Last month I wrote a story about Brian Lucey getting 13 papers retracted:

Chris Brunet

Elsevier Shuts Down Its Finance Journal Citation Cartel

On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher…

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2 months ago · 82 likes · 6 comments · Christopher Brunet

My article hit #1 on Hacker News:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119530

Today’s update involves professor Samuel Vigne, Lucey’s protégé, and former PhD student, who has now had yet another paper retracted:

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1059056023001764

The stated reason for this new retraction is fraudulent citations:

The journal, with guidance from an impartial field expert acting in the role of an independent Publishing Ethics Advisor, found that 22 citations were added to this paper at the article revision stage without justification to the handling editor. Additional 8 citations were added to this paper at author proof stage without the approval of the Editor. The new citations were inserted generically without being thoughtfully integrated into the paper’s narrative, thus lacking direct relevance to the specific points being made. The new citations mainly benefit the authors Muhammad A. Naeem and Sitara Karim.

#2: MIT Fraud Update

Another popular article I wrote was about a PhD student at MIT named Aidan Toner-Rodgers, who was kicked out of school for fabulously fabricating data.

Chris Brunet

MIT Econ PhD Student Kicked Out for Massive Fraud

This is undoubtedly the most blatant and brazen econ fraud of 2025…

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8 months ago · 156 likes · 4 comments · Christopher Brunet

Another paper by Aidan Toner-Rogers (MIT) was just retracted a few days ago, this time in the top journal in the world for Development Economics:

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387826000714

  

The stated reason for this new retraction is because his co-author requested it:

This article has been retracted at the request of the corresponding author (FLF).

The corresponding author has indicated that key results in the paper cannot be independently verified and that the reliability of the underlying analyses cannot be confirmed. In light of these concerns, the Editors have concluded that the findings cannot be relied upon and have therefore retracted the article. This retraction is issued to maintain the integrity of the scientific record.

#3: Florian Ederer Update

Long-time readers will remember that I gave a seminar at Stanford University in 2023 about a hacked economics forum:

Here we are 3 years later, and the resulting paper from the hacked data is still not published, stuck in R&R limbo. Last week, I asked the authors for an update:

I am guessing it is held up due to legal issues.

#4: Faculty Leaks

This week I came across , an “anonymous dispatch from inside higher education”. It’s a brand-new account—just launched this week—and they’ve already published their first 2 pieces. I’m always glad to support new writers, and this one looks promising. If you’re interested in academia, this Substack is worth checking out and subscribing to.

Faculty Leaks

The Last Dinosaurs: Why Academia Keeps Protecting Its Worst Senior Faculty

Faculty Leak is an anonymous dispatch from inside higher education. Some details have been changed. The dysfunction has not…

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21 days ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Faculty Leaks

Faculty Leaks

The Academic Conference Grift: How Professors Turn a Two-Sentence Abstract Into a Paid Vacation in Greece

Faculty Leaks is an anonymous dispatch from inside higher education. Some details have been changed. The dysfunction has not…

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16 days ago · 1 like · Faculty Leaks

#5: Plagiarized Poison Ivy

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Emigration from Canada has doubled since the Liberals took office in 2015. This trend continued through 2025, marking the fourth consecutive year of Emigration growth, with a record 120,016 people leaving the country.

The primary demographic leaving Canada is educated young people.

According to Statistics Canada, 67% of emigrants are between the age of 20-44…

… and 31% have a masters degree or higher.

Canada's youngest, most talented, most educated and wealthiest are giving up.

The question is: why?

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#2: Happiness

Over the past decade Canada has dropped from one of the world’s happiest countries to 25th.

Of the 3 countries that experienced a greater drop in happiness among young people than Canada, one is Malawi (with a poverty rate of 70%), and the other is Afghanistan.

This decline is not consistent across age brackets...

Canadians over 60 still rank in the global top 10 for life satisfaction.

Canadians under 25 rank 71st.

#3: Money Supply

While every other G7 nation has moved to rein in monetary expansion, Canada doubled down on the money printer. By 2025, Canada’s rate of money printing outpaced every other major economy on Earth.

#4: Gold Supply

Did you know Canada is the only G7 nation with zero gold reserves? The Bank of Canada used to have 1,023 tonnes of gold, but sold it for an average of just $1200 an ounce.

As of March 28, 2026, 1,023 tonnes of gold is worth ~$205.5 billion CAD.

#5: Loonie

Fifteen years ago, one American dollar was worth one Canadian dollar.

Today, one Canadian dollar is worth ~70 American cents.

#6: White Population

In 1971, 96% of the Canadian population was white.

Today, it is approaching 50%.

#7: Indian Immigration

Over the past 20 years, Indian Immigration has dwarfed all other forms.

Most Indian immigrants are from the state of Punjab.

#8: Asylum Claims

#9: Temporary Foreign Workers

Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Program is a government-run guest worker program that lets employers hire foreign workers to fill labor shortages.

The TFW gets lots of heat, but if you look at who is actually coming into the country, TFWs are a relatively small part. Most newcomers are students and “International Mobility Program” migrants.

#10: International Mobility Program

Canada’s International Mobility Program lets employers hire foreign workers without proving a labor shortage.

Just like every other program, the IMP has been primarily abused by India.

#10: Study Permits

Again, most international students are Indian.

They aren’t coming here to learn. They are mostly coming to scam the immigration system via third-rate colleges, not top universities.

For example, Conestoga College has become almost a billion dollar institution in under 6 years because of international student tuition.

#11: Productivity

Largely as a result of importing millions of low-wage, low-skilled, low-human-capital immigrants, Canada’s productivity has lagged behind the United States.

#12: Foreign Direct Investment & Capital Stock

One input in measuring productivity is labor.

The other is capital.

#13: Aging Population

Older Canadians have gotten wealthier, younger Canadians have gotten poorer.

Boomers have captured virtually all economic gains of the last 50 years.

#14: Healthcare

#15: Mental Health

#16: Wait Times

#17: Housing

#18: Fertility and Marriage

#19: Trade & Current Account Deficit

#20: GDP

#21: National Debt

#22: Provincial Debt

#23: Household Debt

#24: Tax rate

#25: R&D Spending

#26: Venture Capital

#27: Private vs. Public Sector employment

#28: Unemployment

#29: Equalization Payments

#30: Food Insecurity and Food bank Usage

#31: Inflation

#32: Car Theft

#33: Violent Crime

#34: Overdose Deaths

#35: Religion

#36: MAID

What does this all add up to?

100,000 Canadians have now been Murdered by MAID.

96% of those euthanized were white.

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Wisconsin is now the 38th state. Governor Tony Evers signed AB 446 into law on March 27, 2026, enacting it as Wisconsin Act 143.

I would wager that 99.9% of my readers have no idea this is happening. Major politicians aren’t talking about it. Headlines aren’t being written about it. But the IHRA speech codes march forward, state by state, without resistance. That’s the point: these speech codes are being rolled out quietly, with almost no coverage, no public debate, and no sustained attention from the mainstream press… the Fond du Lac Reporter doesn’t count:

I asked Jenin Younes, National Legal Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, how such a plainly unconstitutional law could be enacted. She told me:

So the trap is set. By the time the first student is jailed or the first professor is fired for daring to lecture on what constitutes ethnic cleansing, the ink will be dry and the law will be entrenched. While the public is distracted by Clavicular getting framemogged or by watching Green Bay Packers training camp, the very boundaries of what you are allowed to say about a foreign government are being redrawn by a pen-stroke in a quiet room in Madison.

As a refresher, these are 11 deliberately broad, vague, and contradictory IHRA examples of speech that can now be treated as discriminatory under Wisconsin law:

1. Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.

   1. If a professor suggests that decades of blockade or occupation are a "root cause" of a specific violent outburst, a litigious student can now claim that the professor is an “extremist” who is illegally "justifying" harm.

2. Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

   1. If a reporter tracks millions of dollars in campaign contributions or lobbying efforts from groups like AIPAC or individuals who happen to be Jewish, a clever prosecutor can argue that the very act of highlighting that "collective power" is an illegal violation of the code. It doesn't matter if the spreadsheet is accurate; truth doesn’t matter; the law is designed to make the topic radioactive.

3. Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.

   1. This forces you to treat every political action as a series of disconnected, random coincidences by "isolated individuals." By banning the concept of "collective responsibility" or even "collective action," the state is effectively saying: You can see the lobby, you can see the money, and you can see the result—but the moment you connect the dots, you’re a criminal.

   2. We don't apply this to any other group. If a group of Evangelical lobbyists pushes for a specific law, we talk about the "Evangelical Vote" and "Christian Nationalism" as a collective political force. If a group of Silicon Valley VCs coordinates on a tech policy, we talk about "Big Tech’s" collective agenda. But under the IHRA definition, if a group of Jewish donors or activists coordinates on a policy, any attempt to describe that coordination as a "group" effort is suddenly a "discriminatory allegation."

4. Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).

   1. Historians routinely debate numbers, logistics, and evidentiary questions within established scholarship. This is the first time in modern Western law that a state legislature has attempted to codify the "correct" results of historical research.

5. Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.

   1. This is a unique "Infallibility Clause" that exists for no other historical event in human memory. You can argue that the casualties of the Great Leap Forward were exaggerated by the West; you can argue that the casualties of the Vietnam War were minimized by the Pentagon. We call that "revisionist history," and it is a standard part of the academic process.

6. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

   1. Meanwhile, top Zionist thinker Melanie Phillips has told Jewish audiences "first and foremost you're Jews, and everything else is secondary."

7. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

   1. You can’t question Zionism or Israel’s founding at all.

8. Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

   1. It effectively mandates that you cannot criticize an Israeli policy unless you simultaneously provide a PowerPoint presentation on similar failings in Norway, Japan, or Canada. Imagine applying this logic to any other facet of American life: you can’t complain about your local DMV unless you first acknowledge the inefficiency of the post office in Lyon, France.

9. Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

   1. You can’t accuse Jewish people of killing Jesus (you legally have to blame his death on Pontius Pilate).

10. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

    1. This would criminalize a 2024 essay from historian and Israel Defense Forces veteran Omer Bartov outlining how his research of Nazi Germany informed his concerns about Israel. It is policing historical analysis.

11. Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

    1. Over 90% of Jewish Israelis support the war with Iran. "Collective responsibility" is often a reflection of collective support.

When you strip away the administrative jargon and the “illustrative examples,” the intent of this speech code becomes transparent. This is a coordinated, state-level attempt to ensure that a specific foreign power—and the domestic lobby that fuels it—is the only entity on earth exempt from the First Amendment. You can critique your own history, you can audit your own churches, and you can protest your own president—but the moment you turn that lens toward Israel, you are a criminal.

To the legislators in Madison and the lobbyists in the wings: We aren’t asking for your permission to speak. We are exercising a God-given right that no lobby group can ever take away. This is America. In this country, there is no “Geopolitical Exception” to the Bill of Rights. There is no “Foreign Power Clause” that allows a governor to edit a journalist’s spreadsheet, a historian’s archive, or a citizen’s conscience. By attempting to carve out a protected sanctuary for a foreign state, you’ve declared war on the foundational mechanics of American dissent.

We must remember the standard set at the very birth of the Republic:

“Any law repugnant to the Constitution is null and void.”

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Ohio

Ohio Senate Bill 87 (SB 87) was introduced in 2025, but stalled for a while, before finally advancing on February 18, 2026, when it reached the floor for debate.

SB 87 sailed through the Ohio Senate on March 4, 2026, by a vote of 27-4.

The 4 votes against it were Ohio Democratic Senators: Catherine Ingram, Kent Smith, Paula Hicks-Hudson, and Nickie Antonio.

“This bill elevates hate speech not to individuals, but to nations because within the language and within the definition, it clearly identifies the state of Israel,” said Senator Paula Hick-Hudson. “It will definitely cause professors and other instructors to determine whether or not they can even raise the issue that’s happening right now in this world between the war that’s going on with Israel, the U.S. and Iran, and that is what I’m most concerned about.”

The Ohio Senate is overwhelmingly Republican.

SB 87 next will move to the House, which is also heavily Republican.

SB 87 is expected to move through the House in the coming days/weeks, leaving only the governor’s signature before it becomes law.

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I can’t foot the bill for everyone’s dinner, but I promise the first round of beers is on me.

You are all invited if you are in town! The restaurant isn’t secret, but I’m keeping the exact location off the public post so I can manage the reservation headcount. Please reach out directly for the restaurant name if you plan to come.

• Email: chrisbrunet@protonmail.com

• Text: 239-201-7405

Also, feel free to send me a message if you just want to chat, especially if you have top secret documents to leak to me or if you have any cool, explosive, or underreported stories you think deserve scrutiny. Historically, I haven't been the best at responding to all my subscriber emails, sorry, but I’m making a concerted effort to change that.

Looking forward to catching up in person.

Feel free to bring a friend, colleague, or your spouse.

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I try to avoid paywalls whenever possible. If I write something valuable, I want as many people as possible to read it. As a result, only about 2% of my readership is paid. If I went paywalled I could easily raise that number to the 5%-10% range, but that is something I am really trying to avoid.

So, please indulge me in one sponsored post, to keep this newsletter free.

On March 19th, 2026, I’ll be attending the Catholic Prayer for America Gala in Washington, D.C. Tickets are pricey, but the organizers gave me a $100 discount code for readers. If you use code BRUNET at checkout, you’ll get the discount.

Tickets here:

• https://cforc.com/event/catholicprayerforamerica2026/

And please follow Catholics for Catholics, host of the event, on X:

• https://x.com/CforCatholics

I am not speaking at the event, I am just going to be wandering around in a snazzy tuxedo. The event is being held at the Waldorf Astoria, the swankiest hotel in D.C.

The speakers are Candace Owens, Matt Walsh, Gen. Michael Flynn, Fr. Chris Alar, John Yep, and Sister Dede Byrne.

The program will also include an award presented to Carrie Prejean Boller following her dismissal from the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission.

Since I will be in D.C. for the 18th, 19th, or 20th, if you want to grab a beer, please email me and I will try my best to make it happen. If enough people are interested maybe we can have a meetup dinner on the 18th.

• chrisbrunet@protonmail.com

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#1: 10,000 graduate jobs for 900,000 graduates in the UK

Bloomberg put out a report last week concluding that there are only 10,000 new graduate jobs each year in the UK, and, well, the math isn’t great.

#2: 38% of Stanford students are disabled

The Atlantic recently published an article with some amazing statistics:

• At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled

• At Amherst: more than 30 percent

• At Stanford: nearly 40 percent

• At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.

Much of this rise in “disabilities” stems from students strategically seeking accommodations—particularly extra time on exams—because of how universities currently define and incentivize disability status.

At Berkeley, psychological/emotional distress is now the top reason for an accommodation. Second is ADD/ADHD.

Professor Eric Kaufman has measured which kinds of university student have high anxiety… the answer may not surprise you:

#3: UC San Diego Students Can’t Do basic Math

This was a big story a couple of months ago when it broke:

Steve Sailer

UCSD Admissions Fiasco Like Subprime Mortgage Crash

Jelani Nelson is the chairman of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at UC Berkeley. He is half Ethiopian, half African-American, and grew up in the Virgin Islands…

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5 months ago · 37 likes · 38 comments · Steve Sailer

UCSD’s “Math 2” course teaches grade-school math (grades 1–8) to freshmen.

From page 49 of the university’s new report:

• 25% of students got 7 + 2 = ___ + 6 wrong
• 61% of students, a large majority, couldn’t round 374,518 to the nearest hundred
• 37% of students couldn't subtract fractions

Hilariously, there are 5 mathematics students at USCD who have to take this remedial math class, 15 electrical & aerospace university students, and 14 Computer Science Students:

UCSD is ranked as the nation’s 5th best public university.

#4: Mega-journal Heliyon retracts hundreds of papers after internal audit

• https://retractionwatch.com/2026/02/03/mega-journal-heliyon-retracts-hundreds-of-papers-after-internal-audit/

Heliyon has published fewer papers and ramped up its retractions since a major indexing service put the journal on hold and the publisher launched an audit of all papers published in the journal since its launch in 2016.

…

Heliyon published over 11,000 papers in 2023 and more than 17,000 in 2024, issuing around two dozen retractions in each year. Last year, the journal published 3,168 articles and retracted 392 others.

So far this year, 37 papers have been retracted, and 144 have been published. The retraction notices cite reference issues, citation stacking, suspicious affiliations and areas of research, authorship changes, ethical approval, among others.

#5: Indiana University just posted a notice of intent to hire two H1B employees

No Americans were qualified for these jobs.

This follows an announcement 2 days ago from Ron DeSantis that all Florida public Universities will pause hiring new H-1B workers.

#6: Oklahoma Professor alleges his work was plagiarized

#7: Harvard is allegedly hiring 2 conservative professors

After I wrote this article about Harvard:

Chris Brunet

Harvard's PhD Bloodbath

Just after midnight last night, the Harvard Crimson quietly published a bombshell. Citing “financial pressure,” the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) announced drastic cuts to dozens of Harvard’s doctoral programs — a restructuring so deep that many graduate programs will effectively cease to exist…

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6 months ago · 183 likes · 3 comments · Christopher Brunet

I was contacted by a Harvard-connected source who told me that Harvard is now trying to hire at least two Conservative/Republicans/Trumpists, meaning two tenured professors who will make the Trump Administration more likely to be lenient in the final deal. The problem, I am told, is that the faculty are making it difficult to do so.

My evidence starts with Harvard’s job openings for faculty positions:

• academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/search

Harvard, as reported, has a hiring freeze because of all the financial pressure. So, how does it have 150 openings? The vast majority are post-doc positions which are already funded and so don’t “count” against the freeze. Let’s restrict the search to job postings mentioning “tenure”:

• academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=tenure

Now, there are just 6 jobs, which is much more reasonable, given the hiring freeze. One of these is actually for a non-tenured role in housing, and so doesn’t count. Three others are in SEAS (school of engineering and applied sciences) which might have special funding. But, in all of FAS (faculty of arts and sciences), there are exactly two job postings:

• https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15390

• https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15389

Why are these two FAS positions hiring, given the FAS hiring freeze?

Both of these postings look dramatically different from any other Harvard faculty job posting I have ever seen. A normal posting looks like this one, for Applied Math:

• https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15608

In particular, it requires the following:

Totally standard stuff: teaching statements, research statements, service statements: The two FAS positions, in contrast, only require a CV, despte being tenured posts:

I have never seen this sparse requirement—only a CV—to apply for a tenured Harvard job posting, or indeed, the job posting for any senior academic position. Of course, if you are President Garber, you want to make this search as quick and easy as possible.

Another weirdness is that, in the typical Harvard posting, you see what we see in the Math posting, that is, the contact information is just some secretary. They do not release the head (or any members) of the search committee, nor does that person want to be bothered by direct enquiries.

However, for the two FAS positions, the contact info is for two senior faculty members, almost surely the ones in charge of the search. Note that, while neither is “conservative,” both are old and white and male, and exactly who you would pick, if you were Garber, if you needed to hire a couple of conservatives.

However, I have heard --- this is very much second hand --- that the problem is that the faculty committees on these searches are not playing ball. They are refusing to hire someone right wing enough, at least by Garber’s lights, so he keeps telling them to keep searching.

#8: Plagiarizing Harvard professor of the practice

Last year, I wrote an article about Harvard professor of the practice Ricardo Hausmann and his serial plagiarism.

Chris Brunet

Professor at Toulouse School of Economics Writes Open Letter Accusing Harvard Professor of Plagiarism

Today's Substack is not by me. Instead, I reprinted this open letter from X with permission from the author, César Hidalgo of the Toulouse School of Economics…

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2 years ago · 56 likes · 12 comments · Christopher Brunet

Someone who read that article sent me this:

There’s another case of a Harvard professor of the practice whose intro stats textbook (co-authored with an undergrad) is a rip-off of several previously written textbooks. He and his student co-author copy dozens of derivations, proofs, problems, solutions, illustrations etc. with some lazy paraphrasing and trivial notation changes. They never explicitly credit the original textbooks or include them in the bibliography. This professor published nothing else over the past ten years, so plagiarism aside, he didn’t meet the criteria for re-appointment.

A professor at another university sent a document showing side-by-side comparisons to Harvard officials months ago. As has been par for the course, Harvard continues to sit on complaints and evidence for months or years on end, and the plagiarists keep stealing with impunity. Unlike Claudine Gay, who submitted a bunch of corrections In January this year, he wasn’t even asked to request corrections crediting the original textbooks.

I’m attaching the document in case you want to publish it on your substack.

Here is that document:

Hfas Complaint

18.5MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I sent this PDF to the authors, the plagiarizee, Harvard, and the textbook publishing company with polite questions about whether they ever looked into it, but nobody responded.

It seems fairly damning: 74 examples of blatantly copy-pasting questions.

That said, I’m not entirely sure how unusual it is for instructors to recycle introductory statistics problems. There are only so many ways to rephrase a word problem about rolling dice, coin flips, or sports betting odds.

The author of the allegedly plagiarized textbook, Joe Blitzstein, has this as his pinned tweet:

And he seems to have made quiet a bit of profit from it, since it has 137 reviews on Amazon:

#9: Indiana Econ Professor Arrested for Child Solicitation; UGA Math professor exposed

#10: Econ Profession Death Spiral Confirmed by MSM

5 months ago, I wrote this article:

Chris Brunet

The Collapse of the Econ PhD Job Market

For decades, a doctorate in economics was a golden ticket. It promised a path to tenure, or at worst, a lucrative role at a central bank, think tank, or tech firm…

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7 months ago · 104 likes · 23 comments · Christopher Brunet

Initially, it was paywalled (sorry!), but it gained so much momentum that I unpaywalled it, and it became one of my more popular articles with 45k reads:

The Tiktok I turned it into went viral too, wasting 283 hours of society’s valuable time:

The article was generally well-received, but Chris Blattman, an econ professor at UChicago, took issue with my Microsoft Paint projections:

Well, Chris, now that 2025 is over, and we have the final data, we can see my early projections were perfect.

This was the worst job market ever for economists:

Last month, the Wall Street Journal wrote almost the exact same article as mine, except much worse:

Two weeks ago, had a nice write-up on the economics profession discrediting itself.

Lorenzo from Oz

Why we should stop listening to economists on immigration

If economists were intellectually serious about immigration, they would analyse it like they do monetary policy. Monetary policy can be done well; it can be done badly; it can be done disastrously…

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3 months ago · 75 likes · 26 comments · Lorenzo Warby

#11: MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS

7 Months ago I reported on an MIT PhD student kicked out of school for falsifying an AI paper:

Chris Brunet

MIT Econ PhD Student Kicked Out for Massive Fraud

This is undoubtedly the most blatant and brazen econ fraud of 2025…

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8 months ago · 156 likes · 4 comments · Christopher Brunet

Now, MIT has a second AI paper retraction.

• https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/03/mit_sloan_updates_ai_ransomware_paper/

Do 80 percent of ransomware attacks really come from AI? MIT Sloan has now withdrawn a working paper that made that eyebrow-raising claim after criticism from security researcher Kevin Beaumont.

The withdrawn paper [PDF], co-authored by researchers from MIT Sloan and Safe Security, claimed, “Our recent analysis of over 2800 ransomware incidents has revealed an alarming trend: AI plays an increasingly significant role in these attacks. In 2024, 80.83 percent of recorded ransomware events were attributed to threat actors utilizing AI.”

Completed in April, the paper was cited in an MIT Sloan blog post last month titled “80 percent of ransomware attacks now use artificial intelligence.” It has since been echoed elsewhere.

“The paper is absolutely ridiculous,” Beaumont wrote in a Mastodon thread last week. “It describes almost every major ransomware group as using AI – without any evidence (it’s also not true, I monitor many of them). It even talks about Emotet (which hasn’t existed for many years) as being AI driven.”

#12: Brett Matsumoto to head Bureau of Labor Statistics

Following EJ Antoni’s failure last year to secure the support required for confirmation as head of the BLS:

Robert Reich

Trump’s political hack nominee for the Bureau of Labor Statistics is already monkeying with the data.

Friends…

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8 months ago · 2042 likes · 320 comments · Robert Reich

Last month, Trump nominated Brett Matsumoto to that role, a much more boring, less partisan, more technocratic pick. Whereas Antoni had no research record to speak of (his PhD was from “Norhtern Illionis University, an objectively terrible school, and his thesis on Austrian economics looked like an undergrad thesis riddled with errors), Brett’s PhD in economics is from UNC Chapel Hill and his research is on serious economic measurement.

Brett is a beloved folk hero in the economics profession (more specifically, in the EJMR community) because he is best known for bravely standing up to fight against research misconduct in the “Family Ruptures” scandal.

Brett is a much better choice in every dimension than EJ Antoni.

#13: College for Sale

Since Green Mountain College in rural Vermont went bankrupt in 2019, its 155-acre campus has been sitting empty.

If anyone here has a spare few million dollars in your pocket, they are now fielding proposals to revive it in some capacity.

#14: Canada Establishes Inuit-led University

#15: Climate Change Economics Paper Retracted

Last year, the Review of Financial Studies (the #2 academic finance journal in the world) issued an “expression of concern” for a 2022 paper about the impact of climate change on the mortgage industry.

Now, the paper has been retracted:

This retraction followed a response by M. LaCour-Little, A. Pavlov and S. Wachter, published in the Review of Financial Studies, which identified two main issues with the original article: the use of incorrect Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) conforming loan limits and the misclassification of loans due to rounding of loan amounts around this limit.

The committee subsequently concluded that correcting the issues would invalidate the main results reported in Table 2 of the original article; rectifying the coding error of the publicly available conforming loan limits alone would invalidate the results reported. Moreover, in the process of examining the results, the committee determined that the methodology described in the original paper does not generate the results reported. The editorial team are retracting this article because the original findings cannot be replicated given these issues.

#16: University of Alberta becomes first Canadian University to Abandon Affirmative Action

• https://nationalpost.com/opinion/university-of-alberta-to-become-first-to-abandon-race-centric-hiring https://nationalpost.com/opinion/university-of-alberta-to-become-first-to-abandon-race-centric-hiring

#17: Shanghai University of Finance and Economics: A Playground for Academic Corruption

I was blown away by the investigation because I didn’t really think that investigative journalism / blogging / whistleblowing could exist in China:

• https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/hVosUoiIoWFJvqUByzOh9w

Shortly after it was posted, it was deleted from Chinese social media:

But I have archived it here on the Western internet:

• https://archive.is/DaoAi

Professor Yao Yang is currently trending:

“In over 40 years, I have never fallen in love with Beijing.”

So, we are very curious—what could Professor Yao Yang possibly fall in love with?

The answer is revealed: Professor Yao Yang voted with his feet, leaving Beijing for Shanghai.

It turns out that the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics’ Dishui Lake Advanced Institute of Finance (DIIJF) is actually a playground for a group of academic corruption and collusion!

Despite this, Professor Yao Yang still tries to maintain appearances and shout slogans:

“DIIJF, standing tall and upright!”

Unfortunately, beneath this facade, there is already a stain.

Yao Yang: Dishui Lake DIIJF aims to be “standing tall and upright,” cultivating scholars who can solve real-world problems.

DIIJF has never been a place to cultivate scholars who can solve China’s real-world problems. On the contrary, it is only good at dealing with “people” rather than “problems”—any scholar who dares to speak the truth and refuses to conform will be treated as a “problem” to be solved.

Despite this, we urge Dean Yao Yang to investigate how many charlatans he has under his command.

We are providing a list for Dean Yao Yang to verify; these professors are all involved in multiple publications of the same paper.

Bao Xiaohua: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/86/c12600a208774/page.htm

Cao Dongbo: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/a8/c12600a208808/page.htm

Ding Xiaoqin: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/9a/c12600a208794/page.htm

Jin Qinglu: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/ 2f/84/c12600a208772/page.htm

Jin Yuying: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/84/c12600a208772/page.htm

Liu Zhiyang: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/75/c12600a208757/page.htm

Luo Yuding: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/90/be/c12600a233662/page.htm

Wang Fang: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/a2/c12600a208802/page.htm

Yan Hongzhong: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/7d/c12600a208765/page.htm

Zhu Xiaoneng: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/7f/c12600a208767/page.htm

#18: Canadian Mathematician Goes Missing

, one of the best journalists in Canada, has published a detailed write-up on a mathematician and outspoken critic of the Iranian regime who warned that the regime had infiltrated a Canadian university engineering program at Simon Fraser University.

He went missing earlier this month under suspicious circumstances.

The Bureau

Mathematician Who Warned of Regime Infiltration of Canadian University Engineering Program Missing in Suspicious Disappearance

VANCOUVER – An outspoken Iranian dissident who publicly warned Canadian authorities in 2021 about alleged Iranian regime infiltration of engineering programs at Simon Fraser University has disappeared under suspicious circumstances, prompting an investigation by the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team…

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3 months ago · 106 likes · 7 comments

The RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) is still investigating.

#19: Rachael Meager is now officially Rafe Meager

If you are active on EconTwitter, you will know that one of the most popular accounts is Rachel Meager, she is one of the cool kids. Previously she was an assistant professor at LSE Department of Economics, but has recently returned home to be a professor in Australia.

She is also on Substack:

The Universal and the Vacuous Events

Either rotten or good, or both rotten and good

By Rafe Meager

Breaking news: Rachael is now going by “Rafe,” and says she is a man.

This is very very sad. You can see the pain and confusion in her tortured eyes.

#20: Marco Di Maggio update

Do Kwon has now pled guilty in a New York court to two U.S. fraud charges, conspiracy to defraud and wire fraud, under a plea deal that requires him to forfeit over $19 million but carries a maximum prison sentence of 25 years.

• https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/do-kwon-pleads-guilty-us-fraud-charges-40-billion-crypto-collapse-2025-08-12/

Kwon was a software engineer who built Terra, which wiped out investors worldwide when it imploded in 2022.

Kwon has nothing to do with economics or academia directly—but his chief economic consultant at the time was Marco Di Maggio, then a finance professor at Harvard Business School.

I wrote about Marco Di Maggio three years ago, in one of my first articles:

Chris Brunet

Marco Di Maggio: Putting the BS in HBS

If you even tangentially follow the crypto markets, you have heard of Terra/Luna…

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4 years ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Brunet

How central was Di Maggio to Terra’s $40 billion Ponzi? Just look at the foundational whitepapers—the core documents outlining the system. His name is on all of them. Marco promised this Ponzi scheme was safe, and he put the Harvard name brand on it, but it was a fatally flawed scam.

When I initially covered this, I noted that Di Maggio had walked away from the wreckage untouched, despite questions about how many millions he might have personally pocketed while retail investors were left holding the bag.

Now for the update: Di Maggio has since quietly left Harvard, and has now resurfaced in the UK at Imperial College Business School.

• https://www.marcodimaggio.net/

Imperial is a good school, but British academia is much worse than American academia, and even in the pecking order of British academia, it is 2nd rate, sitting a tier below the big four: Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, and UCL.

Harvard to Imperial is a pretty major downgrade, but still a comfy landing spot for a man who did so much damage to the global economy.

#21: Adrien Matray Update

Since we’re catching up with old friends, let’s check in on Adrien.

When I first reported on his scandal, it was huge news — one of the very few papers ever retracted by the best econ journal in the world due to two egregious coding “errors” followed by the classic excuse: the dog ate my laptop.

Chris Brunet

BREAKING: American Economic Review retracts Princeton economics professor's paper due to "coding error"

Following this Harvard bombshell from 2 days ago…

Read more

3 years ago · 27 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Brunet

“The data and the code for the analysis are stored on remote, external servers that were inaccessible to the authors for prolonged periods of time during the publication process, so it is unfortunately not possible to recover past versions to isolate the error’s origin.”

— Adrien Matray

After getting caught in this fraud, he was bounced off the tenure track at Princeton and shuffled into temporary VAP roles at Stanford and Harvard. Hardly the academic wilderness, but still a sharp demotion — from a tenure-track golden boy to one-year contracts.

He has not updated his Linkedin since that, for a good reason: he has now left academia and joined the Atlanta Fed. A promising elite academic career derailed by research misconduct, but still a safe cushion too land on.

#22: Times of India Covers Affirmative Action in Canadian Universities

If you follow me on X you know that I am in the habit of tweeting out discriminatory job postings from Canadian schools, e.g.:

My last one about University of Toronto was tweeted by Elon Musk, and The Times of India (13.9 millions followers on X) has written an article about it:

#23: University of Adelaide builds “squat toilets”

Presented without comment:

#24: Last month Supreme Court signals it will defy Trump to keep Lisa Cook on Federal Reserve

This happened over a month ago, but given that I’ve written a dozen articles on Lisa Cook, it is worth covering the newest update:

• https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/21/politics/takeaways-supreme-court-federal-reserve-lisa-cook-trump-power

The Supreme Court signaled deep skepticism Wednesday that President Donald Trump had the authority to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, with several conservative justices joining their liberal colleagues in posing pointed questions of the lawyer defending the president.

By the end of the two-hour argument, many of the justices appeared to be more interested in how the court would side with Cook — not whether it would do so — and how quickly it would resolve her underlying litigation.

…

Given the tenor of the arguments, and the fact that the case was at the Supreme Court on an emergency basis, it’s possible that the justices will hand down a decision far more quickly than it normally might in an argued case. Usually, the court will resolve its most important cases before the end of June.

#25: TAMU Abolishes Women’s Studies Program

#26: University of Nebraska Abolishes Statistics Department

Much more worrying than getting rid of gender studies:

Meanwhile Nebraska is happily funding gender studies, dance, and theater departments. In what world do you eliminate the statistics department before their Bachelor of Arts in Dance?

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Chris Brunet: “I have very simple question for Shabbos, who is Amalek?”

Shabbos Kestenbaum: “Who is what? Who is Amalek? Oh, Amalek?”

Since then, the Overton window has shifted, and taboos are being smashed.

Just last week, Tucker Carlson asked Mike Huckabee:

Tucker: “What is Amalek? Tell me what it means.”

Huckabee: “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Netanyahu.”

3 hours ago, at the time I am writing this, America bombed Iran.

2 hours ago, Donald Trump released a video declaring war on Iran:

Trump: “The lives of American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties — that often happens in war.”

One hour after that, CNN put out an article declaring that the “timing of US-Israel attack on Iran bears symbolic meaning in Judaism” because it’s Purim on Monday, and Purim is a very violent & vengeful time.

For example, the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre took place during Purim of 1994. According to one writer, killer Baruch Goldstein saw the Palestinians as Amalek and “carried out the massacre on Purim, one week after he would have heard the biblical retelling of the command to wipe out a rival nation. As the journalist Peter Beinart and others have written, the timing was not a coincidence.”

Below is a screenshot of today’s full CNN article. Here is a direct link.

The article invokes Amalek three times and explains that the biblical passage commanding Israel to remember and eradicate Amalek is read publicly before Purim to fulfill the mitzvah of remembering Israel’s enemies.

At the very moment American bombs are falling, CNN’s news desk is highlighting ancient scriptural eschatology to justify the bombs.

That is not a neutral editorial decision.

That is propaganda.

What infuriates me is American foreign policy being wrapped in ancient religious extremism while American lives are put on the line. This is supposed to be the United States of America. Our wars are not supposed to be fought over foreign theological ethno-grievances. They are supposed to be fought, if at all, for clear national interests that serve the American people.

If you believe this war meets that standard, say so.

If you don’t, say that too.

Go vote in my poll, before the bot farms swarm it:

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This was her third attempt at taking the SAT.

The first time she got 1100, the second time, 1050, the third time 1070.

A 1070 SAT score is genuinely bad. It sits around the 59th percentile, which is bad enough that if you score at this level you probably aren’t smart enough to go to college, and especially embarrassing given that Alice had every possible advantage: a private tutor, elite schooling, and access to unlimited billions of dollars.

For reference, these are the best schools you could realistically expect to get into with a 1070 SAT score:

1. Montclair State University (NJ) — 930–1200

2. University of Nevada, Reno (NV) — 1070–1230

3. University of South Alabama (AL) — 990–1180

4. University of New Mexico (NM) — 900–1160

5. University of Toledo (OH) — 1040–1260

This is exactly why people are angry. If Alice de Rothschild had been born in a trailer park, her academic profile would have made her a fit for a school like University of Toledo, which has a roughly 95 percent acceptance rate.

Instead, because of her blue blood, she was admitted to New York University, which admits only about 7 percent of applicants. Jeffrey Epstein even tried to get her into Columbia University, but failed. NYU was the fallback.

The New York Times reports:

[Epstein] asked Richard Axel — a Nobel laureate and a powerful scientific figure on Columbia’s campus with whom he had a long relationship — to lobby the admissions office on Alice de Rothschild’s behalf.

“I have spoken with Columbia admissions and she is good but not strongest candidate. I am pushing,” Dr. Axel wrote to Mr. Epstein on Nov. 16, 2016.

“Alice de Rothschild’s university admissions in the United States, as well as her rejections, are entirely due to her grades,” the Rothschild family said in a statement. “Alice cannot be held responsible for Jeffrey Epstein’s unilateral actions.”

She was not admitted. Dr. Axel wrote to Mr. Epstein in February 2017, breaking the news. She ultimately enrolled at N.Y.U., where she studied biology.

This struck a chord because thousands of people who scored far higher than Alice but were shut out of elite schools recognized it immediately for what it was: a rigged system. The “elites” who rule over us are frauds. They deserve scorn and ridicule not because they are exceptional, but because they achieve nothing. They are simply born into power and placed there. They fail upwards.

One of the funnier replies to my tweet sarcastically suggested that the Rothschilds would have to write an admissions essay about how someone was racist to them once and it makes them sad….

… which is ironic, because in the emails, I found that Ariane Rothschild frequently complained to Epstein about all the “anti-rothschild” racism she had to endure and how that makes her sad.

Another common talking point in the replies was that this mediocrity is the result of generations of inbreeding. Which is surprisingly true. For centuries, the Rothschilds almost exclusively married their cousins, which is something they openly admit.

In response to this inbreeding talking point, hundreds of people argued the opposite: that Rothschild blood has been so diluted by recent intermixing with shiksahs, that no wonder Alice Rothschild is dumb.

The most unhinged of all responses came from , who began bizarrely white-knighting for Epstein and the Rothschilds, claiming that me violating the Rothschild’s privacy is “more of a violation of a teenager” than “anything that’s come out in the entire Epstein files” which he referred to as a “moral panic.”

This is what the Epstein files actually show. Everyone looks for the sex tapes and the blackmail, but the day-to-day reality is much more pathetic. Epstein was a fixer for the Zionist mafia. If a billionaire’s kid is too “slow” or “dim” to get into a real school, Epstein was the guy who called in a favor to a Nobel Laureate to fix it.

This story blew up because it’s a middle finger to every smart, poor kid who actually studied. While ordinary people grind for a percentile that might determine the trajectory of their entire lives, the ruling class treats the Ivy League like a private club with a side entrance for their inbred failspawn.

More soon on the Epstein–Rothschild correspondence.

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This includes 7 papers in the International Review of Financial Analysis (a good journal—it has an 18% acceptance rate):

• RETRACTED: The role of feature importance in predicting corporate financial distress in pre and post COVID periods: Evidence from China

• RETRACTED: The impacts of climate policy uncertainty on stock markets: Comparison between China and the US

• RETRACTED: Financing Irish high-tech SMEs: The analysis of capital structure

• RETRACTED: Extreme spillovers across Asian-Pacific currencies: A quantile-based analysis

• RETRACTED: Identifying the multiscale financial contagion in precious metal markets

• RETRACTED: Is Bitcoin a better safe-haven investment than gold and commodities?

• RETRACTED: Cryptocurrencies as a financial asset: A systematic analysis

Plus two more retractions in Finance Research Letters (29% acceptance rate):

• RETRACTED: Datestamping the Bitcoin and Ethereum bubbles

• RETRACTED: Trading volume and the predictability of return and volatility in the cryptocurrency market

Two days later, three more papers were retracted at the International Review of Economics & Finance (30% acceptance rate):

• RETRACTED: Oil price shocks and yield curve dynamics in emerging markets

• RETRACTED: Volatility forecasting on China’s oil futures: New evidence from interpretable ensemble boosting trees

• RETRACTED: ESG disclosure and internal pay gap: Empirical evidence from China

Combined, these 12 papers have 5,104 citations.

All 12 papers had one thing in common: Brian M Lucey, Professor of International Finance and Commodities, Trinity College Dublin — the #1 ranked economics and business school in Ireland — as a co-author.

Lucey published 56 papers in 2025, one paper every 6.5 days. Lmao.

Lucey has published 44 papers in Finance Research Letters alone, an Elsevier journal he edited.

I emailed Lucey for comment, but he did not respond.

Brian Lucey… where have I heard that name before?

Oh yeah, he bullied me on Twitter in 2023.

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The stated reason for the retractions was that: “review of this submission was overseen, and the final decision was made, by the Editor Brian Lucey, despite his role as a co-author of the manuscript. This compromised the editorial process and breached the journal’s policies.”

In plain terms, Lucey was serving as editor while approving his own papers. The result was a complete bypass of peer review—an abuse of editorial authority that functioned as a citation-cartel scheme.

Apparently this was an open secret in the profession for many years, with EJMR comments going back 5+ years explicitly calling him out as a cheater:

Along with the 12 retractions, Lucey was removed as an editor at 5 journals: International Review of Financial Analysis, the International Review of Economics & Finance, Finance Research Letters, Financial Management, & Energy Finance.

Lucey remains as editor-in-chief at Wiley’s Journal of Economic Surveys.

I emailed Wiley, and they provided me with this statement:

We are aware of these concerns and have investigated Prof. Lucey’s activity on Journal of Economic Surveys. Our research integrity team did not find any concerns regarding conflict of interest or mishandling of papers, nor has Prof. Lucey published any papers in the journal since he joined the editorial team as a co-editor in 2024. We expect full commitment and adherence to our editorial practices and standards, and we will be monitoring the situation to ensure that there is no improper handling of papers at the journal.

In response to Wiley’s statement, one EMJR user wrote: “I am baffled how they could possibly still have confidence in him, given his serious and systematic ethical lapses in editorial positions. Sounds somewhat naive to expect ‘full adherence to our editorial practices and standards’!”

Until being purged from the leadership of these 5 journals, Lucey played a central role in coordinating Elsevier’s Finance Journals Ecosystem, which allows “participating journals to suggest transferring a rejected manuscript to another journal in the system without the need for resubmission and the associated cost."

That system, and the editors involved, “came under fire last year when a preprint suggested it might facilitate citation stacking as a way to boost journal impact factors. The analysis in the preprint also suggested a citation ring involving Elsevier editors could be at work.”

I emailed the anonymous “Theophilos Nomos” who wrote this paper, but they did not respond to my email.

That pre-print names Samuel Vigne, a finance professor at Luiss Business School, former PhD student of Lucey, and prolific Lucey co-author (they have published at least 33 papers together) as a core node of Lucey’s citation cartel.

Multiple publications by Vigne and Lucey are flagged on PubPeer.

• https://pubpeer.com/search?q=samuel+vigne (21 results)

• https://pubpeer.com/search?q=brian+lucey (55 results)

This example neatly illustrates how their co-authorship trading scheme operated:

• https://pubpeer.com/publications/59EAFFA126CD44D742AAF1386F45FC

It describes a draft uploaded to SSRN with three authors:

After submitting that draft to the Elsevier finance ecosystem, that draft was scrubbed from SSRN, and in the final published version, an additional author (Samuel Vigne) was added as a new author, with an “equal contribution” statement. The two versions are otherwise identical, containing the same figures, sections, and text.

Co-authorship trading is only one part of the operation. The other is citation stacking. In this model, a small, tightly linked group funnels an enormous volume of papers into the same handful of journals, then systematically stuffs those papers with citations to one another. The result is a rapid, artificial explosion in citation counts that makes them look like influential geniuses.

Take John Gooddell, a professor at the University of Akron and a Lucey co-author. Gooddell has published 68 papers in Finance Research Letters alone, a journal edited by Lucey. If each paper contains even a modest 50 references, that amounts to roughly 3,400 citations recycled through a single outlet. In 2024 alone, Gooddell published 61 papers. He’s not doing research. He’s farming citations.

Following Lucey’s retractions, Samuel Vigne was removed as the editor-in-chief of International Review of Financial Analysis and Finance Research Letters.

In addition to that anonymous pre-print, there is also a 2025 paper written by actual professors with sophisticated econometric analysis & graph theory which describes the citation cartel in much more detail. The conclusion of that paper is: ”Elsevier ecosystem journals benefited from the creation of the ecosystem … Elsevier journals in the ecosystem have overlapping editors and Elsevier appoints these editors in coordination with a single academic [Brian Lucey] that manages the fleet of ecosystem journals.”

Brian Lucey posted a reply to this paper, which was extremely weak and does not contain any tables or figures. It mostly ignores the data and structural model of the citation ring and instead leans on Lucey’s “lived experience” as an editor (“we have experience shepherding…”), while also nitpicking semantics and phrasing, such as Lucey complaining that they called him a “professor of finance” instead of his full honorific, “professor of international finance and commodities.”

The Elsevier ecosystem web page went live on 4 November 2020 , according to Lucey’s rebuttal. Below is a visualization of the network before and after this transition date, which shows a clear distortion of the citation network. During 2021-2025, the Ecosystem citations per article is 103 % higher.

2016-2020: (Before)

2021-2025: (After)

2020 is also the year where Brian Lucey’s citation profile exhibits an exponential “J-curve”, a Hallmark of citation rings. Did he suddenly become a well-respected genius in 2020? Or did he figure out how to cheat the system?

In a comment to Retraction Watch, Lucey further argued that citation cartels are not a crime, because everyone does it.

”Because here’s the thing: Elsevier are aware of [editors publishing in their own journals] as a pretty common practice in finance and economics. We’ve given them evidence of hundreds of instances of this. And nothing has happened, which does raise the question, you know, maybe they’re going to go back and go look at all these. Presumably, they will treat everything the same.” Lucey shared his list of such instances. It includes 240 articles, 133 of which are in Science of the Total Environment, which was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in November.

(N.B.: As several commenters have noted, the list linked above includes citations to editorials and special issue introductions, which are typically penned by editors-in-chief. The disclaimer at the top of the document Lucey provided reads, “In no way is this meant to suggest any ethical or other breaches. It is a list of persons who occupied a EiC or similar role in the Journal mentioned at the same time as a paper in which they were an author or coautho[r].”)

Dr. Thorsten Beck, in a blog post, confirmed that no, not everyone does it, and yes, it is a crime.

This incident raises an important question: is this common practice across academic journals? And are there rules for editors publishing in ‘their’ journals? As I was editor across three journals for a total of 11 years, I can certainly speak to this (and clearly say NO).

…

I don’t have formal confirmation but I have been told by several independent sources that ultimately even Elsevier realised that this editor was seriously damaging the reputation of the journal, appointing a second editor and then easing out the ‘doubtful’ editor from his responsibilities.

The fallout from the Lucey–Vigne era extends far beyond a handful of retracted PDFs. What it exposes is a structural weakness in how academic “excellence” is manufactured, measured, and monetized. By presiding over a coordinated cluster of journals, a small group of editors effectively gained the ability to print their own academic currency.

However, blaming Lucey and Vigne alone ignores the hand that fed them. Elsevier did not just “allow” this to happen; they engineered the environment for it to flourish, because of incentives: Elsevier’s internal metrics (Impact Factors) directly benefitted from this behavior. It was a symbiotic corruption: the editors received a fast-track to academic stardom, and Elsevier received a high-margin, high-volume production line of citable content.

This is the “paper mill” reimagined for the elite: not a basement operation in a third-world nation, but a polished, corporate-mandated factory within the halls o the world’s most powerful publisher. This is the natural result of a corporate mandate to maximize profits by bundling journals into monopoly-priced packages, forcing universities to pay for the very “prestige” that Elsevier’s own staff helped to dilute. As one EJMR commenter noted, “The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data.”

The question now is whether Trinity College Dublin will fire Lucey.

They did not respond to my inquiry.

What Investigators Should Look For

An editor of a psychology journal was offered $1,500 per accepted paper.

, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex, wrote that he was offered $5,000 per paper.

Muhammad Ali Nasir, a professor of Macroeconomics at Leeds University, wrote about how common selling papers is in European finance journals: “I had been made such offers from anonymous emails but I choose not to engage and in one case forwarded the email to EiC. I will be surprised if any editor is not approached by these people.”

This raises a multi-million-euro question: given their documented corruption, are the various “educational consultancies” and special-purpose vehicles operated by Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne used to circulate ecosystem funds, conference fees, or “consultancy” payouts from authors seeking a shortcut to publication?

One anonymous economist says:

Here is a hypothetical outline of how such a cash-flow scheme could function.

“Hello [unknown, distant institutions], we offer consulting services: €€€ for excellent advice on how to publish in top-tier finance journals. Our advice yields results.”

Money flows into companies.

Papers flow into journals.

Another anonymous economist says:

I’m not going to provide details on how to corruptly have a paper published. I’m just going to speculate on what could be going on in a situation like this. It could be based on “consultancy fees” for advice on publishing that you or your institution pay to one of those companies. They give some advice, including what papers to cite, etc, and if you follow their advice you are likely to be published in one of their journals. This could be attractive for researchers and institutions in, e.g., China and the Middle East.

Another anonymous economics professor I spoke to told me:

Universities in East and West Asia pay cash bonuses for publications. Some authors hire a broker (many advertise openly on Facebook), other authors contact the editor directly. The cash bonus is shared between the author, broker, and editor.

Besides selling papers, they also sell special issues, which allow the guest editors to do what they want.

And they sell positions on the editorial board, which are important for promotion to the next academic rank.

Some payments are in cash, others in kind.

Finally, they organize conferences. Registration fees more than cover the costs of putting on a conference. The conference name suggests it is organized by a society, but it really is Lucey who pockets the profits.

Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne operate four private companies in Ireland and the UK classified under “other education,” likely functioning as consultancies or special-purpose vehicles for academic or policy work.

• PIQUE ASSOCIATES LIMITED

• INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE FINANCE VENTURES COMPANY LIMITED BY GUARANTEE

• HIPPOPOTAMUS LIMITED

• FUTURE FINANCE AND ECONOMICS ASSOCIATION LIMITED

The existence of these consultancies warrants investigation into potential conflicts of interest and financial misconduct.

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For the Gen Z and Millennial voters who swung his way, the promise was straightforward: no more foreign wars, a return to sanity, and a real chance to own a stake in the country they live in.

One year later, that mandate is in ashes.

Since his inauguration, Trump’s approval rating has fallen consistently, month after month. The decline is neither marginal nor confined to any single pollster or methodology. It appears across the polling landscape, a pattern captured clearly in the RealClearPolitics average of the top 19 national polls:

Republicans are now projected to get crushed in the 2026 midterms:

Meanwhile… Trump’s approval just reached a record high… in Israel.

The administration’s opening act was a grim indicator of things to come: the deportation of students for the crime of writing op-eds.

The National Review now reports: Government investigators found no evidence that Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, had “engaged in antisemitic activity” or made “any public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization or antisemitism generally,” before the Trump administration tried to deport her, according to newly unsealed court documents.

John Dickerson

The Op-Ed Arrest

In March 2025 A Turkish graduate student, Rumeysa Öztürk, was arrested for being one of four authors of an op-ed. At the time it seemed absurd. Officials made bold claims about Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University, but they offered no proof…

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3 months ago · 128 likes · 4 comments · John Dickerson

Since then, Trump has increasingly deferred to and elevated Lindsey Graham on foreign policy. Graham—who played golf with Trump last week—has an approval rating of just 29% in his home state of South Carolina. Only 14% of his constituents say he should be reelected, while 73% say it’s time for someone new.

Graham visited Israel last week, where he bragged that “I come to Israel every two weeks, if I need to or not” and explained: “The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel“

Meanwhile, the most iconic photograph of Trump’s term so far is him obsequiously pulling out a chair for Netanyahu.

My point isn’t to aimlessly bash Israel or Netanyahu, my point is they are both historically unpopular with voters. Netanyahu’s approval rating among U.S. adults sits at a paltry 29%, while Israel consistently polls as the most disliked country in the world: according to Pew Research, the only remaining countries that have a net positive view of Israel are Nigeria, Kenya, and India.

Netanyahu and Israel are especially unpopular with young Americans, with a majority of adults under 35 now favoring reducing—or ending—U.S. aid to Israel.

Is it any surprise, then, that Trump’s approval decline is being driven by young voters more than any other demographic? He has lost the youth vote outright.

Roughly half of America’s younger voters moved away from Trump in the span of a single year. Among voters aged 18–29, his net approval collapsed from +9 in February 2025 (52–43%) to –42 in February 2026 (25–67%), according to YouGov.

That’s a 51 point swing in one year.

You might dismiss YouGov as an unreliable pollster. But the collapse is not an outlier. Even Quantus Insights, a Trump-aligned firm with a clear pro-GOP house bias, reports a comparable freefall. Among voters aged 18–44, Trump’s net approval fell from –2 in August 2025 to –45 by February 2026.

Trump has already bombed Iran once on Israel’s behalf, and he is now on the verge of doing so again. Public support for another attack on Iran stands at just 21%.

Chris Brunet

How Senate Republicans Are Using Fake Polls to Justify Bombing Iran

Israel has never been this unpopular…

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10 months ago · 52 likes · 25 comments · Christopher Brunet

Intervention in Venezuela was deeply unpopular as well. Roughly 56% of respondents said they either oppose or strongly oppose U.S. military action there.

Young people feel betrayed particularly because Trump campaigned on an isolationist message of no new wars and no foreign interventions.

Trump also ran on a platform of ending the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours. Here are 53 times Trump said he’d end the Ukraine war within 24 hours or before taking office. Yes, people know Trump is a bullshitter who speaks in hyperbole, and they bake that into their expectations, but you promised it would take a day, and it’s been a year with zero progress, people are justifiably upset.

Who actually benefits from these foreign wars?

Not young Americans.

They benefit a narrow set of interests: major donors, defense contractors, and foreign governments with direct influence over U.S. policy. Trump’s administration is structured to align U.S. power with those Zionist billionaires.

Young Americans notice that, and they care.

Chris Brunet

The Biggest Winner in Venezuela: Paul “The Vulture” Singer

Coups, collapses, and revolutions are usually framed as moral dramas: heroes and villains, tyrants and liberators, peoples rising against power. What receives less attention is the market for distressed assets that forms in their wake. When states fracture, assets do not vanish. They are liquidated quietly, legally, and at a steep discount. Crisis creat…

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4 months ago · 107 likes · 22 comments · Christopher Brunet

This deference to Israel ultimately culminated in Trump’s mishandling of the Epstein files. On July 16, 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social, calling the push for more Epstein files a Democratic “hoax” and “bullshit.” He referred to his supporters demanding transparency as “weaklings” doing “the Democrats’ work” and stated he no longer wanted their vote.

Trump said he doesn’t want the votes of people who care about Epstein.

Voters have taken him at his word.

In terms of public opinion and polling, this is yet another lopsided issue where Trump finds himself on the wrong side of the electorate, and it is plainly dragging his approval rating down.

Perhaps the most egregious Epstein lie came from Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who brazenly misrepresented his association. Younger voters, raised in an era of receipts and screenshots, know exactly what it looks like to be lied to.

The fact that Howard Lutnick is still a member of the Trump administration would be shocking, if not for the fact that if he fell on his sword, it would mean a dozen other Trump officials would have to fall on their swords as well.

MAGA is flailing. With no rebuttal to the Epstein argument, they are now reduced to changing the subject or lashing out with unrelated personal attacks.

Case in point, Pam Bondi spent her entire hearing last week lashing out with personal attacks & changing the subject.

Beyond Israel and all the baggage that comes with it, another major force dragging down youth support is housing. Housing is not an abstract issue for this generation. It determines whether they can marry, have children, or stay in the country at all. When a political movement offers them endless war abroad and lifelong rent at home, they do not see stability.

Trump ran on making housing more affordable, another bait and switch:

But in reality all he has produced so far is a fig leaf proposal like 50-year mortgages, sold as “innovation” but functionally indistinguishable from debt serfdom. Stretching mortgages across half a century doesn’t make homes more affordable; it simply lowers the monthly payment while locking buyers into lifelong leverage. The price of housing doesn’t fall — it rises. To young people, the message is unmistakable: You will not own. You will rent. And if you do manage to buy, it will be through permanent debt slavery.

Graham’s Newsletter

IMPORTANT: The 50-year mortgage is a disaster

Big goals, limited time…

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5 months ago · 28 likes · 2 comments · Graham Stephan

Trump has zero interest in making homeownership easier for young families. His policies have been cosmetic at best and hostile at worst. There is no appetite for deflating a housing bubble because that bubble is the retirement plan of his boomer base.

Last month, speaking at the World Economic Forum, Trump was unusually candid about housing. He acknowledged that he has the power to bring prices down—but made clear he has no intention of doing so:

“Every time you make it more and more affordable for someone to buy a house cheaply [that’s a bad thing]. I don’t want to do anything that will hurt the value of homes … if I really wanted to crush the housing market I could do that so fast, and people could buy houses.”

Two days later, he reiterated the point even more bluntly, saying he did not want to drive housing prices down simply so that youth “who didn’t work very hard” could afford to buy a home.

For younger Americans locked out of homeownership by prices they did nothing to inflate, the message was unmistakable: preserving asset values for existing owners matters more than giving the next generation a chance to build a life.

And that’s before we even get into the broader economy, or broader corruption.

As a result of Trump’s indifference to young people, U.S. fertility has been falling to historic lows and according to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, that decline is expected to worsen in the coming decades. In fact, the CBO now predicts deaths will exceed births in America 10 years sooner than their 2024 projection.

Yes, this fertility crisis predates Trump, but he has shown no interest in addressing it.

While American fertility collapses, Israel’s Jewish population recorded a fertility rate of 3.1 births per woman in 2024, nearly double that of the United States. Washington has money, attention, and political urgency—just not for its own country.

A government that subsidizes foreign demographic growth while presiding over domestic collapse is not confused. It has made its priorities clear.

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The night had 3 debates: the first was between two lawyers specializing in birthright citizenship, it was a treat to watch their elite legal sparring for an hour.

The headline debate was Ana Kaspartian, Executive Producer & Host of The Young Turks, vs. “Pearl”, a contrarian e-girl with 2,000,000 followers on YouTube.

It was a slaughter…

The e-girl couldn’t think on her feet, resorted to nervously reading a script most of the time, froze several times, and was literally on the verge of tears.

The most explosive debate of the night involved , founder of Anti-Zionist America PAC (AZPAC), who is currently running attack ads against Randy Fine…

… and Rectenwald’s opponent, Shabbos Kestembaus, who plays the role of a whiz kid, but he is actually 27, so a bit too old to be a whiz kid.

The reason he was still a student while pushing 30 is that after his undergrad he spent a couple of years abroad training at Aish HaTorah, a conservative yeshiva best known for running "Hasbara Fellowships” in collaboration with Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

• https://hasbarafellowships.org/

After Aish HaTorah, Kestenbaum attended Harvard Divinity School in 2024, where he became famous for suing Harvard. He now works at Prager U, whose CEO Marissa Strelater, served in the IDF’s Unit 8200.

His uncle, Rothschild-connected Lord Jonathan Kestenbaum, served on the board of Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square.

Kestenbaum has deftly positioned himself as the “Ben Shapiro of Gen Z”, except, I think he is much smarter and better connected than Ben Shapiro was at his age.

To open the debate, Kestenbuam gave a blistering 5 minute rant which went viral in all the right places.

The next 90 minutes was a bloody, knockdown brawl, but at the same time, it was actually quite cordial, they hugged, and respected each other.

At the Q&A portion, I stood up and asked a question, which went viral from two different perspectives:

Let’s read the transcript:

Chris Brunet: I have very simple question for Shabbos, who is Amalek?

Shabbos Kestenbaum: Who is what? Who is Amalek? Oh, Amalek?

Chris Brunet: Yeah, and do you believe they should be destroyed? Who are they, and do you believe they should be destroyed?

Shabbos Kestenbaum: I... I mean, I’m happy to have a Jewish theological debate, but I don’t want to be rude, I’m not sure how much Hebrew you know, but most of them [classic religious texts] believe that Amalek is more of a concept in the age of Golus.

Chris Brunet: Are they people today?

Shabbos Kestenbaum: No

Michael Rectenwald: According to Netanyahu, they are, in fact, he referred to the Palestinian people…

Shabbos Kestenbaum: Hang on, hang on, you don’t speak Hebrew so you wouldn’t know, I speak Hebrew, you can listen to the video yourself, [Netanyahu] clearly says…

Michael Rectenwald: Watch the video yourself, he said, we should treat [Palestinians] like we treat [Amalek] in the bible, which is to destroy all men, women.

Shabbos Kestenbaum: First of all, I’m going to give you all a Hebrew lesson, it’s not Amalek, it’s Amalek, all right, that’s first of all, second of all, you just sound stupid when you say it like that, the second way, the same way you said that there’s a Golan brigade, there’s no Golan brigade, it’s called Golan. So it’ll just make it sound smarter. The second thing is when [Netanyahu] said that, he said that Hamas is the equivalent of Amalek, which sure if that’s your theological political justification go for it. But again, I don’t know how much of a theological debate you want to have, but almost all the [classic religious texts] certainly in the Gemara as well say that Amalek in the age of Golus is not a practical people.

Chris Brunet: So when every Israeli politician says that Amalek must be murdered and destroyed, who are they talking about?

Shabbos Kestenbaum: Well, as I just said, when [Netanyahu] refers to Hamas, he’s comparing them to the Amalek nation in the Bible, but the thing is that...

Michael Rectenwald: The bible says, and I do know the Bible in this regard, it says the Amalek should be utterly destroyed, man, woman, child, and all the animals, wipe them out, so that’s not just Hamas, that’s all the Palestinians, that’s what he was referring to, and not only that, other Israeli officials called for total extermination. This is not a moral people. This is not a moral nation. This nation is barbaric.

Almost every word Shabbos spoke in this exchange consisted of calling his opponent stupid for not speaking Hebrew, and filibustering about proper Hebrew pronunciation. Still, we can confirm a few things:

1. The term Amalek has religious significance (Hashem needs to eliminate Amalek because that is a source of all evil)

2. Shabbos has heard the word a billion times, to the point where he has encyclopedia knowledge and cares about the proper pronunciation

3. Shabbos has Netanyahu’s famous Amalek quote memorized verbatim

That Amalek rhetoric is not academic. Polymarket currently assigns a 53% percent probability that the United States will strike Iran before summer is over.

So, it matters very much if Iran is Amalek.

States can negotiate with rivals. They cannot negotiate with metaphysical evil.

If Iran is Amalek, American power is not being used to defend national interests; American taxpayers are being asked to finance a foreign war justified by a foreign theology.

Even if you don’t believe in Amalek, Israelis believe in it earnestly.

When Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of starvation of Gaza as a weapon, one justice described the war against “Amalek“ as “obligatory.”

When polled in a March 2025 Haaretz survey, 2 out of 3 of Jewish Israelis said there is “modern day Amalek”, and of these, 93% responded that the commandment to wipe out the memory of Amalek applies today.

Israelis literally kill people, today, because of Amalek.

So who, or what, is Amalek?

In the Hebrew Bible, Amalek refers both to a people and to a symbol. The Amalekites first appear in the Book of Exodus, where they attack the Israelites shortly after the Exodus from Egypt.

“Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.”

— Deuteronomy 25:19

God then commands King Saul to annihilate Amalek in its entirety, explicitly including women and children. This verse is frequently cited by contemporary actors to religiously justify the killing of women and infants in Palestine.

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

— 1 Samuel 15:3

“Do not show mercy to Amalek. If I were the prime minister, I would wipe out Gaza with Jericho missiles and heavy artillery.”

— Tally Gotliv, member of the Knesset for the Likud party

Some understand Amalek as a specific ancient tribe long since extinct.

Some understand Amalek as a metaphor.

Israeli politicians and rabbis have variously applied Amalek to Palestine, Iran, Germany, Lebanon, Syria, Rome, “Spiritual Rome”, Armenia, Qatar, all Christians, all Muslims, all Arabs, or all Gentiles. Really, it’s whoever Israel happens to be fighting at any given moment.

Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who died last month in the Bondi Beach shooting, has a, extensivey documented history of justifying war crimes by labeling dead Gazan children and anti-Zionist political commentator alike as “Amalek.”

What a depressing legacy.

To be killed in a mass shooting and remembered primarily for spamming “Amalek” on X underneath footage of dead children.

Rabbi Eli Schlanger’s justification draws on the writings of the Rambam, widely regarded as a gold standard of rabbinic authority. In this tradition, Jews are commanded to eradicate the descendants of Amalek as a prerequisite for rebuilding the Third Temple.

The command in the Rambam does not end with an ancient enemy; it is understood to extend across generations—to Amalek’s presumed lineage in the present. Clearly, Amalek is not an idea floating in space, it’s people today they are literally commanded to kill.

But when I ask Shabbos Kestenbaum who“Amalek” is, suddenly it’s “no one.”

It’s so nebulous, in fact, that many Rabbis believe that White Supremacy is Amalek incarnate, therefore, anyone who espouses White Supremacy must be “blotted out” (murdered) along with their women, children, and pets.

Forgiving Amalek

If your enemy is Amalek—the embodiment of absolute evil—then war is righteous. Everyone you fight becomes Amalek by default, and therefore, their women and children a legitimate target. When Palestinians or Iranians are framed as Amalek—irredeemable, subhuman, beyond salvation—why would anyone seek peace with what they believe God commands them to destroy?

In 2025, Israel attacked at least six countries: Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen. How many will they attack in 2026, using American tax dollars? is currently predicting they will attack four.

In his New Year address to the Diplomatic Corps, Pope Leo warned that “war is back in vogue,” that peace is increasingly pursued through force rather than justice, and that humility, dialogue, and multilateralism are being cast aside.

His warning applies here with unmistakable clarity.

Rather than advocating for the bombing of Iran under the banner of Amalek, what is required now is repentance: a turning away from doctrines that sanctify annihilation and excuse the killing of innocents as obedience to God. A stable Middle East does not require the eradication of one’s neighbors. It requires restraint, moral accountability, and the rejection of theologies that render peace sinful and violence sacred. So long as Amalek remains a living category—invoked to dehumanize entire peoples—peace will remain impossible.

Repentance, forgiveness, and humility are prerequisites for peace.

If Amalek was once a people, they are long gone. What remains is a story that has outlived its moral usefulness and now functions only as a license for annihilation.

Forgiving Amalek does not mean denying history.

It means recognizing that history does not grant eternal permission to kill.

It means choosing to remember without reenacting.

Amalek should be forgiven, not because it was harmless, but because it is over.

Three thousand years later, the only unforgivable act is continuing to invoke it.

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The first 16 minutes of this interview are mostly chitchat, and I’m a bit nervous and stumbling with my words early on. I’m still getting my reps in with public speaking, so thanks for bearing with me. I did at least finally upgrade to a proper professional microphone instead of relying on broken AirPods, which is progress.

Around the 16-minute mark we move past the small talk and into the substance of the article. Once the discussion gets going, I hit my stride and we end up having a genuinely engaging conversation about Venezuela, empire, interventionism, and the political economy of sanctions and regime change.

If you’re inclined to watch, I’d recommend starting at 16:00.

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In the language of global finance, these actors have a name: vultures.

They circle distressed states, wait for the moment of maximum weakness, then swoop in to buy debt and assets for pennies, only to extract full value later through courts, sanctions, or political leverage. Or, in this case, at gunpoint.

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Towering over the vulture ecosystem is one figure more synonymous with the name “vulture” than anyone: billionaire activist Paul Singer, founder and CEO of a hedge fund called Elliott Management, which currently manages $78 billion worth of capital, making it one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. Forbes currently ranks Singer’s personal fortune as the 578th richest person in the world.

Singer has feasted on too many corpses for me to catalog in this article.

One prominent example, as described by Tucker Carlson in one of his stronger monologues below, is the tale of how Singer destroyed the small town of Sidney, Nebraska, by gutting their largest employer and selling it for parts (after donating the maximum allowable amount to Nebraska’s governor, of course):

Singer did the same thing in Detroit:

And in Korea.

In 2015, as part of dispute between Singer and Samsung, Samsung published several cartoons of him as an anthropomorphic vulture on its corporate website.

The cartoons were denounced by Singer as antisemitic, and Samsung was forced to apologize to the ADL.

While Singer often targets private companies, such as in Nebraska, Detroit, or South Korea, his most notorious campaigns have involved bring entire nations to their knees. These include the Republic of the Congo (he filed at least fifteen separate lawsuits against Congo, at a time when they were in the middle of the worst food shortage in the world) and Peru (where, as former president Alberto Fujimori attempted to flee the country, Singer’s firm seized his jet). Most famously, Singer spent fifteen years in open conflict with the Argentine government over defaulted bond payments, a campaign that culminated in a $2.4 billion payout to his firm in 2016.

• Paul Singer: The Vulture Chewing Argentina’s Living Corpse

• The Vulture: How Paul Singer Made Billions off Argentina Debt Crisis

• Paul Singer—market master or litigious vulture?

Which brings us to Venezuela.

How Paul Singer Stole Venezuela’s Crown Jewel

About a month ago, on November 25, 2025, a US judge approved the sale of Citgo Petroleum Corporation (CITGO), a subsidiary of Venezuela’s a state-owned oil company, to Amber Energy, a subsidiary of Paul Singer’s Elliott Management.

Venezuela rejected the legitimacy of the sale, with the Maduro administration calling it “fraudulent process,” a “barbaric theft, ”and “the theft of the century.”

The sale price for CITGO was $5.9 billion, with the proceeds flowing to creditors of the Venezuelan state. The acquisition is expected to be finalized sometime next year, pending regulatory approval... Maduro was the obstacle blocking that approval, but now he’s gone.

On a fundamentals basis, CITGO is worth far more than what Singer paid for it. Valuations during the auction ranged from $10 billion to $20 billion, depending on methodology and assumptions. Evercore, the investment bank advising the court-supervised sale, placed CITGO’s value at roughly $13 billion, while the Venezuelan government has argued the company is worth north of $20 billion.

The reason CITGO sold for a fraction of its real value is simple: U.S. sanctions and non-recognition of the Maduro government made Venezuela radioactive to investors. Most serious buyers would not touch the asset. Financing dried up. The auction never became competitive. What should have been a sale turned into a clearance event, with one vulture left standing.

What great luck for Paul Singer, then, that only one month after his purchase was approved, Trump invaded Venezuela and turned it into a puppet state, declaring that all the oil now belonged to American investors!

This outcome was not an accident, and it was not the result of normal market risk. It was the product of a specific sequence. First, sanctions isolate a country financially and legally. Then creditors use U.S. courts to strip away sovereign protections. By the time assets are finally put up for sale, the original owner is boxed out, legitimate buyers have fled, and the only actors left are those who specialize in siege warfare. At that stage, price discovery is a fiction. The asset is no longer being sold. It is being harvested by parasitic vultures.

This is the terrain Paul Singer understands better than anyone alive. His business does not depend on growth, innovation, or productive investment. It depends on collapse that stops just short of total ruin. Courts must still function, nominally. Contracts must still bind. The state must be weak enough to surrender assets, but intact enough for judgments to be enforced. Venezuela, after years of sanctions and diplomatic isolation, met those conditions perfectly.

How Paul Singer Purchases Political Influence

Am I saying that Donald Trump invaded Venezuela for Paul Singer?

No.

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4 months ago · 624 likes · 60 comments · Judd Legum

Foreign policy is never driven by a single donor, and pretending otherwise would be unserious. Venezuela sits at the intersection of energy markets, regional power politics, sanctions regimes, the war on drugs, domestic U.S. electoral incentives, and long-standing ideological hostility to the Maduro government… Any intervention would have happened in a crowded causal field.

But that does not make Singer irrelevant.

It makes him unusually well positioned and influential.

Political donors like Paul Singer don’t need to micromanage strategies when those strategies already align with their interests. Instead, they strategically fund media outlets, think tanks, politicians, and campaigns to create an ecosystem where policies—such as framing military actions against regimes like Venezuela’s under Nicolás Maduro as moral imperatives—become legally enforceable and financially beneficial.

Here are 7 clear, distinct ways Singer exerts this influence:

1. Paul Singer owns the Washington Free Beacon — it’s his personal mouthpiece. In the month leading up to this week’s invasion, the Free Beacon published at least five articles portraying Maduro’s regime as a narcoterrorist threat linked to Hezbollah and drug cartels. This media barrage frames intervention as a security necessity, without disclosing that Singer, who is pushing the intervention, would profit billions.

   1. Hezbollah, Short on Support From Iran, Turns to Drug Trafficking in Venezuela To Fill Its Coffers (December 23, 2025)

   2. Bill Barr Defends Legality of Trump Boat Strikes and Describes Danger of Maduro Regime: Hezbollah’s ‘Anchor in Our Hemisphere’ (December 19, 2025)

   3. Dealing With Maduro Is No Distraction. It’s a Necessity. (December 6, 2025)

   4. Biden Admin Prosecuted Leader of Venezuelan Drug Cartel That Mainstream Media Now Say ‘Doesn’t Exist’ (December 1, 2025)

   5. Ben Shapiro Savages Tucker Carlson’s Defense of Commie Drug Lord Nicolas Maduro (November 7, 2025)

2. Singer has donated over $10 million to the Manhattan Institute since 2011, including $2 million in 2024 and $1.8 million in 2023. From 2008 to 2025, Singer served as chairman of the Manhattan Institute board of directors. He currently serves as chairman emeritus. The Manhattan Institute has produced a steady stream of papers and reports calling for Maduro’s ouster and defending Trump’s aggressive policies against the regime.

   1. “A September 2025 column criticized Columbian President Gustavo Petro for opposing foreign military intervention in Venezuela designed to oust Maduro.”

   2. “An October 2025 piece by another Manhattan Institute analyst and a co-author praised Trump’s “consistent policies against Venezuela’s Maduro,” describing them as part of an effective strategy to eventually remove Maduro from power.”

   3. “And a November 2025 article criticized Democrats for raising the alarm about Trump’s push for regime change in Venezuela.”

   4. In March 2025, the Manhattan Institute hired a Venezuelan dissident dedicated full-time to tweet about how they need regime change to pump more oil:

3. Singer is a major donor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In the month leading up the invasion, they published 8 articles with such subtle titles as: "A FREE VENEZUELA ELEVATES U.S. ENERGY SECURITY.”

   

4. Paul Singer is currently funding (via a $1 million donation) a vicious primary campaign against Congressman Thomas Massie, who is “one of the most vocal opponents in Congress to Trump’s regime change push in Venezuela, joining Democrats to co-sponsor multiple failed war powers resolutions that would have reined in the president’s ability to launch military strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and launch an attack on mainland Venezuela.”

5. Singer has been one of Marco Rubio’s primary financial backers for more than a decade, helping elevate one of Washington’s most consistent advocates of sanctions and intervention in Latin America

   

6. In 2024, Singer donated $5 million to Trump’s Super PAC, along with $37 million more to Trump’s allies, and $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Singer has met personally with Trump at least four times.

7. Paul Singer has donated a total of $3 million to AIPAC since 2022, making him tied for AIPAC’s third largest donor. This matters because the court-appointed special master who forced the sale of CITGO, Robert Pincus, sits on the board of directors for AIPAC.

Taken individually, these carefully curated relationships can be dismissed as ordinary political activity: a donor funding media, think tanks publishing white papers, senators advancing hawkish views, super PACs backing friendly candidates.

Taken together, they form something else entirely.

Paul Singer did not invent sanctions. He did not invent sovereign debt litigation. He did not invent regime change. What he perfected was the ability to profit from all three at once, while remaining legally insulated from the consequences.

CITGO was not lost because Venezuela failed to manage its assets.

It was lost because transnational capital wanted it, so they took it.

Straight gangsterism.

This is what vulture capitalism looks like at its apex. Not chaos; precision. Not theft in the dark; but seizure in broad daylight. The asset survives. The state does not. And by the time the sale is approved, the only remaining question is not whether it was just, but whether anyone still remembers who owned it in the first place.

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Marriage has been grounding in the best way. It’s sharpened my perspective, steadied my priorities, and I expect it to show up in more mature, focused writing going forward. This feels like a transition into the next phase.

That shift is reflected in a branding move you may have noticed, away from Karlstack to www.ChrisBrunet.com. This is a move away from a persona- or pseudonym-based project and toward work that’s more durable, accountable, and aligned with where I’m headed long-term.

I’m grateful for each of my 13,000 subscribers and for the steady, organic growth this community has shown over time. This chart reflects years of consistent interest, engagement, and trust, as well as years of disciplined work refining my writing, starting from scratch in 2022, and raising my standards and credibility as a journalist. We’ve come a long way together. The best is yet to come.

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year. Thank you for sticking around — more to come soon. God bless.

— Chris

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What topics do you want to see in 2026? Drop a comment below.

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At the time, a lone commenter on EJMR accused him of being “corrupt to the bone” and ‘‘publishing his buddies.’’

What once sounded like an internet cheap shot now sounds like prophecy.

The Karolyi name has since become shorthand for everything rotten in academic finance: nepotism, backroom deals, and a profession that quietly rehabilitates insiders rather than holding them accountable, or even asks them to say sorry.

Before writing this article, I contacted both Andrew Karolyi, and his son, Stephen Karolyi (He/Him/His), but neither responded.

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Stephen Karolyi earned his PhD in Financial Economics from Yale in 2014, landed his first tenure track job at Carnegie Mellon, then immediately began flooding the Review of Financial Studies with submissions, knowing full well that racking up multiple publications in his daddy’s journal would guarantee him a lifetime of tenured sinecures.

But publishing in daddy’s journal was only the tip of this corruption iceberg…

Will the real specification please stand up?

Our saga begins in October 2015, when our hero, an assistant professor of accounting named Alex Young—then at North Dakota State, now at Hofstra—attended a conference where Stephen Karolyi presented a paper, “Governance and Taxes: Evidence from Regression Discontinuity,” coauthored with Andrew Bird, another assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon.

The lowly North Dakota scholar spotted a fatal flaw with their methodology and alerted them, but the mighty Carnegie Mellon scholars brushed him off.

When that paper finally appeared in The Accounting Review in January 2017 — another one of the best accounting journals in the world — Young again spotted something odd: the methodology section had been rewritten since the 2015 draft… but every number in all 11 tables remained identical, down to the third decimal place.

Their methodology completely changed, but their results didn’t…

That is how they were caught.

In the 2015 draft, the authors began their data description as follows:

In the 2017 draft, the authors stated that they made the opposite choice:

The 2015 methodology further appears the following:

While in 2017:

In sum:

Young concluded it was fraud:

Thus, if we compare the tables from the two versions, at the very least, we should see slightly different numbers for the estimated coefficients, standard errors, etc. But row for row, column for column, the numbers for the estimated coefficients, standard errors, and R-squareds are all exactly the same between BK 2015 and BK 2017 to three decimal places.

Young then launched a campaign to get to the bottom of it.

• On 18 April 2017, Alex Young emailed Professor Bird to follow up on their October 2015 conversation, and requested that he share their data and code.

• Two days later, on 20 April, Professor Karolyi replied with a short message that ignored the request.

• On 5 May 2017, Alex Young then wrote to The Accounting Review, to explain his concerns in detail.

• Six months then passed with no update.

• In November 2017, Econ Journal Watch (www.econjorunalwatch), the profession’s most respected independent watchdog, intervened formally to request the files. The authors answered—but not with the files. The journal asked again. The answer was still no.

On December 1, 2017, The Accounting Review (TAR) formally opened a misconduct inquiry thus launching a series of elaborate excuses from Bird & Karolyi.

Excuse #1: The Copy-Editor Did It

One month later, in January 2018, Young published a devastating takedown in EconJournalWatch.

Bird & Karolyi responded immediately with a note blaming the ‘‘potentially confusing description of our methodology’’ on a rogue ‘‘copy editor’’ who made the changes ‘‘during the final iteration of copy editing’’ without their knowledge.

This claim is absurd.

Copy editors don’t rewrite methodology—they deal with commas, capitalization, and house style. They would never, under any circumstances, alter how you describe your data or your methods. And even if they did, every journal shows you exactly what edits the copy editor made, giving you the option to accept or reject them. Authors are wholly responsible for ensuring the text accurately reports their data and findings.

Excuse 2: STATA Sort

Nobody bought the ‘‘copy-editor’’ excuse, so, a month later, in February 2018, Bird and Karolyi published a (now deleted) 4-page note to SSRN titled, “Governance and Taxes: A Note on Methodology.” That note claimed that Alex Young did not correctly replicate their article:

Young (2018) replicates the main findings using the Russell rankings, but was unable to replicate the same finding using May market capitalization rankings.

Curiously, rather than open-sourcing their own data and code to prove Young wrong, they only used the data and code provided by Young:

To provide the strongest possible evidence of replicability, we replicate the main findings of Bird and Karolyi (2017) using only data and code provided by Young (2018). We do this by making one correction to the measurement of May market capitalization ranking

The correction they made to Alex Young’s data involved the STATA ‘‘Sort’’ command — and tweaking that ‘‘Sort’’ command magically fixed everything:

The following regression commands (exactly as in lines 51 and 52 of the Young (2018) code) produce analogous results using reconstructed May market capitalization rankings:

This is what their miraculous ‘‘Sort’’ fix looked like:

This would turn out to be fraudulent as well, because it sorted the data the opposite direction as they claimed. They got the coding backwards.

When I emailed Alex Young to ask about the ‘‘Sort’’ tweak, he uploaded an extensive explanation:

To be clear, if Andrew Bird and Stephen Karolyi had simply made a Stata sort coding error and had provided their original data and code which

• contained this error and

• reproduced all their reported tables in “Governance and Taxes: Evidence from Regression Discontinuity,”

I would’ve been convinced that they committed no data falsification. In addition, I would’ve apologized to them and contacted Dr. Daniel Klein to request that my Econ Journal Watch article be appended with a note clarifying that there was no research misconduct, just an honest mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, and of course I am no exception to that.

So the problem is not a mistake.

Within days of posting their flawed ‘‘Sort’’ fix, Bird and Karolyi deleted the 4-page SSRN note and replaced it with a shortened 1-page note that now contains:

• no mention of their STATA sort tweak ever existing,

• no mention of any data or any code,

• no tables, and

• no citation of any article besides their own.

Excuse #3: The Dog Ate My Laptop

When The Accounting Review requested the data and code during their investigation, Karolyi & Bird claimed that a laptop crash had wiped out everything—no backups, no cloud storage.

The excuse was hard to believe given that Karolyi was known for managing numerous projects simultaneously; at that point, they had nearly 30 (!) working papers in progress, making it implausible that all their research, code, and data would have been stored on a single, unprotected laptop.

In 2019, The Accounting Review concluded their investigation and retracted the article, explicitly stating that “the methodology described in the paper does not generate the results reported,” and that ‘‘the authors were unable to provide the original data and code.’’

The Accounting Review‘s retraction notice does not mention Alex Young or comment on whether Bird and Karolyi committed any form of research misconduct.

Bird & Karolyi admitted no wrongdoing: they put out a statement saying that they ‘‘are disappointed by the American Accounting Association’s (AAA) decision.’’

They maintain they committed no fraud and thus no crime.

The dog just ate their laptop, that’s all.

Stephen Karolyi’s CV now has a cheeky section referring to this retracted paper as a ‘‘Permanent Working Paper’’:

Excuse #4: The Replication Kit

Following The Accounting Review’s retraction, Carnegie Mellon’s Office of Research Integrity and Compliance (ORIC) launched an investigation at the Provost’s request. ORIC found “no evidence of research misconduct,” reasoning that although the authors had “lost” their original data and code, they were able to privately “create a replication kit” that reproduced the results. They refused to release the alleged replication kit, preventing anyone from verifying this claim.

After being officially ‘‘cleared’’ by CMU, Andrew Bird was exiled from the school without tenure — yet soon resurfaced at Chapman University, with tenure.

I spoke to Alex Young about Dr. Bird’s transition to Chapman University, he told me:

From November 2020 to September 2023, I received multiple emails from [name retraced], formerly Associate Dean for Research at Chapman University’s business school, “seeking input.” [name retraced] brought up the “replication kit” claim, and I asked him three times (in November 2020, March 2023, and September 2023) for a copy of the “kit.” [name retraced] ignored my first request and then responded to my last two requests by saying that he did not have “access” to the “kit,” or any interest in obtaining “access.”

I reached out to [name retracted], who denied this version of events but was unable to substantiate his recollection after changing jobs and losing access to his old emails. His explanation nonetheless seemed credible, so I withdrew his name from this article.

Excuse #5: Daddy’s Corrigendum

After being caught red-handed fabricating results in The Accounting Review, Bird and Karolyi were exposed a second time when a special committee appointed by the Review of Financial Studies — managed by Karolyi’s father, remember — investigated their paper, “Do Institutional Investors Demand Public Disclosure”, after ‘‘discovering inconsistencies between the published version and the earlier working paper.’’

Using the data and code provided by the authors, Review of Financial Studies determined that two versions of this paper used different market capitalization rankings (Russell vs. CRSP), yet somehow produced identical results.

In other words, the Review of Financial Studies paper suffered from the exact same fatal flaw as their The Accounting Review paper: the description of the specifications had changed, but the numbers in every table magically stayed the same.

After Review of Financial Studies concluded that the same ‘‘error’’ happened a second time, they published a “Statement” concluding that:

• “the Committee discovered that equations (1) and (2) on page 3254, which describe the two-stage model, do not describe the actual regressions that were used to generate the results presented in the paper.”

• “the committee found that the paper’s main inferences are not robust if the models are estimated as described on page 3254 of the paper.”

• “the Committee concluded that the methodology described in the paper does not generate the results reported in that paper.”

In response, the authors quietly published a paywalled corrigendum admitting the fatal flaw, noting only that “the authors regret this error” and that their methods were were wrong.

The paper remains on the books, unretracted, still padding their CVs and tenure files. Daddy refused to retract it, and instead let them publish a bogus corrigendum.

It’s hard to explain why the same “mistake” happened twice. That’s blatant fraud.

In any honest system, that ends a career.

In academic finance, it’s just another Tuesday.

Consequences

Andrew Bird downgraded from Carnegie Mellon to Chapman University.

His co-author, Stephen Karolyi, meanwhile, was effectively exiled from academia and got a job in government as a “senior advisor” in the Division of Supervision, Risk, and Analysis at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The man deemed too corrupt to remain in academia was entrusted with regulating the banking industry.

This brings me to why I wrote this article today.

On one level, this scandal is old news — relegated to obscure 2018 lore within the economics profession, never picked up by the media. I wanted to be the first to document it to show how the sausage is made.

But the timeliness is what makes it relevant: as of last month, Stephen Karolyi has now returning to academia, moving from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to tenure at George Mason University’s business school.

The obvious question is: can someone who committed blatant academic fraud, and had his nepo daddy sweep it up, ever be redeemed? Or is there a line beyond which “second chances” become a joke — especially when every single one of his colleagues is aware of his fraud?

What message does hiring him send to students?

Is he going to tell them with a straight face that he ‘‘lost his laptop’’ when they ask him about this fraud?

Or will he go back to blaming it on STATA?

Or will he go back to blaming it on the copy-editor?

The simple truth is that Dr. Stephen Karolyi would not be a tenured professor today if his powerful daddy didn’t protect him, and if his colleagues cared about unrepentant fraud. For students, early-career researchers, and anyone who believes in meritocracy and scholarship, this is a bitter pill to swallow. While unrepentant frausters like Stephen Karolyi are given infinite “redos,” countless honest economists grind away for years, hoping hard work will be enough to secure a stable academic career.

The lesson is clear: the system is corrupt.

No wonder the profession is dying.

Chris Brunet

The Collapse of the Econ PhD Job Market

For decades, a doctorate in economics was a golden ticket. It promised a path to tenure, or at worst, a lucrative role at a central bank, think tank, or tech firm…

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7 months ago · 94 likes · 22 comments · Christopher Brunet

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As for the elder Karolyi, who enabled his son’s fraud, his CV shows that he was renewed in 2017 for a second three-year term as an executive editor of the Review of Financial Studies. He “voluntarily” resigned from this position only one year into that term, in 2018, right as his son was put under investigation.

• https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/10/21/fas-phd-admissions-cuts/

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According to the Crimson report, which quotes five anonymous faculty sources, the reductions are as follows:

• Science PhD admissions slashed by more than 75%

• Arts & Humanities cut by about 60%

• Social Sciences reduced 50–70%

• History down 60%

• Biology down 75%

• The German department will lose all PhD seats

• Sociology will go from six students to zero

In addition to slashing PhD admissions, FAS has also instituted a hiring freeze for full-time staff, announced it would keep its budget flat for fiscal year 2026, and ceased work on all “non-essential capital projects and spending.”

These austerity measures follow a wave of layoffs across other Harvard schools, including the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Kennedy School of Government, the School of Dental Medicine, and the Graduate School of Design.

On the surface, Harvard’s austerity might appear justified. Four days ago, the university released its fiscal year 2025 financial report, revealing an operating loss of $113 million for the year ending June 30. That marks a massive reversal from the $45 million surplus it reported the year before. According to Chief Financial Officer Ritu Kalra, the deficit stems largely from the “abrupt termination of nearly the entire portfolio of our direct federally sponsored research grants” driven primarily by $116 million in reimbursements for money Harvard had ‘‘already spent’’ that “disappeared almost overnight.”

Even so, it strains belief that the richest university on Earth cannot find the resources to keep a few PhD cohorts afloat. The newly reported $113 million loss amounts to just 1.7 percent of Harvard’s $6.7 billion in annual revenue — a rounding error in Cambridge terms. Did the Faculty of Arts and Sciences really need to cut 6 sociology PhD students in order to survive? Would the school really risk insolvency if they admitted 13 History PhD students instead of 7?

Harvard’s claim of hardship collapses under even cursory scrutiny. The endowment returned $4 billion last year, climbing to $56.9 billion in total value after an 11.9 percent gain. Private equity alone now accounts for 41 percent of its holdings.

Furthermore, 2025 was a record year for donors, current-use gifts totaled around $629 million — the most in Harvard’s history, up from $528 million the prior year — yet we are told the school can no longer afford to train its own graduate students? What is the point of record ‘‘current use gifts’’ if they can’t even keep their basic PhD programs afloat? You’re really telling me in a year where their private fundraising hit an all-time high, that six history PhD stipends are what break the budget?

The entire purpose of an endowment is to help a university weather lean years without gutting its core academic programs. Yet Harvard has chosen to protect its gold pile over its scholarship, famously behaving like a hedge fund with a school attached as an afterthought. As CFO Ritu Kalra put it, the endowment is “not a source of short-term relief but a covenant across generations.” Translated from administrative jargon, that means the priority is not education but to have as big a stream of income as possible that is shielded from the influence of donors, students, and government.

And right on cue, the university’s collapse into financialized pseudo-education is now being met with a political response that’s just as absurd. Two weeks ago, President Trump announced that Harvard had reached a tentative deal with his administration to restore $2.4 billion in frozen federal grants — on the condition that it spend $500 million to create a network of trade schools for mechanics to work on ‘‘automotive plant, motors, engines,’’ which doesn’t really make any sense to me, but okay. I mean, I think funding trade schools in general is a good idea, but I am not sure that forcing Harvard to run one at gunpoint makes sense.

‘‘This would be a giant trade school, series of trade schools. It would be run by Harvard,’’ Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

Yesterday, he again reiterated that: “They’re going to open up trade schools. And I love the idea of trade and trade schools by Harvard. So, you know, they get into like a vocational type school.”

So there it is: the richest university on Earth is claiming poverty and cutting history, philosophy, chemistry, biology, and sociology — only to reinvent itself as a glorified trade school to appease the government that froze its funding.

This is where higher education is heading. The intellectual core is being hollowed out from both directions, administrators treating universities as hedge funds, politicians treating them as job-training centers. What’s dying in the middle is the idea of the university itself: a place devoted to knowledge for its own sake.

It’s fitting that Gen Z is named after the last letter of the alphabet. They may also be the last generation to experience anything resembling a classical liberal education rather than debt-funded vocational training under corporate or state control.

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#1: Yet Another Harvard Economics Professor Implicated in Jeffrey Epstein Pedophile Network

Since earlier this month I exposed misconduct by Harvard’s former Dean of the Faculty of Arts, it seems worth pointing to a Crimson story from last week about another former Dean of the very same faculty.

The Crimson just reported that Epstein not only arranged “massages” for Henry Rosovsky, former Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but also facilitated a $2 million gift to build Harvard Hillel’s Rosovsky Hall.

• https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/9/3/rosovsky-epstein-massage-allegations/

Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell alleged that former Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Henry A. Rosovsky received a “massage” through disgraced billionaire and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s network, according to a transcript of a United States Department of Justice interview released on Aug. 22.

…

In 1991, Epstein helped facilitate a $2 million donation from billionaire Leslie H. Wexner to fund the construction of Harvard Hillel’s Rosovsky Hall, named in the former dean’s honor, though Epstein did not contribute his own money. Rosovsky also frequented Epstein’s Cambridge office during his tenure at the helm of the FAS.

#2: Nicholas Decker update

4 months ago, I profiled a GMU econ PhD student who defended pedophilia, obsessed over ‘transgender children,’ and argued for abolition of age of consent.

Decker urged leftists to rise up and begin indiscriminately killing Republicans, a call to violence that now takes on new relevance in light of Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Following his full-throated defense of pedophilia and successful incitement to violence, Decker tweeted that puberty is an “irreversible harm” and that children should not go through it.

He then spent several days defending bestiality, claiming that animals can consent to sex if they show “indicators of enjoyment” or “seem to like it.”

He declared that ‘‘queerness is a spectrum,’’ therefore bestiality is protected under the LGBT+ umbrella.

A week after defending bestiality, he became a vegan.

Decker then announced he’s spending this semester as a visiting student at MIT.

#3: Congress, DOE, & DOJ go to war with GMU

Speaking of GMU, this summer, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce sent a formal letter to GMU President demanding he appear for questioning to answer questions about GMU’s DEI programs. That hearing is expected to take place in early fall. If Washington refuses to testify voluntarily, the committee has floated the possibility of issuing a subpoena.

• https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairmen-jordan-and-roy-demand-testimony-george-mason-university-president

The impetus for this new congressional hearing appears to be an investigation by investigative journalist John Sailer, who exposed via FOIA requests how GMU ‘‘required every faculty hiring committee to carefully document how it prioritized diversity.’’

One hiring committee openly stated that it discussed ‘‘demographic diversity” as a part of candidates’ strengths/weaknesses, while another committee put in writing that out of 8 candidates there were “seven women of color, five of whom identify as African American, one as Palestinian American, and one as Iranian American; and a Korean American man...”

The U.S. Department of Justice’s then opened a formal investigation into GMU to determine whether it discriminates against employees on the basis of sex and race, including in promotion and tenure decisions. The probe will also review discrimination against students on the basis of race or national origin in admissions, scholarships, and other benefits, as well as the university’s handling of antisemitism on campus.

In late August, the Department of Education announced that GMU violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by using race in hiring and promotion. They demanded that GMU issue a public apology. The president of GMU rejected DOE’s proposed resolution and refused to apologize, and is currently attempting to negotiate with them.