Americaโs elite institutions are facing a crisis of integrity akin to the 2007 housing market collapse, fueled by fraud, low standards, and political corruption. Just as banks bundled risky, fraudulent mortgages into mortgage-backed securities and sold them as high-quality investments, our institutions have filled their ranks with incompetent individuals and promoted biased, politically motivated theories as legitimate knowledge. This erosion of standards undermines the trust, competence, and knowledge that are the foundational capital of these institutions.
Concrete examples highlight this systemic problem. The Grievance Studies Affair exposed how intentionally absurd papers, crafted by scholars like James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose, were accepted by prestigious academic journals, revealing a lack of rigour in certain fields. Investigations by Chris Rufo and Aaron Sibarium uncovered instances of plagiarism among high-profile figures, including the Vice President of the United States and a former president of Harvard University. These cases demonstrate how politically motivated activists have infiltrated academia, using fraudulent theories with poor standards to influence education, government, and social institutions.
If unaddressed, this corruption threatens to trigger a domino effect of institutional failures, mirroring the financial crisis of 2008. As society becomes aware that much of the knowledge and information disseminated by these elite institutions is compromised, their credibility, reputation, and funding could evaporate. Recognising and confronting this deep-seated rot is crucial to prevent a widespread collapse and to restore the integrity of the institutions that hold our social fabric together.
[The above is a GPT o1-preview summary of the following Thread by @wokal_distance.]
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There’s a huge story behind @realchrisrufo’s plagiarism investigations people have missed:
The integrity of America’s elite institutions has been destroyed by fraud, lying, low standards, and political corruption.
It’s just like the 2007 housing market.
I’ll explain๐งต
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To understand what’s happening today we need to understand how the 2007 housing crisis happened.
Once we do that I’ll show you how what’s going on in America’s elite institutions today perfectly mirrors what happened in the housing market during 2007
Let’s begin
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To begin, we need to know what a Mortgage-Backed Security (MBS) is.
The bank take mortgages from different markets, packages them together, and then sell them. The buyer makes money collecting the mortgage payments the bank makes a profit selling mortgages.
That’s the idea
4/
The idea here is to spread out the risk of lending.
If you lend a billion dollars to one person and they don’t pay you back, you lose a billion dollars. If you lend a mortage to 10,000 people and one doesn’t pay you back, you still make money on the rest of the mortgages.
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In this way you end up with lots of mortgages that almost everyone is paying on, and as long as that happens the package is very valuable, and whoever buys the loans gets to make money collecting the mortgage payments.
But there’s a catch…people have to make their payments
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If loans are made by reputable lenders with high standards to people with good credit who can afford them, almost all the mortgages get paid off.
If the banks lower their standards, make bad loans, engage in fraud, then mortgages don’t get paid…and the bank loses it’s money
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In 2007 banks began to lower their standards, make risky loans, give high risk mortgages to people who could not afford them.
OK, now here is the key thing that explains what’s going on in out institutions. Pay close attention…..
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Then banks took all those bad, risky, fraudulent, low standard mortgages and packaged them together into Mortgage backed securities….and then sold them like they were just as good as the good, safe, legitimate, high standard mortgages.
See what the problem is here???
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They packaged thousands of corrupt loans that were never going to be paid off into Mortgage backed securities, and sold them like they just as good as the Mortgage backed securities that were filled with good loans.
And then people bought these MBS’s full of terrible loans…
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Not only that, but using various other financial instruments, the Mortgage-Backed securities get bought, sold, traded, and loaned and end up getting used in deals made by banks, insurance agencies, pensions funds, unions, commercial businesses, corporations and so fourth…
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When lots of bad mortgages are packeded and sold as though they were just as legitimate as good mortgages, you get an entire economy that’s built on a foundation of bad mortgages, low standards, fraud, and corruption
This is basically what’s happened with our institutions
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An economy built on bad mortgages people can’t afford collapses when the payments stop because organizations that depend on those payments end up going broke, and other organizations that financially depend the first set of organizations also go broke. They fall like dominos.
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This is what’s happening in our elite institutions.
I will explain.
Our society is held together by a number of interconnected social, economic, education, and governmental institutions. The capital those institutions function on is trust, competence, and knowledge.
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The way institutions maintain trus is by ensuring the people they employ are competent, and the knowledge/information that is used by those institution meets the highest standards and criteria for accuracy and truth.
When that those standards are met, everything is fine.
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However, just like how the housing market in 2007 relied on fraudulent mortgages, our elite institutions rely on incompetent people and bad information created using corrupt, biased, and politically motivated, theories and ideas.
*THAT* is the story people are missing.
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Over the Last Several years, a number of things have happened which demonstrate that the knowledge, information, theories, and ideas coming out of elite institutions are created by politically motivated activists who are using fraudulent theories with low standards.
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A terrific example of this is the grievance studies affair, in which @ConceptualJames, @peterboghossian and @HPluckrose went undercover and wrote a several intentional and obviously absurd papers, and got them accepted in prestigious academic journals.
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Another example is comes from @realchrisrufo and @aaronsibarium who have shown that a number of high profile people in elite institutions, including the Vice-President of the U.S. and the Former President of Harvard created their work using plagiarism.
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The result is that the academic journals, academic studies, institutions of elite education have taken a bunch of flawed, biased, corrupt, and politically motivated theories, packaged them together, and then sold them to institutions filled with incompetent people.
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In the same way banks lowered their standards and filled Mortgage-backed securities with fraudulent loans, our elite institutions lowered their standards, and have filled their academic journals and prestige publications with woke nonsense written by incompetent activists.
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The result is that all of our important social institutions (schools, hospitals, governments, etc) that rely on elite institutions to get them good information are being handed politically motivated garbage written by woke activists and told that it is real knowledge.
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Political activists in fields like Critical Race Theory, post-colonial theory, and Gender Studies created fraudulent academic journals with poor standards as a vehicle to publish biased papers and studies. Then they claim all of that is legitimate knowledge and scholarship.
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Now huge numbers of institutions rely on journals, studies, and so forth that are filled with nonsense.
When people realize this, the credibility, reputation, prestige, and funding of elite institutions which spread that nonsense is going to evaporate.
When that happens…
24/ it will create a domino effect causing other institutions that depend on the elite institutions to face a crisis as well.
If the crisis is deep enough, and enough incompetent, biased, politically corrupt activity is exposed, a domino effect across institutions will occur.
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The result will be a collapse of the highest and most prestigious elite institutions in the same way we saw the collapse of giant, rich, prestigious, financial institutions (like Bear Sterns) during the 2008 financial crisis.
The start of that is what we are seeing right now
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This is the story that everyone is missing. What @realchrisrufo is doing is not just pointing out a few plagiarists; he is showing the rot and corruption of our elite institutions, and pointing out that the legitimacy of many of these institutions is a mirage.
/fin
