frank Act).
Frank argues that Singature was singled out because of its ties to crypto—it was one of the go-to banks for crypto companies. Frank told Bloomberg that he believes Signature wasn’t on the verge of collapse, and regulators only shut it down “to send a message to get people away from crypto.”
Authorities have pushed back on the pushback. The New York State Department of Financial Services, which initiated the closure, claims that Signature executives were elusive in sharing data with regulators during the bank panic, causing a “crisis of confidence.”—SK
Everyone with a complex about getting wing sauce all over their face has a new hero. Aimen Halim of Chicago filed a class-action lawsuit against Buffalo Wild Wings that accuses the restaurant chain of falsely advertising its boneless wings when they are allegedly just chicken nuggets.
The lawsuit, filed last Friday, states that Halim believed BWW’s boneless chicken wings were actually deboned wings. If he had known the breast-meat truth, Halim claims he would have ordered something else, and therefore he’s suffered “financial injury.”
This debate has been a hot one. A man went viral in 2020 for giving an impassioned speech to the Lincoln, NE, city council about why the term “boneless wings” should be stripped from every menu in the city.
But we’ve been having the conversation even before that. In the early 2000s, boneless wings gained popularity when the price of chicken breast—which is what boneless wings are usually made of—cratered, while wings remained expensive. And wing purists have always pushed back against the bone-free option. The prices of both items have fluctuated in the past few years, but the debate over what, if anything, constitutes a boneless wing has raged on.—MM
Stat: Calling it now—summer 2026 will see the lowest worker productivity on record. The World Cup is expanding to 104 games, a considerable increase from the 64 matches played last year in Qatar. That’s the result of more teams in the field (48 vs. 32 previously) and a bigger group stage. The next tournament will be hosted in North America over a span of nearly six weeks.
Quote: “The standard deli sandwich with processed meat and cheese, you’re literally eating a heart bomb.”
An article from the WSJ ruined sandwiches for us, and now we’re ruining them for you, too. Sorry. This quote about the health risks of sandwiches comes from a cardiologist and nutrition professor at Tufts University, who, along with other health experts, is warning about the high levels of sodium, sugar, and saturated fat in Americans’ favorite lunch option. A typical turkey sandwich in the 1980s had ~320 calories; in the 2000s, it had 820, per the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Read: Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content. (Teen Vogue)
Silicon Valley Bank’s new CEO said that rebuilding has begun and asked customers to return: “We are open for business.” Meanwhile, the DOJ and the SEC have begun investigating the bank’s collapse.
Ohio sued Norfolk Southern to ensure the railroad pays for damage caused when its train containing hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine in early February.
Boeing notched a big order for 78 787 Dreamliners from two Saudi airlines.
Apologizing for bad behavior. David Madison/Getty Images
This is an update to an article I posted yesterday. Read here.
So after apologies were sent out to a federal judge because of the bad behavior by students and a affirmative action dean(appointed before the change was made), The loons were at it again.
Jenny Martinez’s whiteboard covered in fliers from student activists denouncing her and Judge Kyle Duncan
The ‘Outnumbered’ panel discussed the incident and the broader debate surrounding free speech on college campuses.
Hundreds of student protesters wearing masks and all-black clothing lined the hallways outside Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez’s classroom after she apologized to U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan for the disruption of his recent speech.
On Monday, Martinez, who teaches constitutional law, arrived to find her whiteboard covered in fliers ridiculing Duncan and defending those who disrupted his speech. The fliers echoed the opinion of student activists and some administrators who claimed hecklers derailing Duncan’s talk was a form of free speech.
After her class ended, protesters, obscuring their faces with masks that said “counter-speech is free speech,” stared at Martinez as she left. The protesters formed a “human corridor” that stretched from the class to the building’s exit and contained nearly a third of the school’s student body, according to students who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon.
Approximately 50 out of the 60 students in Martinez’s class also joined the protest and scowled at those who did not join in.
Tirien Steinbach, the Stanford University Law School associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion, slams U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan during his presentation at the school as an invited guest on March 9, 2023. (Screenshot/ Vimeo – Ethics and Public Policy Center)
“They gave us weird looks if we didn’t wear black” and join the crowd, first-year law student Luke Schumacher said. “It didn’t feel like the inclusive, belonging atmosphere that the DEI office claims to be creating.”
Another student, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the experience was “eerie.”
“The protesters were silent, staring from behind their masks at everyone who chose not to protest, including the dean,” the individual said.
The protest was even larger than the one that occurred days earlier and came after the Stanford National Lawyers Guild said Martinez had thrown “capable and compassionate administrators” under the bus. Similar comments were made by the school’s Immigration and Human Rights Law Association and the school’s chapter of the left-wing American Constitution Society.
Last Thursday, Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter invited Duncan to speak. However, the Trump-appointed judge was shouted down and heckled by hundreds of students who made it impossible for him to deliver his speech.
Video footage widely shared on social media shows that the school’s associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), Tirien Steinbach, did nothing to quell the disruption as protesters hurled verbal abuse at the judge.
A view of Stanford’s campus. (Google Maps)
Instead, Steinbach gave a minutes-long and emotional speech at the event, accusing Duncan of causing “harm” through his work on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and questioning the school’s policies on free speech.
The students were particularly angry at Duncan for a 2020 opinion in which he refused to use a transgender sex offender’s preferred pronouns. In comments to the Free Beacon, the judge described the incident as a “bizarre therapy session from hell.”
Duncan was never given a chance to read his prepared remarks. After a hostile and profane Q&A session, he was escorted out the back door by federal marshals, who were there to protect him, the Free Beacon reported.
Following the event, Steinbach claimed the students hadn’t violated any law school policies and alleged that Duncan hadn’t prepared a speech, a claim contradicted by video footage and Duncan himself, according to students. She also allegedly said he was a “serial provocateur” who made fun of students in order to rile them up for the cameras.
A skyline view of the Stanford campus in California. (David Madison)
Over the weekend, the university apologized to Duncan for the incident.
“We write to apologize for the disruption of your recent speech at Stanford Law School,” Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Martinez wrote in a joint statement. “As has already been communicated to our community, what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus.”
The letter also claimed that staff members failed to enforce university policies and “intervened in inappropriate ways” that did not align with the school’s commitment to free speech, but the letter did not mention Steinbach by name.
Speaking with the National Review, Duncan said he appreciated the apology, particularly Stanford’s acknowledgment that the administrator’s behavior “was completely at odds with the law school’s mission of training future members of the bench and bar.”
“Such an apology would also be a useful step towards restoring the law school’s broader commitment to the many, many students at Stanford who, while not members of the Federalist Society, nonetheless welcome robust debate on campus,” Duncan added.
Fox News’ Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report.
Many institutions are now offering minors, majors, and masters degrees in diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice topics.
Campus Reform reported earlier this month that several Christian liberal arts colleges are experiencing double-digit increases in admissions or enrollment.
A growing number of colleges and universities are expanding their curricula to include degree programs in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (DEISJ).
While certain schools are requiring DEISJ coursework for graduation, others are designing minors, majors, and master’s degree programs with identity politics at their core.
Tufts University, for example, offers a Masters in DEIJ Leadership, designed to make its students “effective leader[s] in anti-racist and anti-bias efforts” by blending critical theory with “practical tools…to implement institutional change.”
U.S. Military Academy at West Point also offers a Diversity and Inclusion Studies minor, which requires classes in “Power and Difference” and “Social Inequality.”
In response to Campus Reform’s request for comment, West Point clarified that the program was started in 2018 in part to balance faculty and student interest with the “Superintendent’s Strategic Goal of leveraging diversity and fostering inclusion.”
Bentley University in Massachusetts told Campus Reform that its DEI Bachelor of Arts or Science degrees were created in 2021 to “[prepare] students for a growing number of roles in the business and non-business worlds.”
“The ability of organizations to strategically leverage the range of skillsets and experience brought by a diverse workforce is key to their long-term success,” Bentley’s program description reads.
By contrast, classical liberal arts institutions that reject DEI are seeing enrollment increases and expansions. Campus Reform reported earlier this month that several Christian liberal arts colleges including Hillsdale College, Liberty University, and Grove City College are experiencing double-digit increases in admissions or enrollment.
Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano observes that, across the country, “Enrollment is down, companies are dropping degree requirements, and it’s all through self-inflicted wounds like” an overemphasis on DEISJ issues.
What’s more, DEI-related degrees do not seem to be what students or employers actually want.
In the job market, private sector businesses with reputations for wokeness are experiencing massive layoffs and record financial losses.
Disney announced this month that it will be letting go roughly 3% of its workforce worldwide and cutting $5.5 billion in costs after having lost $123 billion in market value in 2022.
Similarly, Microsoft is eliminating approximately 5% of its employees, and Coca-Cola is shrinking its American workforce by 12%.
Critics of DEI in academia are also more broadly concerned with the philosophical framework of identity politics.
Giordano argues, “DEISJ pushes propaganda and a political agenda that ultimately forces people into groups and pits groups against each other….This is not 1920s America, and no one has a problem with diversity.” Rather, the problem is that DIE examines all issues “through the lens of race, privilege, and oppression.”
Tufts, Texas State, and Michigan Tech have not yet responded to Campus Reform’s request for comment. The Wharton School denied the request for comment.
Apologizing for bad behavior. David Madison/Getty Images
Stanford University Apologizes to Judge for bad behavior by Students, Faculty.
Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne and law school dean Jenny Martinez apologized to Judge Kyle Duncan after students and faculty accosted him during a Federalist Society event.
In a joint statement to the Fifth Circuit judge, Tessier-Lavigne and Martinez said, “We write to apologize for the disruption of your recent speech at Stanford Law School.”
“As has already been communicated to our community, what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus,” the continued.
The apology comes after multiple students and the university’s dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, berated Duncan and would not allow him to speak. At least three other members of faculty were present and allowed the judge to be shouted down.
“Staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech,” the letter says. “We are taking steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again.”
The letter falls short of describing disciplinary action for the students or faculty members, both of which Duncan called for in the aftermath of the incident — including the firing of Steinbach who brought a six-minute prepared monologue.
In response to receipt of the letter, Duncan toldNational Review, “I particularly appreciate the apology’s important acknowledgment that ‘staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.’”
“Particularly given the depth of the invective directed towards me by the protestors, the administrators’ behavior was completely at odds with the law school’s mission of training future members of the bench and bar,” Duncan continued before calling on the school to issue a similar apology to the law students who invited him to speak at Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter.
“The apology promises to take steps to make sure this kind of disruption does not occur again,” the judge concluded. “Given the disturbing nature of what happened, clearly concrete and comprehensive steps are necessary. I look forward to learning what measures Stanford plans to take to restore a culture of intellectual freedom.”
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
A Russian fighter jet crashed into a US drone. In the first known physical contact between US and Russian aircraft since the invasion of Ukraine, a Russian fighter jet 
ChatGPT is old news. OpenAI released its much-hyped 
EPA moves to get “forever chemicals” out of drinking water. The EPA proposed regulations yesterday to 
Hannah Peters—FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images
