And turned it into this:

I’m being told that I need to buy a teleprompter from Amazon.

I have studio lights and a 4k camera on the way.

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An expansion of this magnitude is difficult to understand as anything other than preparation for a potential World War, an enormous windfall for the military-industrial complex, or some combination of the two.

But the broader military buildup is not the focus of this article. Instead, I am examining a specific provision in the new defense budget bill known as the “United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” (USITCI).

The USITCI appeared as Section 224 in earlier versions of the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but has since been renamed as Section 219.

If you are extremely online, you have probably already heard about this.

Perhaps you saw Dennis Kucinich discussing it with Tucker:

Or perhaps you saw it on someone else’s Substack:

DEEPER LOOK with Michael Sellers

Uproar Builds Over Proposed Unprecedented U.S.-Israel Military, Defense Tech Integration

At a time when American public opinion toward Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu has turned sharply negative, a new uproar is building over a little-noticed provision in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act…

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2 months ago · 97 likes · 20 comments · Michael Sellers

Wajeeh Lion

Sovereign Surrender: The Erasure of the U.S.-Israeli Military Boundary

The global geopolitical architecture and the established paradigms of bilateral military cooperation have ruptured. Following a twenty-four-month period where the Middle East transitioned from a theater of proxy engagements into a zone of high-intensity, state-on-state conventional warfare, the United States defense establishment has fundamentally alter…

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2 months ago · 294 likes · 41 comments · Wajeeh Lion

Insight to Incite: Open Source Intelligence Analysis

Section 224: Congress's Secret Plan to Merge the U.S. Military With Israel

AIPAC and Israel-First politicians know that with support for Israel at an all-time low, renegotiating the 3.8 billion they get annually from the American taxpayers might not go well. Their solution? Merge the two militaries’ R&D, give Israel equal ownership and access to emerging tech, and place Israeli War Industries in every congressional district in America to force our representatives to answer to Tel Aviv. In the future, defunding the IDF will require defunding the U.S. Armed Services. This “gift” to Israel is worth more than every fighter jet, warship, and aircraft carrier in the American fleet, combined. And worse yet, it will make pleasing Israel a priority for every member of Congress…

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2 months ago · 67 likes · 3 comments · JD Hall

But if you rely on mainstream media, there is a good chance you have not heard about it at all, and on the rare occasion it has received mainstream coverage, it has been framed as a good thing.

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Origins

Today’s legislation is the culmination of a decades-long effort.

• 2020–2022. Congress authorized the creation of the United States–Israel Operations-Technology Working Group, whose purpose was “to identify military capability requirements common to the Department of Defense and the Ministry of Defense of Israel.”

• 2023: Congress attempted to expand this model through the United States–Israel Future of Warfare Act, which would have created a dedicated United States–Israel Future of Warfare Research and Development Fund.

• 2024: Pentagon establishes a partnership between the Defense Innovation Unit and its Israeli counterparts.

• 2025: The United States–Israel Defense Partnership Act sought to create a permanent Defense Innovation Unit office in Israel.

• 2025–2026: The FY2026 budget created a United States–Israel Defense Industrial Base Working Group with the mandate to “identify opportunities for deeper integration between the American and Israeli defense industries.”

The various strands were finally pulled together on February 12, 2026, with the introduction of the United States–Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security Act—the FUTURES Act.

The FUTURES Act proposed establishing a new United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative that would fold in Israeli technology to American military systems and coordinate activities across the Pentagon.

Senators Ted Budd and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the Senate version, while Representatives Ronny Jackson and Don Davis introduced the House bill.

Neither the House nor Senate version of the FUTURES Act advanced out of committee… instead, the bill was folded almost verbatim into today’s budget, as the USITCI.

Is it Really a “Merger”?

Zionists will insist that the USITCI is not ~*technically*~ a merger, merely an expansion of military cooperation and a major step toward permanent integration.

Defenders compare this arrangement to standard NATO or AUKUS interoperability. But USITCI would establish a dedicated Pentagon Executive Agent charged with synchronizing, expanding and accelerating U.S.–Israel research, development, testing, integration and industrial cooperation. Under Pentagon rules, that agent’s assigned responsibilities would take precedence over those of other Defense Department component heads, giving it unusual authority to push Israeli technology through the department.

That semantic distinction is impossible to sustain.

Read the text of the bill for yourself:

• https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8800/text

The bill directs the Pentagon and the Israeli Ministry of Defense to “align efforts and avoid duplication.”

That is the basic logic of any merger: eliminate overlapping functions, coordinate investments and divide responsibilities across a single integrated system.

If Exxon merged with Chevron, the combined company would not maintain two separate accounting departments merely to preserve the appearance of independence. It would consolidate “duplicated” functions. The same principle is at work here. The Pentagon and the IDF will now “avoid duplication” in:

• manufacturing

• missile defense

• Space Command

• drone fleets

• directed energy

• quantum computing

• artificial intelligence

• cyber warfare

• biotechnology

  • Of particular concern is the listing of “biotechnology, biomanufacturing, and medical defense” as an area for joint research, given Israel’s failure to join the Biological Weapons Convention and longstanding rumors of an active biological weapons program on its part; information-sharing within this domain may breach US commitments under Article III of the Convention.

• the overly broad category of “other Department of Defense entities, as appropriate”

The merger becomes even more explicit when the bill turns to “network integration” and “data fusion.” Satellites, drones, radar systems, intelligence databases and battlefield sensors will now all be designed to exchange and process data across a unified architecture — hence the word: “fusion.” There won’t be Israeli or American satellites, there will simply be ”fused” satellites.

A military that depends upon another country’s missiles, satellites, technology, data, factories, supply chains and drones is no longer operating independently in any meaningful sense. It has merged into one component of a larger system.

Deeper integration also means weaker oversight and less accountability. As personnel and systems become increasingly intertwined, it becomes harder to determine who is making which decisions, or even where American authority ends and Israeli authority begins. This gives Netanyahu undue influence over when, where, and how American military power is used.

Separately, it extends through 2029 an existing authority allowing the U.S. to transfer weapons already stored in its War Reserve Stockpile in Israel. That authority permits transfers without Congress voting on each shipment.

Co-Production and “Buy America” Bypasses

When the United States provides military aid to Israel, the standard defense is that the money supports American jobs because Israel is required to spend it on U.S.-made weapons.

But Israel already enjoys unusually favorable access to Pentagon procurement:

• Historically, Israel enjoyed a unique exemption under Foreign Military Financing (FMF) called Off-Shore Procurement (OSP), allowing many Israeli defense products to receive exemptions from the Buy American statute.

• Under the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS 225.872-1), Israel is explicitly designated as a "qualifying country", which grants exemptions from Buy American Act restrictions.

USITCI would deepen that subversion by helping Israeli-origin technologies move into American procurement programs. A weapon could now be assembled in a U.S. factory and marketed as American-made, even when the underlying factory, workers, technology, intellectual property, and profits belong to an Israeli company. USITCI would therefore undermine the competitiveness of the American private sector.

From Aid to Partnership

The U.S. has given Israel hundreds of billions of dollars in direct military aid over the past few decades.

People are upset about that. So upset, that 60% of Americans now oppose sending arms to Israel, and 75% of Americans under 30 have unfavorable views of the country.

Faced with that backlash, pro-Israel influencers have recently coordinated to push a new damage-control line: “Fine—cut off the aid. We don’t want it anyway.”

The one leading this narrative is actually Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

Netanyahu is saying: “Keep your $3.8 billion. Let’s just merge our militaries instead.” He’s willing to walk away from a few billion in foreign aid if it means gaining a massive foothold into a $1.5 trillion pile of money. On June 1st, 2026, he put this plan in writing, sending a letter to Indiana Congressman Marlin Stutzman explicitly calling it “my plan to shift the framework from aid to partnership”:

Netanyahu then went on Fox News where he said “I'm calling it from aid to partnership … the meshing of our two great countries would strengthen the military battlefield in many important ways.”

The Congressional Calculus

An amendment was introduced last month by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), supported by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), that would have stripped the USITCI from the House version of this bill.

It was rejected.

Or, more accurately, Khanna & Massie’s amendment was never even allowed to come to a vote. It was never allowed to reach the House floor. The House Rules Committee declined to make it in order, preventing any floor debate or vote. Nor did the amendment receive substantive consideration in committee.

Below are the members of the Rules Committee that blocked the amendment from receiving a vote. The committee is chaired by 83-year-old Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC):

On July 23, 2026, the House passed the NDAA by a narrow 216–212 vote. The result fell largely along party lines, with a handful of defections:

• 6 Democrats voted YES along with 210 Republicans

• 7 Republicans voted NO along 205 Democrats

The House will likely vote once more after its version is reconciled with the Senate bill in conference. Barring an unexpected development, however, the House outcome appears largely settled.

The more difficult battle will be in the Senate.

The Senate Calculus

Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. Assuming every Republican votes yes, they will need at least seven Democrats to reach the 60-vote cloture threshold required to advance the bill.

Senate Democrats already blocked the bill once last week:

Republicans responded by bundling the NDAA with the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

By bundling these two bills together, Republicans are effectively issuing an ultimatum: if you want voter ID, you must also accept the merger of the Pentagon and the IDF. It is a cynical attempt to bully fiscal or Israel-skeptical conservatives into supporting a bloated, Israel-designed defense bill by branding anyone who votes against it as an opponent of voter ID.

Expect the Senate battle to continue for several months as Republican leaders negotiate with Democrats and holdouts within their own party. There is little urgency to reach an immediate agreement: Congress rarely sends the final NDAA to the president before November. The chart below shows when the NDAA has passed in previous years:

Prediction markets currently expect the bill to pass in December.

Conclusion: Treason

The billions Israel already receives in direct military assistance are at least visible. Congress appropriates the money, the press can identify it and the public can oppose it. This bill would replace that visible pipeline with something far more dangerous: a gateway into the entire Pentagon budget. What is now counted as foreign aid could be scattered across weapons programs, research contracts, procurement accounts and joint military initiatives until no one can say where American defense spending ends and Israeli subsidy begins.

The arrangement is being smuggled through Washington inside a bill approaching a thousand pages. There was no standalone vote. The amendment that would have removed it was not even permitted to reach the floor. Meanwhile, America’s supposedly adversarial press has responded with near-total silence. If this provision were genuinely defensible, its architects would defend it in public. Instead, they are counting on Americans never discovering that it exists.

A government that quietly subordinates its military resources to the interests of a foreign state has betrayed the people it governs. Its defenders can call it cooperation, interoperability or strategic integration. The honest word is treason.

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I just released a new investigation, and I’d love your support once again. Please give it a watch, and consider liking or commenting to juice the algorithm:

I’m still learning how to make videos, and there is plenty of room to improve. I need a professional camera, better lighting, and eventually a proper set. But the massive success of the first video proved that the concept works.

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It would mean a lot if you subscribed over on YouTube.

The plan is simple: I have a backlog of hundreds of Substack investigations, and I’m turning the strongest ones into videos.

This is the first.

Thoughts? Constructive criticism?

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Parts 3, 4, & 5 are coming soon, I promise, I am still working on them, it’s a ton of research.

Part 3 will about Crowdstrike / Guccifer.

Part 4 will be about Russiagate / Crossfire Hurricane.

Part 5 will be about the ongoing FBI coverup.

In the meantime, there was a new development in the Seth Rich case yesterday!!

After 10 years of fighting the courts, finally, there is movement:

I joined Benny Johnson this morning to discuss these updates. He has 6.1 million subscribers on YouTube, so this was easily the biggest platform I’ve been on so far. I clipped the segment and uploaded it to my own channel — finally, I have some YouTube content:

I uploaded it on X, too, if you could consider retweeting it, that would be great:

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In 2024, Acrisure hired John Tuttle, the former vice chairman and global head of listings at the New York Stock Exchange, as its president. Tuttle had previously worked on more than 1,300 equity offerings.

In 2025, Acrisure raised $2.1 billion in convertible senior preferred stock through a funding round led by Bain Capital, valuing the company at $32 billion. The financing was explicitly structured around a future IPO.

As Acrisure prepared itself for Wall Street, it eliminated thousands of American jobs—and repeatedly blamed artificial intelligence and automation.

Dozens of mainstream news articles uncritically accepted this explanation at face value, parroting Acrisure’s line that they are an AI-powered fintech innovator whose AI prowess had rendered their American workforce obsolete.

My investigation points to a far more conventional explanation: Acrisure is shifting work once performed by American employees to lower-cost operations in India, the Philippines, and Colombia.

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The word for this is “AI washing.” Much like “greenwashing,” AI washing allows companies to wrap conventional corporate behavior in the language of technological progress. Instead of admitting that jobs are being eliminated because the work can be performed more cheaply overseas, executives describe the cuts as an unavoidable consequence of artificial intelligence.

For a company preparing to go public, the AI narrative is far more attractive. “We outsourced thousands of jobs to India” sounds like conventional cost-cutting. “We used artificial intelligence to transform our workforce” sounds like innovation, and encourages investors in the IPO to value the company as a fintech platform rather than merely another insurance broker.

I reached out to Acrisure for comment:

An Acrisure spokesperson repeatedly told me they would answer my questions, and then only provided the following bland statement:

Next, I reached out to Michigan state Rep. Josh Schriver, who represents the 66th House District. He provided me with the following statement:

Representative Josh Schriver

Official Updates from Representative Josh Schriver (MI-66)

By Staff - Joe

The First Round of Layoffs

Eight months ago, Acrisure announced 400 initial layoffs in their accounting department, citing advances in “technology” and ”automation” and “AI.”

Acrisure is headquartered in Grand Rapids, and, immediately, Acrisure employees on the r/grandrapids, /Accounting, r/InsuranceAgent subreddits began grumbling about the *real* reason:

The same grumblings appeared on TikTok, LinkedIn, and Facebook:

On Glassdoor and Indeed, ex-Acrisure employees told the same story via reviews:

“The people who were leaving due to AI were expected to train the India team.”

“They claim AI, but lots of roles have been offshored to places like India.”

“I was training contractors to take my job then finally laid off.”

“Stop laying people off because of “AI” when you’re just offshoring the work.”

“It feels like they’re trying to get people to leave so they can be replaced with contract workers.”

“Told we’re being laid off due to AI. Being forced to train our own replacements from India before we’re fired.”

“…outsourcing…”

“They are outsourcing too many jobs, destroying morale and efficiency.”

“They decided to outsource to a company in India that allegedly will build AI to do the work in order to save money but the outsourced company will only be able to automate a fraction of the work.”

“There is no amazing “fintech”. It is smoke and mirrors.”

“I’ll be glad to quit this embarrassment of a “fintech” company".

“Not even remotely close to being a Fintech.”

These quotes are especially damning for a company that describes itself in the first line of their “About” page as a “fintech leader” in preparation for an IPO.

Still, anonymous employee reviews are not conclusive.

I need a smoking gun.

Let’s start with a recent job posting for “Specialist - Cash App & Receivables” :

The job duties mention “offshore accounting delivery teams” 6 times:

• This role works closely with their peers, our Accounting automation partner/offshore delivery team

• Serve as the primary onshore escalation point for Operations staff and offshore delivery teams

• coordinating with offshore leads

• Develop and maintain strong relationships with Accounting automation partner/offshore delivery team

• Works closely with offshore delivery teams

We can now be sure that Acrisure’s accounting unit was offshored.

When a company prepares to offshore a department, the overseas workers do not yet possess the institutional knowledge required to perform the specific, day-to-day tasks of the Americans they are replacing. Software can be deployed overnight; institutional knowledge cannot. In the corporate language of offshoring, “knowledge transfer” and “knowledge sharing” are euphemisms for when American employees are ordered to write manuals, record step-by-step walkthroughs, and conduct Zoom training sessions to train the offshore workers who will take their jobs.

The same “Specialist - Cash App & Receivables” job hints at precisely that “knowledge transfer” or “knowledge sharing” process:

• “Support training documentation and knowledge sharing for both onshore and offshore teams.”

The same language appears across many other postings for accounting jobs — for example, a “Specialist in Producer & Broker Commission Payables” role mentions “offshore delivery teams” 4 times, including “knowledge sharing”:

Another accounting post, “Director - Premium Payables”, lists “offshore” 6 times:

• “managing both onshore and offshore teams”

• “managing global teams in offshore delivery centers”

• “provide functional leadership to offshore teams within the Accounting & Finance Operations team.”

• “Champion change management to ensure smooth adoption of new processes and systems across onshore and offshore teams

• “Experience leading large, high performing teams (ideally a mix of onshore and offshore/captive/outsourced teams)”

• “overseeing day-to-day operations managed by teams onshore and offshore for NA Retail and Specialty business (supports approximately 60% of Acrisure revenue)”

A Senior Director, Digital & Systems Operations posting says the ideal candidate should understand “offshore/nearshore delivery strategies.” It also included a dedicated section called “Vendor & Offshore Relationship Management,” with responsibilities to “manage offshore support teams” and to “develop and execute strategies that leverage outsourcing, offshoring, and hybrid delivery models to improve cost and service performance.”

Across these jobs, Acrisure repeatedly describes Americans as the “onshore escalation point” who provide “functional leadership” and “knowledge sharing” to “offshore workers” at the “Accounting Global Delivery Center” where the actual day-to-day accounting functions take place.

In the course of my investigation, I identified at least 9 offshore contractors with publicly available evidence of having worked with Acrisure.

• Taskforce BPO (Macedonia)

• Patra Corporation (India & Philippines)

• EFFIKA Group (Uzbekistan)

• ReSource Pro (China, India, Philippines)

• LeadMaker (Philippines)

• InsBOSS (Philippines)

• Lean Solutions (Colombia)

• Tata Consultancy Services (India)

• Cognizant Technology Solutions (India)

Drilling down further, I identified the two specific contractors to which Acrisure outsourced accounting work.

The first is Lean Solutions, in Colombia, which, in the months following the 400 layoffs in Grand Rapids, boasted about “growing our Acrisure Accounting team to 101 people”.

The Colombia evidence actually appears broader than the 101-person accounting team. Lean Solutions personnel publicly describe separate Acrisure West, Southwest, and Accounting teams, and a Lean manager advertised for insurance and data-entry staff specifically “to support the Acrisure account.”

Acrisure is also outsourcing some accounting functions to Poland. However, the Poland-based employees replacing American financial-accounting staff appear to be employed directly by Acrisure rather than through a third-party contractor.

They were all hired in the months following the American layoffs.

The main firm taking American accounting jobs is Tata Consultancy Services.

Tata’s entire business model is to take over a client’s finance department and move it to India or the Philippines to drive "cost reduction in core processes."

Tata established a dedicated “Acrisure finance unit” in the months after Acrisure’s U.S. accounting department was scheduled to be phased out in Q1 2026.

My sources tell me that Tata’s “Acrisure finance unit” has about 400 people.

Hilariously, all Tata contractors in Nagpur, Maharashtra, have pronouns in bio.

The second location involved is Pune, India.

Beginning in January 2026—just as Acrisure’s eliminated American accounting positions were scheduled to disappear—Tata Consultancy Services launched a sustained hiring campaign for insurance-accounting workers in Nagpur, India.

At a January 3 “Mega Walk-In”, TCS recruited “Accounts Payable—Premium Payable” workers to reconcile direct-bill commissions from insurance carriers, modify broker commission rates, track carrier payments and investigate discrepancies. A January 10 recruitment drive simultaneously sought workers for Record-to-Report, Premium Payables and Accounts Receivable–Billing. TCS repeated the hiring on January 24, recruiting separately for premium payables and insurance billing, then advertised the same billing role again on February 14, emphasizing a preference for “immediate joiners.” On April 10, TCS held another Nagpur drive for experienced accounts-payable and accounts-receivable workers.

Applicants were expected to know Applied Epic—the exact same insurance-management software used by Acrisure—and work American hours.

This is apparently the building in Nagpur where accounting work once performed in Michigan by Americans is now being transferred:

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Tata’s $168 Million Insurance-Platform Case

TCS has used a similar insurance offshoring strategy before—and just last week, the Supreme Court declined to review a $168 million judgment arising from it.

In that case, TCS took over Transamerica’s life-insurance operations and absorbed more than 2,000 of its employees. Federal courts found that some of those workers transferred proprietary source code and technical materials to TCS’s offshore personnel, helping the company accelerate development and migration work for its competing offshore platform.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear TCS’s appeal left in place approximately $56 million in compensatory damages and $112 million in punitive damages.

The case does not establish misconduct at Acrisure. But it clearly maps out the immense regulatory, security, and operational risks that materialize when an American insurer’s internal database knowledge, systems, and client data are fast-tracked into TCS’s offshore delivery network.

The Second Round of Layoffs

In May 2026, Acrisure announced a much larger round of 2,250 layoffs—equal to 11 percent of its workforce—to be implemented across its U.S. operations. This is the largest single-employer 2026 layoff in the insurance brokerage subsector. From what I understand, 1000 of the layoffs are through 2026 and 1,200 or so through 2027.

My anonymous sources say Acrisure internally refers to this round of layoffs as “Project Bradshaw,” while the earlier accounting layoffs were code-named “Project Greene.” The names follow a football theme tied to Acrisure’s $150 million naming-rights deal for Acrisure Stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers: Terry Bradshaw and “Mean” Joe Greene are two of the most famous players in franchise history.

Again, disgruntled employees took to the /r/GrandRapids subreddit, complaining about having to train their overseas replacements:

I tried to speak with Acrisure employees on the record for this article, but nobody was willing. They are all terrified. One anonymous employee told me:

Fortunately, there was no need to persuade employees to speak on the record. After the second round of layoffs, dozens of frustrated Acrisure workers took to Facebook with their real names and described publicly what they said was happening inside the company:

The primary beneficiary of “Project Bradshaw” layoffs, my sources say, is Cognizant.

Acrisure and Cognizant do not appear to have publicly announced their relationship, and I have not located a contract explicitly identifying Acrisure as Cognizant’s client. But Cognizant’s recent hiring activity provides remarkable corroboration: the timing, software, job functions, and locations all closely match the work Acrisure is now eliminating across its American operations.

The Amphitheater Whitewashing

Acrisure announced its latest layoffs just five days after the opening night of the Acrisure Amphitheater, downtown Grand Rapids’ newest entertainment venue.

Acrisure paid $30 million for the naming rights.

There is no evidence that Acrisure deliberately timed the layoff announcement to coincide with the amphitheater’s opening. Still, the timing was remarkably convenient. The opening generated precisely the publicity the company would have wanted to overshadow the layoffs: ribbon cuttings, Lionel Richie, civic celebration, and repeated praise for Acrisure’s commitment to Grand Rapids.

The juxtaposition is a PR disaster.

Acrisure Amphitheater was built with a $30 million State of Michigan grants and city-issued bonds whose debt service is funded through Kent County hotel-tax revenue.

Likewise, when Acrisure moved its headquarters to Grand Rapids, it received $7 million in economic incentives. As part of the incentive package for that public subsidy, Acrisure committed to create and maintain 400 new, high-paying jobs in Michigan.

That grant expired at the end of 2025… exactly when Acrisure fired 400 people.

Also in December 2025, the CEO of Acrisure announced a record $401 million commitment to Michigan State University, $100 million of it to literally buy 10% of their football team’s revenue-generating operations. The new MSU president and athletic director who orchestrated this deal then just abruptly left.

The point is not that Acrisure was obligated to give that money to employees, or that Acrisure cannot purchase naming rights while cutting costs.

The point is that Acrisure plainly had hundreds of millions of dollars available for prestige projects, stadium branding and college athletics. Against that backdrop, it is deeply unseemly for the company to accept public subsidies intended to create Michigan jobs, then eliminate those jobs and transfer them to India.

Conclusion: The IPO Story

On April 1, 2026—seven weeks before the 2,250 additional layoffs—S&P Global Ratings changed Acrisure’s outlook from stable to negative.

The numbers explain why. Acrisure’s adjusted leverage had risen to 9.6 times EBITDA by the end of 2025, up from roughly eight times the previous year. Its adjusted EBITDA margin had fallen from 27 percent to 21 percent, placing it among the lowest-margin insurance brokers rated by S&P. In North America, its organic growth had slowed to just 1 to 2 percent.

“[Acrisure] have to respond more aggressively and more quickly because they’ve got to manage their debt loans,” says Kevin Stipe, CEO of insurance brokerage consulting firm Reagan. “Because PE firms generally use debt, then it is fair to say that they have to respond to some of these things more quickly and sometimes more strongly. But I think the key part of the story is that growth is slowing for brokers.”

Acrisure has grown extraordinarily quickly, but not primarily by inventing revolutionary insurance technology. It grew by acquiring a vast number of independent, small-to-midsize insurance agencies and consolidating them under a common corporate umbrella.

Through that acquisition spree, Acrisure’s revenue grew from $38 million in roughly 2013–2014 to about $4 billion by 2023—an increase of approximately 105-fold in ten years.

That roll-up model works beautifully while acquisitions keep producing headline growth. But eventually the company must prove that the collection of agencies it assembled can generate stronger organic growth and wider margins on its own.

By 2026, Acrisure was under pressure to do exactly that.

The company had spent years positioning itself for an eventual public offering. It hired John Tuttle, the former global head of listings at the New York Stock Exchange, as its president. It raised $725 million in preferred equity at a $23 billion valuation in 2022, followed by $2.1 billion in convertible senior preferred stock at a $32 billion valuation in 2025.

Those securities are not ordinary shares that can be sold on a public exchange. Private-equity investors, executives and potentially some owners of businesses acquired by Acrisure hold private company equity whose value cannot readily be converted into cash without an IPO, a company sale or a secondary transaction.

There is public evidence that Acrisure has at least sometimes used its own stock as acquisition currency. That matters because many insurance-agency owners spent decades building their businesses before selling them to Acrisure. To the extent that sellers accepted Acrisure shares, rollover equity, earnouts or other equity-linked consideration, part of the price they received for their life’s work remains illiquid—effectively “locked” inside a private company.

A great deal of supposed wealth therefore exists as Acrisure paper. Until a liquidity event occurs, that paper cannot easily be converted into cash.

An IPO would force investors to decide what Acrisure actually is: a conventional insurance brokerage assembled through thousands of acquisitions, or an automated fintech platform capable of generating software-like margins.

That distinction could be worth billions of dollars.

The incentives are therefore straightforward:

• Acrisure expanded too fast.

• Margins had deteriorated.

• Leverage was extremely high.

• Acrisure was positioning itself for an IPO.

• Offshore labor could reduce operating costs (“window dressing”).

• The “AI” narrative could persuade Wall Street to award Acrisure a technology premium rather than value it as a vanilla private-equity roll-up, thereby artificially inflating their upcoming IPO by billions of dollars.

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But never a population problem.

Anyone who suggested that record immigration levels might be overwhelming Canada’s housing and healthcare systems was treated as if he had committed a moral offense. You were not making a basic supply-and-demand argument. You were “blaming immigrants,” “scapegoating newcomers,” or spreading racist conspiracy theories.

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Liberal ministers said this explicitly.

In 2022, 2023, and 2024, Immigration Minister Marc Miller repeatedly rejected any blame on immigrants/international students for the housing crisis, arguing they were “no more responsible for the housing crunch than they are for rising interest rates,” and warned that public debate would cause “stigmatization of particularly people of diversity that come to this country to make it better, and that includes international students.”

For years, Miller repeated these talking points on a weekly basis.

In 2025, Miller performed an utterly shameless 180. After years of treating immigration-housing skepticism as bigotry or paranoia, he now openly boasts that immigration does, in fact, affect housing.

Miller’s reversal captures the Liberal Party’s broader heel turn: an attempt to distance itself from the stench of Justin Trudeau.

Prime Minister Mark Carney was sworn in in March 2025, and almost overnight, the taboo vanished. Suddenly, it was no longer racist to say in polite company that Canada had imported people faster than it could house them.

Carney immediately began reversing the population shock the Liberals had spent years pretending did not exist:

1. Cut permanent-resident admissions from the Trudeau-era plan of 500,000 per year to 395,000 in 2025, 380,000 in 2026, and 365,000 in 2027.

2. Capped temporary residents.

3. Restricted international-student growth through the study-permit cap, tighter rules on designated learning institutions, and stricter post-graduation work-permit eligibility.

4. Restricted the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, including the reinstatement of pre-pandemic restrictions, lower hiring caps, shorter permit durations, and limits on the use of low-wage foreign labour in regions with higher unemployment.

5. Restricted family open-work permits and chain migration.

6. Ended the visitor-to-worker conversion loophole, the temporary policy that allowed visitors already inside Canada to apply for work permits without leaving the country.

7. Tightened asylum eligibility by expanding grounds for refugee-claim ineligibility and restrictions on people who had already been in Canada for more than a year before filing a claim.

8. Targeted immigration fraud and abuse by consultants via new/harsher penalties for paid immigration representatives who break the law.

9. Tripled deportation numbers from the Covid era, and doubled deportation numbers from the pre-Covid baseline.

While the stock of “temporary” foreign workers remains high, the flow has effectively been throttled. In 2025, Carney’s first year in office, Canada saw negative population growth for the first time since Confederation in 1867!

This week, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced:

• 88% drop in new international students

• 78% drop in new international workers

• 80% drop in new asylum claims

The raw numbers are stunning:

To be clear, massive structural loopholes remain. Take Bill C-3, passed into law last year: it amends Canada’s Citizenship Act to extend citizenship by descent beyond the first generation, allowing foreign-born citizens to pass it to unlimited generations abroad with minimal residency requirements.

There is still an incredibly long way to go. But while Carney hasn’t completely shut off the tap—a political impossibility given the institutional momentum—he is at least forcing the ship in the right direction. It doesn’t excuse the years of elite gaslighting that got us here, but it is a stark departure from the Trudeau status quo.

Carney essentially stole Pierre Poilievre’s homework, but kept it quiet, technocratic, and respectable. No cringe slogans. No culture-war theatrics. No obvious permission structure for leftists to accuse him of xenophobia. That reflects a deeper understanding of the Canadian psyche. Many Canadians know the country imported people faster than it could house them, but they are too polite and still recoil from anything that feels cruel, crude, or openly anti-immigrant. Carney gave them a way to support restriction without feeling as though they had crossed a moral line. He did things politely and quietly.

The vibe is shifting.

Even Tim Hortons, Canada’s most prominent importer of mass slave labor, this week announced that they would reduce their reliance on temporary foreign workers and hire 10,000 Canadians…

… although that may be an empty promise, writes :

Without Diminishment

Alexander Brown: No, Tim Hortons isn’t suddenly interested in hiring Canadians

If you believe yesterday’s announcement that Tim Hortons plans to dial back its use (and clear abuse) of the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP) to hire “10,000 people locally” out of the goodness of its heart, I have a below-sea-level basement apartment to sell you in Richmond, B.C.’s peat-based Delta soil…

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2 months ago · 43 likes · 2 comments · Without Diminishment Editor and Alexander Brown

Housing Prices

With the most important immigration inflows choked off by up to 88%, the desperate bidding wars that characterized the Canadian rental market have completely disintegrated

Average asking rents across Canada have fallen year-over-year (YoY) for 19 consecutive months as of April 2026, and in April 2026, the national average asking rent for a house dropped by 7.9% YoY:

In many cities, rent is down by double digits YoY:

Hamilton & Toronto are down ~27% from their peak:

My personal favorite is Brampton, Ontario, which has the highest South Asian population in the country, and is in absolute freefall:

The numbers don't lie, even if the politicians do. For a decade, they weaponized the language of tolerance to protect a broken economic model that enriched slumlords, corporate fast-food franchises, and strip-mall colleges at the expense of an entire generation of young Canadians.

These liars and traitors will never apologize. They will never admit that the “racists” and “conspiracy theorists” were simply describing supply and demand.

But the taboo is broken, the numbers are moving, and the old consensus is dead.

The clearest sign that the taboo has shattered is that Liberals are now beginning to outflank Conservatives from the right. Eric Lombardi, a candidate for the Ontario Liberal leadership, is openly running on what amounts to a mass-remigration platform, calling for Canada to unwind its temporary-resident population from roughly five million people nationally to well under one million over the next five to ten years.

That would have been politically unthinkable two years ago. Not from a fringe populist party. Not from a Conservative backbencher. From a Liberal. Yet here we are: the party that spent the Trudeau years treating immigration restraint as a moral crime is now producing candidates who are willing to say, in plain language, that millions of temporary residents must leave.

This is how completely the politics have shifted. The Conservatives spent years trying to make the immigration-housing argument acceptable. Carney quietly absorbed it into government policy. Now Liberals are beginning to run ahead of the Conservative Party itself, using the language of administrative realism rather than nationalist revolt. What was racist in 2023 is Liberal pragmatism in 2026.

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It was the chance of a lifetime.

Rufo had just spent the past five years positioning himself as the face of the anti-woke movement — a champion for meritocracy, a voice for disillusioned young men frustrated by affirmative action and collapsing institutional standards — now, he had the chance to handpick anyone — literally from a pool of thousands of hyper-competent young geniuses — and for months, he bragged non-stop about using this opportunity to assemble a team of ‘‘dangerous’’ “killers” and “assassins” who would “build institutions” and “advance the conservative movement” with dogged precision and intelligence.

So… who did he hire?

Rufo’s first hire, Hannah Grossman, is a self-described ‘‘Holocaust educator.’’

Hannah’s journalism career began in 2017 as a fellow as Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a Jewish supremacist think-tank, where she ground her teeth by lobbing softballs to Jeffrey Epstein associate Alan Dershowitz, in articles such ‘‘Alan Dershowitz on Trump, Israel, and Antisemitism.’’

She then worked as an associate editor at the Daily Caller, where she wrote such classics as ‘‘95-Year-Old World War II Paratrooper Captured By Nazis Describes His Harrowing Experience’’ and ‘‘150 Rockets Rain Down On Israel As Revenge For Palestinian Leader’s Death.’’ She then wrote for Jewish Press, Jewish Star, The Five Towns Jewish Times, Daily Wire, and Legal Insurrection, where she mostly spent her time complaining about anti-Zionism, e.g.: ‘'Important win for Jewish students against anti-Zionist discrimination at Cal State.’’

She was then given a shot in the A-leagues at Fox News, where her corpus of work doubled down on nakedly shilling for the Israel Lobby.

Here is a sample of her Fox News articles:

• Oscar celebrities accused of wearing 'symbol of bloodlust' originating from Palestinians 'lynching' 2 Israelis'

• Hamas defector tells pro-Palestinian activists they belong in 'a mental asylum' in brutal debate

• Black student erupts on anti-Israel 'White libs' for blocking path on campus

• Major 'political shift' among Jewish Cornell students as they question ties to progressive groups

• New York Times' fraught history covering Jews, Israel draws fresh backlash amid report on Hasidic schools

• Father of American held captive by Hamas says hostages 'are dying,' going through 'hell' in Gaza

• Ilhan Omar's daughter suspended from college amid anti-Israel activism

• 'Radical' pro-Palestinian groups increasingly target houses of worship for protests in alarming trend

• ‘Woke Kindergarten’ leader wants US, Israel destroyed

• House reps announce investigation into Harvard, MIT, UPenn after ‘morally bankrupt’ testimony on antisemitism

On Rufo’s team, she focused on “the fight against campus anti-semitism”:

Hard hitting stuff.

Look: I have nothing against Hannah Grossman personally, I have never met her. My focus isn’t on her as an individual but on her career, which is as an overt Israeli attack dog singularly dedicated to promoting Zionism with little nuance. She is an Israeli PR agent, not a journalist. Her Twitter feed is dedicated to retweeting Israeli government accounts and “Mossad Commentary”.

The real issue is what her hiring says about Rufo’s priorities. He swore to avenge the injustice done to disillusioned young conservative men, was given a slush fund to do it, and then promptly gave that slush fund to… a midwit Holocaust educator chick, to write about anti-semitism? Huh?

Since hiring Hannah, Rufo’s focus has conspicuously shifted. Instead of targeting woke absurdities or academic malfeasance, he has spent the past couple of years focused on attacking professors who call for financial divestment from Israel, or attacking other pundits for not being sufficiently Zionist.

The Free Press

Christopher Rufo: The Antisemitic Influencer Problem

In 1991, a motorcade carrying a Jewish rabbi cruised through Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. After getting separated from the group, one of the cars ran a red light and collided with another vehicle, which swerved onto the curb and hit two black children, leaving one injured and another dead. Within hours, the neighborhood had…

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a year ago · 313 likes · 297 comments · Christopher F. Rufo

His second hire, Christina Buttons, is much more scandalous.

buttonslives

Critical reporting on the evidence base behind biological explanations for transgender identity, gender-transition treatments, and psychiatric models—seeking a better path forward for mental health.

By Christina Buttons

For starters, the least of the problems is that it was a nepotism hire.

Christina Buttons is dating , another senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute… meaning after hiring a holocaust scholar, Chris Rufo promptly hired his buddy’s idiot girlfriend. Put bluntly: everyone knows she wouldn’t have gotten the job at the snobbiest intellectual thinktank in New York if she didn’t sleep her way there. So much for meritocracy.

Secondly, ‘‘Christina Buttons’’ is not her real name.

Her real name is “Christina Berry.”

She uses a nom-de-plume “Buttons” to obfuscate her past as a hardcore porn star.

She stared in at least 25 pornos from 2008-2016 under the stage name ‘‘Rita Lovely,’’ sometimes “Cute Courtney” , including such classics as ‘‘Perky Redhead Hippie Slut,’’ ‘‘Cum Stained Casting Couch 14,’’ ‘‘Only Teen Blowjobs 3,’’ and ‘‘Treat Me Like a Slut 3.’’

Here is her partial filmography:

Her career transition from ‘‘Perky Redhead Hippie Slut’’ to conservative gatekeeper was uncovered after an internet sleuth named Basil ran her face through facial recognition software, which showed R-rated stills from her pornos next to her professional headshots.

Basil gave this info to a drama streamer named Ethan Ralph, he tweeted it out, it went viral, and it’s been a recurring meme for 2 years now.

It was then double-confirmed when users on X cross-verified her moles/freckles with Rita Lovely’s moles/freckles:

Rufo pled ignorance, and besides, it didn’t matter, because she was repentant:

Except: she has always been unrepentantly pro-porn & pro-prostitution. In fact, she explicitly maintain that prostitutes and porn stars are making a completely rational choice because they can easily make more than someone earning minimum wage, so, sex work is good. Sex workers are NOT victims with no agency. It’s a rational choice.

Despite being pro-sex work, she has a habit of bullying other strippers, trafficked women, and CSA survivors, telling them without any irony to “take some responsibility” for “whoring yourself out all over the internet”:

Perhaps Rufo should have read her tweets before hiring her, where she explicitly warned him:

Or perhaps he could have looked at her previous employers, the Daily Wire, where she quit in a blaze of glory because Ben Shapiro was mean to trans people.

Another of her former employers was the “Jewish Institute for Liberal Values”:

buttonslives

A Quick Explainer On Woke Antisemitism

This explainer is adapted from an infographic slideshow created for Instagram and offers an intentionally oversimplified perspective to give a quick overview of the topics. It's not designed to be comprehensive, but the links interspersed within the article will be helpful for those seekin…

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3 years ago · 69 likes · 31 comments · Christina Buttons

Her Jewish liberal values include aggressive support for abortion:

She loves abortion so much that her Etsy page, where she posts doodles of softcore loli porn and sells pro-abortion tank tops, donates 20% of all proceeds to The Lillith Fund to pay for abortions:

I particularly like her art of naked Jewish children:

While she loves Judaism, she hates Christianity…

…so much so that she even hates her own name because it has “Christ” in it:

…this hatred for Christianity is despite the fact that as late as 2025, she has “never opened a Bible before”:

Of course, she would never criticize the Talmud — support for Israel is a prerequisite for working at the Manhattan Institute, whose board of Trustees includes names like Barr, Golub, Hertog, Singer, Kristol, Lefkowitz (Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer), Rosenkranz, Kaufman, Lebovitz, and Greenberg.

They fired their biggest star last year for milqueoast hemming and hawing about “well maybe we shouldn’t carpetbomb women and children in refugee camps”:

Glenn Loury

I Was Fired by the Manhattan Institute. Here's Why.

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a year ago · 111 likes · 60 comments · Glenn Loury

They publish articles claiming that anyone holding up a banner saying “NO US MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL” is a “civil terrorist”…

…and other articles arguing that free speech is “too sacred” and that more people should be “deported” for “anti-Israel speech”:

Here is the Manhattan Institute’s Director of Constitutional Studies, Ilya Shapiro, spreading the lie that Hamas burns babies alive in ovens, calling Palestinians “subhumans” who “must be eradicated”, and repeatedly calling for explicit “ethnic cleansing”:

But I digress.

Upon going viral for being a porn star who works at the most elite conservative thinktank in the world, she wrote an essay justifying it:

buttonslives

Crazy is You or Me, Amplified

In interviews, I’ve often shared how I became a journalist after discovering the stories of detransitioners—stories that deeply resonated with my own struggles with mental health and identity. I’ve been very open about the severe mental health crises I faced in my youth and have frequently…

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2 years ago · 654 likes · 106 comments · Christina Buttons

Her reasoning for doing porn is as follows:

I received many diagnoses throughout my life, the most recent being Asperger's syndrom… I eventually agreed to meet with a representative from an agency that had been hounding me, which led to my decision to make adult films to pay off my debt. At the time, and for several months thereafter, I believed I had bipolar disorder. However, I later realized that the instability I felt stemmed from other factors, including heavy drinking

So: BPD, heavy drinking, OCD, autism, and credit card debt.

A tale as old as time.

Then, after years of having “autistic” in her bio and loudly making having autism her entire personality, just last week, she came out and loudly proclaimed that autism is fake, her diagnosis was fake, and launched a whole anti-autism crusade:

As a wise woman once said: You spent over a decade whoring yourself out all over the internet, you have no one to blame but yourself. Take some responsibility for your actions, this perpetual victim act is pathetic.

Now she wants to be a gatekeeper of the conservative movement.

Sorry, but no.

Someone has to be the gatekeeper of the conservative movement.

Today it’s me.

Leave.

You don’t belong.

You are a cancer.

Go back to being who you really are: a mentally ill adventuress bimbo with rainbow hair obsessed with abortion, who’s now only masquerading as a conservative gatekeeper to trick people into advancing the interests of Israel.

She is very explicit in this goal:

How Many Porn Stars Are There in Con Inc.?

Ms. Buttons isn’t the first porn star to infiltrate the conservative movement and rise to become a gatekeeper.

Not by a long shot.

One prominent example is “Jack Murphy”, who spent years pretending to be an Irish alphamale, later revealed as a gay Jewish pornographer whose actual name is John Goldman:

Another good example is conservative freedom warrior Corey DeAngelis, who did his porn under the name “Seth Rose”:

Chris Rufo, of course, defended his friend’s past as a gay porn star and maintained that he should keep his role as a Con Inc. gatekeeper:

Corey DeAngelis / “Seth Rose” headlined CPAC this year.

My favorite example in this genre is Brian Riedl, who joined the Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow in economic policy in 2017.

After working for the Manhattan institute for a decade as their resident tax wonk, in 2025, Brian Reidl, chose to shatter his own family and traumatize his children so that he could put on a skirt, paint his face, and do news hits as a Manhattan Institute expert flaunting his fetish and subverting/destroying the conservative movement:

The Manhattan Institute using female pronouns for “Jessica” Riedl, is, of course, extra funny because Rufo built his entire career on the absurdity of pronouns.

The Real Reason Christina Buttons Was Hired

It turns out that Christina Button’s biggest fan on Twitter is a woman named Suzy Lebovitz-Edelman, who has sycophantically replied to her hundreds of times before Buttons ever worked at the Manhattan Institute:

Suzy Lebovitz-Edelman, Christina’s top reply-guy, is married to hedge-fund manager Joseph Edelman, whose net worth is roughly $2.5–$3 billion. Their interests can be traced by their donations history. This includes the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish World Service, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, The Tikvah Fund, Bari Weiss’s UATX, and Media Matters.

Suzy and Joseph are among Manhattan Institute’s top donors, giving them a $725,000 cash infusion in 2022-2024 for a “gender identity initiative.”

The term “Woke Right” and “Woke Reich” came from Suzy Edelman-Lebovitz and James Lindsay.

Here, Chris Rufo corrects Rod Dreher over his misuse of the term, since he is paid by the Edelman's through their special donation devoted to "transgender issues":

As part of this “Woke Right” psychological operation, Suzy met with Chris Rufo and James Lindsay to coordinate messaging:

Recently, James Lindsay attacked Arby’s as "Woke Right”:

When Chris Rufo stepped out of line and made fun of James Lindsay for this, Suzy put him back into his place. She keeps him on a short leash.

Suzy Edelman-Lebovitz is Christina Button’s biggest fan.

Suzy Edelman-Lebovitz is Chris Rufo’s handler.

She tells him what he is or isn’t allowed to tweet about, and who to hire.

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• https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.411922/gov.uscourts.txnd.411922.1.0.pdf

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Wang’s undergrad degree is from Duke, and he earned Masters degrees from NYU and South Florida, and a PhD from Cornell.

His lawsuit is 18 pages long.

It begins on page 1 by asserting that SMU has a systemic problem with race discrimination and retaliation that violates the Civil Rights Act, and then spends the next 17 pages building that argument.

I reached out to SMU for comment, but did not receive a response.

Clearing the Bar for Tenure

At its core, this case is simple: Sean Wang was denied tenure in 2024.

In April 2025, Wang filed a complaint to the President appealing the tenure decision and claiming discrimination, and in May 2025, the President denied the appeal.

SMU’s own standards are not ambiguous. The Cox School’s Promotion and Tenure Manual sets a clear benchmark: “at least four top-tier publications.”

Wang obliterated that standard… this was not a borderline case.

SMU is a respectable but not elite institution, ranked #88 nationally, and its tenure bar is clearly defined. By those standards, Wang’s record is exceptional. Far from a marginal candidate, his output more closely resembles that of a full professor at a significantly higher-ranked school.

By the time of his tenure review, he had published ten articles in top-tier journals (e.g. Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, and Management Science)—more than double the output of any other faculty member in the department at the time of their tenure decision.

His publications garnered nearly 2,000 citations, exceeding the citation count of all three Indian professors granted tenure in the Accounting department.

• https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fUc4WKwAAAAJ&hl=en

Nevertheless, SMU denied him tenure due to “bad fit” and repeatedly said that he needed “more citations” and “more visibility.” Between the 2023 and 2024 annual reviews, Dr. Wang was called a "bad fit" at least thirteen times by his Chair and Dean. SMU’s Associate Provost, Dr. Paige Ware, acknowledges in the lawsuit that “one of the cautionary alarm bells for anyone who’s looking at DEI is the word fit… that elusive word ‘fit’ that spits in the face of data.”

The “bad fit” contrast becomes sharper when Wang’s case is compared to his colleague, Sorabh Tomar (Indian). At the time of his third-year review, Tomar had ZERO publications, yet received a positive mid-career evaluation from the department chair (Indian). No concerns about “fit” were raised—even though his work, like Wang’s, involved behavioral research using experimental methods and collaboration with the same co-authors.

On its Faculty Permission to Hire Form, SMU recorded Dr. Wang as “White” in its HR and EEO records, erasing his self-identified minority status and treating him as a white man so that they may more easily discriminate against him.

Testimony From 4 SMU Professors

Testimony from the lawsuit:

1. Prof. Robin Pinkley (Janet & Craig Duchossois Endowed Professor of Management & Organizations, SMU)—a 35-year veteran of Cox who has served on numerous P&T committees—wrote to Dean Myers that the Department’s reliance on “fit” is “self-serving” and “does not stand up when compared to the empirical evidence provided by top-tier publications, citation counts, and invitations to speak at Harvard, London Business School, Kellogg, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon.” Prof. Pinkley concluded that “Sean Wang’s case was not treated in an unbiased manner consistent with the P&T document and our commitment to equity,” and warned that the current leadership’s pattern of bias “should not be tolerated.”

2. Prof. Pab Jotikashtira (Full Professor of Finance, SMU; member, Provost’s Advisory Committee on Tenure & Promotion) compared Dr. Wang’s record with the two Indian professors most recently tenured in Accounting. Prof. Jotikashtira found that Dr. Wang is “very significantly more productive than Gauri Bhat” and has “a comparable record to Neil Bhattacharya, who is ten years his senior,” adding that “any reasonable person would deem Sean’s citation count as more than sufficient for tenure.” Prof. Jotikashtira dismissed the Department’s quality and “fit” objections as “personal taste” and “absurd,” noting that the career success of ten top-tier publications “cannot be due to luck” given the less than ten percent acceptance rates in those journals.

3. Prof. Jeff Hales (Charles T. Zlatkovich Centennial Professor of Accounting, University of Texas at Austin) described Dr. Wang as “an outstanding researcher with few comparable peers.” Benchmarking against recent promotions at top-twenty business schools, Prof. Hales wrote that Dr. Wang’s 11 peer-reviewed articles (10 Financial Times Top 50 Journals) and nearly 2,000 citations would already match the average full-professor dossier, and that Dr. Wang has “more citations than I had at a similar point in my career.” He concluded that SMU hired Dr. Wang “to do exactly this kind of research—and he delivered.”

4. Prof. David Wood (Glenn D. Ardis Professor of Accounting, Brigham Young University) noted that SMU’s claim that Dr. Wang did not meet the research standards as “ludicrous” and that Dr. Wang met the research bar for full even for top 20 schools.

Discrimination by Desai

On November 19, 2024, Dr. Hemang Desai, Chair of the Accounting Department, informed Dr. Wang of a negative departmental vote (3–1). All three Indian faculty members voted against tenure, citing a failure to achieve “outstanding” performance, while the sole non-Indian faculty member voted in favor.

Wang’s complaint repeatedly alleges that, from the start of his employment, Desai held him to different and more demanding standards than his Indian colleagues.

Since at least 2006, when Hemang Desai (an Indian-Origin faculty member) became a full professor in SMU’s Cox School of Business, the Accounting Department granted tenure to 100 percent of Indian-origin candidates (two of two) who met the published “four top-tier publications” standard, while denying tenure to 100 percent of non-Indian candidates (zero of five) who met the same standard … This pattern is consistent with an ancestry-based preference for Indian-origin candidates and disfavor toward non-Indian candidates. … Dr. Wang’s research productivity significantly exceeds that of his tenured Indian colleagues in the department when they received tenure.”

The filing also includes a more unusual claim: in Spring 2024, when offices were reassigned in the department’s new building, Wang alleges they were “segregated” along ethnic lines— Indian faculty were handed prime offices with nice views, while East Asian faculty were assigned to a Chinese ghetto down the hall.

When I googled Desai’s name, this was the first review that popped up:

Notably, Desai’s son graduated from SMU in 2024 with a degree in business, and was recommended (I wonder by who?) by the school to receive Poets and Quants’ “Best and Brightest Business Major” award.

In that interview, his son described yet another award from SMU: “The achievement I’m most proud of is being selected as a Don Jackson Fellow for the Alternative Asset Management Center Program here at SMU.”

Gee, I wonder how his son got picked to Don Jackson Fellows for the Alternative Asset Management Center Program at SMU Cox... And how he got such a glowing recommendation from Jim Bryan, the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs at SMU Cox...

Jim Bryan: “The best students in every school are the ones who don’t just succeed in the classroom, but who strive to make the school better when they leave. Mohan Desai is one of the best examples of this concept I’ve ever seen... I can’t think of anyone better to mentor our new students than Mohan. No matter where he goes after graduation, I want Mohan wearing SMU Cox gear—there can be no greater advertisement for SMU Cox’s student body than Mohan Desai.”

While every father is proud of his son, the optics of the Department Chair's child sweeping competitive internal awards while the department's most productive professor is labeled a 'bad fit' are, at best, a conflict of interest.

My point isn’t to attack Desai’s son, it’s to highlight a pattern the lawsuit alleges: nepotism. A fish must swim; a beaver must build dams; a bird must fly; a fresh-off-the-boat Indian must hire and promote their own caste. Indians are famously one of the most nepotistic ethnic group in America, it’s just what they do, it is clearly how their culture operates, as documented in thousands of other lawsuits and articles, e.g.:

• Across India, Nepotism as a Way of Life (New York Times, 2012)

• Tech giant accused of hiring bias in favor of Indian workers (World of Labour, 2017)

• The US says Oracle is encouraging Indians to hire other Indians—and it’s killing diversity (Quartz, 2022)

• ‘Indian students preferred’: Discriminatory rental ads have people shying away from applying (CBC, 2020)

• Punjab Health Foundation’s hiring scandal exposes systemic nepotism epidemic (Samaa, 2023)

• Insiders Tel How IT Giant was intentionally discriminating against non-Indian workers (Bloomberg, 2024)

• The Public Timeline Of The Cisco Caste Discrimination Case (2024)

• ‘Nepotism never fails’: Indian-origin FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam draws flak over H-1B hiring (Times of India, 2025)

• Nepotism: The Silent Killer of Merit in India’s Legal Landscape (Hindu College Gazette, 2025)

• ‘This is why Indians are being hated’, US techies claim Indians taking high-paying jobs, ‘it’s nepotism’ (Financial Express, 2025)

• A White Man in the Indian-Dominated Tech Sector (American Renaissance, 2025)

• Indian nepotism in the software industry explained by an insider, parts I-III (Reddit, 2025)

SMU’s Response

The university’s response filing is sparse, offering little substantive detail or point-by-point rebuttal. SMU denies the allegations in full and asserts that Dr. Wang is not entitled to any relief.

• https://assets2.pacermonitor.com/filings/Wang_v_Southern_Methodist_University/Wang_v_Southern_Methodist_University__txndce-25-03129__0014.0.pdf

Trial is scheduled to begin on February 1, 2027.

Wang is seeking preliminary and permanent injunctive relief requiring SMU to:

1. Grant Dr. Wang tenure and promotion to Associate Professor;

2. Grant Dr. Wang an expedited, conflict-free review for promotion to Full Professor with appropriate retroactive compensation adjustments if the fact-finder determines Dr. Wang's qualifications warranted such promotion at the time tenure was denied;

3. Cease discriminatory practices in tenure and promotion decisions;

4. Implement and enforce written policies prohibiting the use of subjective “fit” criteria in tenure decisions.

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I bought the book solely because it mentions me, so I was curious, and felt obligated to point out the lies and propaganda she is spreading.

You can buy it here:

• https://www.amazon.com/Poisoned-Ivies-Academic-Americas-Universities/dp/1668087537

  

The first thing I noticed is that, ironically, Stefanik plagiarized the title:

• Poisoned Ivy (1981): A Student Witnesses The Origin of the “Woke Mind Virus”

• Poison Ivy (2022): How Elite Colleges Divide Us

• Poisoned Ivies (2026): Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities

Before I even read page 1, I noticed a groan-worthy, blatant lie in the first line of the book jacket where Stefanik claims that the Claudine Gay hearing was "the most-watched congressional hearing in history."

She doesn’t make an attempt to quantify or prove this claim, because there is zero chance it’s true. For example, 85% of American households saw at least part of the Watergate hearings… do you really think even 5% of of American households saw the Claudine Gay hearing?

The rest of the book was much of the same.

Introduction

Typical slop about how society-is-losing-trust in universities because of DEI and wokeness, mixed with plenty of bragging about how historic her hearing was.

• “the world heard [me]”

• “it would become a historic earthquake that instantly reshaped the debate on higher education overnight”

• “the hearing changed the trajectory of higher education”

• “as a result of [my question], elite campuses are in the midst of a generational upheaval”

• “nothing is the same”

• “our hearing reset the course of American higher education”

Readers quickly learn that the entire purpose of the book is to brag about, promote, and re-live this 1-minute long clip:

She re-plays this clip hundreds of times in the book.

Except, Stefanik is histrionically overstating what she actually means.

When she refers to “calls for genocide,” she is actually just referring to students chanting “from the river to the sea,” a slogan that featured prominently in the DOJ’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard.

Stefanik was part of a concerted effort by the Israel lobby and to characterize the phrase as an explicit call for genocide. For example:

• Combat Antisemitism Movement: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free is a violent call to genocide that should be banned from the social media platform.”

• Senator John Kennedy: “The phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ is a call for genocide against Jewish people. It’s a call to annihilate Israel.”

• Senate Resolution 497: “This resolution expresses the sense that the slogan from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free and its derivations are anti-Semitic and a call for genocide and destruction of the Jewish state.”

What makes the charge of genocide especially strange is that this slogan has deep roots in Revisionist Zionism itself. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement, wrote a 1929 song titled “The East Bank of the Jordan,” which became one of Betar’s (an Israeli terrorist movement) best-known anthems:

“The Jordan has two banks; this one is ours, and the other one too.”

The Likud Party’s 1977 platform then stated:

“Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

So, if “from the river to the sea” is treated as inherently genocidal when Palestinians use it, then the same standard has to be applied consistently. Either the phrase is not genocidal, or Israel is founded on the same calls for genocide.

During her book tour, she was brutally exposed by Jake Tapper for this hypocrisy:

Chapter 1: The Hearing Heard Around the World

This chapter begins by tediously whining about Hamas and Hitler for several pages, then whines about Hamas and Hitler for several more pages, then whines about university students having the nerve to sign petitions and open letters.

Stefanik then name-drops several of her colleagues and profusely praises each one. The prose is as sloppy as it is sycophantic:

“A dear friend and mentor, Dr. Virginia Foxx has a spine of steel and a heart of pure gold. Virginia Foxx is a no-nonsense, legendary member of Congress not just among Republicans, but across the aisle. Sh’e just a bull, and she just charges in every day, non-stop, from sun up until way after the sun goes down. At age 82, Virginia put many fellow members of Congress to shame with her dogged work ethic and determination. She keeps a packed schedule that would tire out even the spriteliest Gen-Z movers and shakers.

Stefanik then spends a few pages describing how she prepared for the hearing:

• “I stayed up late working through reams of research”

• “I pre-drafted several rounds of questions “

• “I thought to myself, how can I ask this in a very moral way, that will force them to answer YES?”

What’s fraudulent about this narrative is that she conspicuously omits any mention of Shabbos Kestenbaum and “a small gathering of Jewish students” working “behind the scenes” to “help write” her now-infamous genocide question, also writing her follow-up questions:

Kestenbaum is only mentioned briefly in Stefanik's book, where she says he was threatened by a man waving a machete:

The line about a Harvard employee waving a machete at Kestenbaum leaves out that the "machete" was a toy.

The video with the toy machete is about the false exoneration of Jeffrey Epstein’s close friend, Alan Dershowitz, not even about Kestenbaum. You be the judge:

In April 2026, Stefanik then goes on Kestenbaum's show to promote her book, and neither mentions it to their audience that he was actually the one who wrote her “question heard around the world”:

I watched the entire 22 minutes.

There is 1 minute worth clipping:

To start the clip, Shabbos lies about not knowing that her not-a-trick question was coming:

Of course, he was the one that wrote it, and specifically wrote it to not be a trick question:

She then makes a hilarious slip up, almost saying that he was there to write it for her, before catching and correcting herself:

She then repeats several times how she came up with the question herself, and how she wrote follow up questions:

Of course, a year earlier, Shabbos framed it as HE WAS THE ONE who was writing the question and follow up questions:

Chapter 2: Harvard

This chapter is dedicated to explaining that Elise Stefanik is a humble, hardworking genius because she got into Harvard. She wants you to know that she thrived around other geniuses, because she is a genius, and she enjoyed her time as an undergrad. She was very popular and used her time there to become friends with many famous, powerful people.

Did I mention that she’s a hardworking genius, and very popular?

Chapter 3: Harvard Exposed

Complaining about Harvard going woke interspersed with complaining about Hamas and Hitler. Then complaining length about how Claudine Gay was insufficiently loyal to Israel. Then complaining about Qatar.

Then bragging about how she was featured on Saturday Night Live.

Chapter 4: University of Pennsylvania

Complained about anti-semitism at UPenn for 12 pages.

Chapter 5: Columbia

Complained about anti-semitism at Columbia for 26 pages.

Chapter 6: Other Ivies and Beyond

Complained about anti-semitism at other schools for 39 pages, including screeching about several obviously staged, fake, false-flag hate crimes, such as a Yale student who blatantly lied about a Palestine flag hitting her eye which she described as being “stabbed.”

Chapter 7: What Went Wrong?

Complaining about DEI, Hamas, Qatar, and the communist infiltration of the Chinese Communist party, and concludes that to counter China’s influence on American campuses, TikTok must be sold to a Zionist.

Chapter 8: How We Fix It

She talks about what role the government can play in reforming American higher education. Her primary solution is to arrest, suspend, and expel all anti-Israel “agitators” on campus.

Another solution is to pass laws IHRA laws, including two pieces of legislation called “Combatting Anti-Semitism” and “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism” to direct federal agencies to use “all available and appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”

Visas should be revoked.

Oh, and please support Bari Weiss’ University of Austin, and support Peter Thiel.

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Many of these result in comments from billionaires like Elon Musk, Chamath, or Paul Graham:

Many, like my most recent one about Memorial University, result in international mainstream news coverage:

This has been a terrific way to go viral and farm engagement and outrage, but has been disheartening since nothing in Canada ever changes.

Canada is simply not going to abolish affirmative action. In fact, Affirmative Action is enshrined in Section 15(2) of the Canadian Constitution:

More recently, since immigrating to America — I have taken to referring to myself as a first-generation immigrant — I have switched to tweeting out H-1B job postings, e.g.:

After tweeting out dozens of these, my most recent one about Missouri University was finally picked up by the DOJ Civil Rights Division:

And then it was picked up by the Lt. Governor of Missouri, who said “I am going to check into this”:

Today, a spokesperson for Missouri University confirmed the school is “conducting a review of its H-1B program.” Wasinger said “he had spoken with the school’s president, Mun Choi, about the issue shortly after he posted on X.”

Wasinger also confirmed “he has spoken with the principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, about potential investigations into visa fraud in the state.”

My sources tell me that the Missouri legislature is now looking at introducing legislation prohibiting H-1Bs from being hired by any government entity, including State universities. This legislation is hinted at in a tweet tonight by the Missouri GOP:

Let this be a tale of autistic determination and the power of citizen journalism.

We are seeing a real-time shift where social media exposure is no longer just about farming clicks; it is becoming a mechanism for oversight. For years, universities have hidden behind bureaucratic language, HR euphemisms, and a compliant media class that treats every discriminatory hiring scheme as morally self-evident. But the internet has changed the incentive structure. A job posting that once would have disappeared into an institutional careers page can now be seen by millions of people, scrutinized by lawyers, amplified by lawmakers, and placed directly in front of federal investigators.

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RIBAF’s previous Editor-in-Chief, John Goodell—a Professor of Finance at the University of Akron—was not due to have his term expire until 2027.

So, what happened?

I reached out to Goodell and Elsevier for comment, but did not receive a reply.

According to my sources, Goodell’s departure is directly due to the citation cartel I exposed 2 months ago that resulted in Elsevier firing of 2 other finance professors, Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne—both are co-authors of Goodell.

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Goodell has been a professor since 2008.

For the first decade, his publication output was steady and within the normal range: 2, 2, 6, 7, 8, 13, 11, 4, 3, 3, 3, 6 papers per year.

Then something changed.

From 2021 to 2025, his annual output exploded: 16, 34, 53, 58, and 32 papers.

How did he accomplish this amazing feat?

Simple: he was gifted 100+ papers by the now-fired Brian Lucey and Sam Vigne.

Lucey, as I described in my earlier articles, was fired as an editor or editor-in-chief at 5 journals: International Review of Financial Analysis, the International Review of Economics & Finance, Finance Research Letters, Financial Management, & Energy Finance.

Samuel Vigne was fired as the editor-in-chief of International Review of Financial Analysis and Finance Research Letters.

John Goodell published:

• 47 papers in International Review of Financial Analysis

• 12 papers in International Review of Economics & Finance

• 66 papers in Finance Research Letters alone

For a total of 125 papers in their corrupt journals!

If each of these 125 papers contains a modest 50 references, this generates roughly 6,250 citations to spread around his cronies. This obviously isn’t legitimate research; it is a citation-farming operation—a practice that has already prompted Elsevier to retract dozens of his cronies’ papers for “citation stacking.”

These hundreds of fraudulent publications have resulted in an explosion of Goodell’s citations, now at 15,663. In 2025 alone, he earned 4,203 citations, resulting in his citation profile exhibiting an exponential “J-curve”, a hallmark of citation rings.

According to an analysis published at PubPeer mapping the 500 top Finance Professors in the Elsevier ecosystem, the biggest blue dot in the middle of this graph of influence (below) is John Goodell. Despite working at a terrible school and producing terrible research, through corruption, he has made himself the single most influential researcher at the biggest academic publisher in the world.

He is the gatekeeper through whom the entire network must pass.

According to my sources, Goodell was widely-known to be running a gift-authorship and citation cartel with RIBAF for years in which he makes junior scholars work for him and he adds his name — “you add me on your paper - I get you a few guaranteed RIBAFs” deal, which is a retraction reason at Elsevier.

Elsevier’s guidelines are clear: if an editor receives a manuscript from a co-author and no independent editor is available at the journal, the paper is supposed to be transferred to another journal.

Because John Goodell handled some hundreds of such papers at his journal, Elsevier seems more interested in containing the scandal than confronting it directly. A full mea culpa would likely require retracting a vast number of articles, which would turn this into a major and deeply embarrassing story.

In an honest world, this journal should be shut down altogether, not reformed.

In RIBAF’s case, we are talking about hundreds of compromised papers. By my rough estimate, the number is around 200 retractable papers if you count active co-authors alone, and well above 350 if former collaborators are included.

Please share my article widely to hold Elsevier to account:

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Here is a straightforward example of how this paper trading scheme could work.

In January 2025 and March 2025, Emmanuel Abakah, Senior Lecturer in Finance at the University of Ghana, published two papers at Goodell’s RIBAF:

While these papers was under review by John Goodell, Emmanuel Abakah added Goodell as a co-author to 2 publication in Brian Lucey’s other journal, where Goodell was credited with “Supervision” co-author credits.

This pattern repeats hundreds of times:

1. Goodell receives a submission for review at RIBAF

2. Goodell is added as a co-author to that submitter’s paper at a different journal

3. The submitter’s RIBAF submission is accepted

Perhaps the most prolific example in this scheme is Dr. Anna Min Du, a Professor of Finance at Edinburgh Napier University and a fellow at both the University of Cambridge and Peking University.

She is an editor at 6 Elsevier journals:

She published at least 22 RIBAFs (!!) in 2024-2025:

- 4 in Volume 70, Part B, June 2024, 102386
- 3 in Volume 71, August 2024, 102436
- 2 in Volume 72, Part B, October 2024, 102544
- 6 in Volume 73, Part A, January 2025, 102541
- 2 in Volume 75, March 2025, 102755
- 2 in Volume 76, April 2025, 102819
- 2 in Volume 77, Part A, May 2025, 102886
- 1 in Volume 79, July 2025, 103029

1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102386

2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102394

3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102405

4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102406

5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102436

6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102459

7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102475

8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102544

9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102545

10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102541

11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102557

12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102624

13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102633

14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102634

15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102585

16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102755

17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102764

18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102819

19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102878

20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102886

21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.103029

22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102912

While Du painstakingly lists all of her other publications on her personal website, she conspicuously omits any mention of RIBAF:

She allegedly had all her RIBAFs listed on her Google Scholar at one point, but then removed them all. When I checked, they were not there.

Sadly, I made the amateur mistake of not archiving it, so I can’t prove it.

I emailed her to ask about these papers scrubbed from her Google Scholar.

She denied ever removing them:

Thank you for your email. My Google Scholar remains the same. I didn’t scrub any of my publications or add them back. I didn’t check messages on LinkedIn either. I believe you can tell whether messages were read or not on LinkedIn. You might want to check it carefully.

Then, after emailing her, when I checked her Google Scholar again, most of them magically reappeared. However, these 4 are still not listed on her Google Scholar:

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102624

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102755

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102878

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102886

But then when I emailed her again to press her on how she published at least 22 papers in 2024-2025 all in one journal, she stopped responding.

Sure, she could just be a really productive and well-connected author who submitted 22 papers to this journal that year.

Or……. it’s possible that John Goodell gifted her 20+ RIBAF publications in one year, and she returned the favor by adding his name to 14 of her papers at other journals that same year:

1. Artificial intelligence as a catalyst for sustainable tourism growth and economic cycles AB Siddik, MS Forid, L Yong, AM Du, JW Goodell - Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2025

2. Internal business process governance and external regulation: How does AI technology empower financial performance? X Cheng, AM Du, C Yan, JW Goodell - International Review of Financial Analysis, 2025

3. Ecological risk and corporate sustainability: Examining ESG performance, risk management, and productivity Q Du, Z Sun, JW Goodell, AM Du, T Yang - International Review of Financial Analysis, 2024

4. Ecological risk management: Effects of carbon risk on firm innovation investment F Li, JW Goodell, AM Du, T Yang - International Review of Financial Analysis, 2024

5. Modeling climate policy uncertainty into cryptocurrency volatilities S Ding, X Wu, T Cui, JW Goodell, AM Du - International Review of Financial Analysis, 2025

6. Vulnerability of energy firms to climate risk: Does fintech development help?

   K Abbasi, A Alam, JW Goodell, AM Du, NA Brohi - Energy Economics, 2025

7. Carbon emission trading policies and energy transition: Perspective from natural gas consumption in China L Cai, AM Du, Q Du, JW Goodell, Z Li - Energy Economics, 2025

8. Exploring AI-driven digital banking platforms: Implications for Business model innovation and sustainability in the financial sector AB Siddik, L Yong, AM Du, JW Goodell - IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2025

9. Digital credit and insurance: Improving economic well-being for rural households J Zhang, S Chen, JW Goodell, AM Du - International Review of Economics & Finance, 2025

10. Disentangling and hedging global warming risk: A machine learning approach S Ding, T Cui, AM Du, JW Goodell, N Du - Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 2025

11. Innovating towards a sustainable future: decarbonization strategies and energy economics in lesser-developed economies JW Goodell, AM Du - Energy Economics, 2024

12. Impact of bank-affiliation on liquidity seeking of foreign mutual funds during adverse shocks: Evidence from China J Zhang, R Mao, JW Goodell, AM Du, Y Xu - International Review of Financial Analysis, 2024

13. Impact of Chinese foreign direct investment on energy demand and stability: The Belt-Road Initiative as conditioner R Shinwari, AM Du, JW Goodell - Journal of Environmental Management, 2025

14. Internal business process governance and external regulation: How does AI technology empower financial performance? JW Goodell, X Cheng, AM Du, C Yan International Review of Financial Analysis 99, 1

This is blatantly a reciprocal exchange where Goodell provides the platform (RIBAF) and Du provides the co-authorship credits to boost Goodell’s H-index.

Also, it’s worth noting 6 of these 14 publications were in the International Review of Financial Analysis, a journal ran by the now-fired Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne.

Again, this pattern repeats hundreds of times, with hundreds of authors.

In the extensive sample of his 100+ papers I analyzed, I found a perfect correlation between co-authorship on Goodell’s CV and subsequent publication in his journal, RIBAF. This is not a series of coincidences; it is a blatant, industrial-scale quid pro quo. Goodell has effectively turned the peer-review process into a private brokerage.

Elsevier has replaced the man, but they haven’t addressed the rot. If hundreds of authors participated in this scheme, why are their papers still standing? Someone is still protecting the house. The only question left is: Who, and why?

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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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5 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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a year 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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4 months 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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4 months 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