Cherie Zaslawsky
Cheaters never prosper
By Cherie Zaslawsky
If I ask my students to write about aphorisms like "crime doesn't pay" or "cheaters never prosper," they find it difficult, since they know from their own observations that cheaters do indeed often prosper. Yet that is generally in the short term. That is the glory of the recent college bribery scandal – the cheaters who'd gotten away with so much are now being publicly exposed, arrested, and indicted. Justice is being served. It's a beautiful thing to watch.
After being outed as a participant in one of these illegal bribery schemes, Hallmark Channel actress Lori Loughlin was summarily dropped from Hallmark's shows. Since she refused a plea bargain, she's facing multiple felony charges, which, if she's found guilty, will likely result in a stiff prison sentence. As even Nancy Pelosi likes to remind us – if only in reference to Republicans – no one is above the law.
Amazingly, CNN, so often the worst perpetrator of "fake news, " is going great guns on this story of wealthy people blithely bribing coaches and proctors to sneak their under-achieving kids into colleges that by rights should be out of reach for them – that is, if we're playing fair.
Now we have actresses and CEOs paying off university coaches and their pal Rick Singer – a crooked "consultant" with a fraudulent non-profit organization – swept up in a brilliant sting operation by our own FBI that we thought was good only for exonerating the guilty and conducting pre-dawn SWAT team raids against the innocent.
Let's not forget: the American people never liked cheaters.
In fact, there is such a sense of outrage now that a group of parents of students who failed to gain acceptances at top-tier colleges are suing the rich kids' parents, who, they claim, stole their children's rightful place in those universities.
I view that as more of a crass action lawsuit than a legitimate class action one, and I hope some judge throws it summarily out of court on the grounds that we can't possibly know whether their children would have been accepted, and $500,000,000 in damages for Junior's would-be brilliant career looks like wishful thinking, not to mention awfully venal.
However, it is a good measure of parental anger. Parents understand how unfair these shenanigans were. My hope is that they now will take a closer look at the admissions process, where they can find a far more egregious injustice that impacts their offspring. Consider that this breaking scandal affected only some 50 people – maybe a dozen or two dozen students. But every year, thousands of qualified students are rejected from the colleges of their choice due to legal, rather than illegal, cheating. I refer to diversity quotas. If your child is white, he goes to the end of the line. If your child is male and white, any female student, along with any black or Hispanic student or other student "of color," regardless of his scores, grades, and other qualifications, gets a head start over your son.
This policy of favoritism was overturned by voters in California in 1996, but the colleges keep sneaking it in. The real unfairness, the systemic cheating, is that done in the name of multiculturalism and diversity. If you don't believe this, read Heather Mac Donald's excellent book The Diversity Delusion.
If the current parental outrage can be channeled in that direction, we might be well on our way back to the only system of college admissions that makes sense: a colorblind, merit-based system. No exceptions.
What makes me consider this possibility, and allows me to rejoice over the exposure and arrests of the bribing parents, is that we're seeing law and order and justice in action. The American people are so disgusted by the unethical, immoral, illegal, and – if I may say so – unsportsmanlike behavior of these super-rich, entitled parents and corrupt school officials – that this scandal may actually go far toward making morality great again. Just think about the implications of that!
A nationwide surge of indignation against fraudsters should make it all the easier for the Justice Department, now under Attorney General Barr, to go after those other miscreants who've committed far worse crimes against the American people than bribing college coaches – i.e., all those D.C. Deep State insiders who used falsified "evidence" against our duly elected president in their desperate attempt to oust him from office. Astonishingly, after two-plus years of the Mueller probe that found no wrongdoing on the part of our president, they are still hell-bent on overturning the votes of 63 million American citizens by manufacturing another phony "impeachable" offense against President Trump.
In a word, they are cheaters – and seditious ones at that. The truth, as they say, will out, and the American public needs to know the truth. I'm hoping and praying that an even greater tidal wave of righteous indignation and outrage will sweep across our land until we see justice done in the halls of Congress and in our Courts and we have a national revival celebrating honesty, truth, integrity, and justice for all.
Originally published at American Thinker
© Cherie Zaslawsky
November 17, 2019
If I ask my students to write about aphorisms like "crime doesn't pay" or "cheaters never prosper," they find it difficult, since they know from their own observations that cheaters do indeed often prosper. Yet that is generally in the short term. That is the glory of the recent college bribery scandal – the cheaters who'd gotten away with so much are now being publicly exposed, arrested, and indicted. Justice is being served. It's a beautiful thing to watch.
After being outed as a participant in one of these illegal bribery schemes, Hallmark Channel actress Lori Loughlin was summarily dropped from Hallmark's shows. Since she refused a plea bargain, she's facing multiple felony charges, which, if she's found guilty, will likely result in a stiff prison sentence. As even Nancy Pelosi likes to remind us – if only in reference to Republicans – no one is above the law.
Amazingly, CNN, so often the worst perpetrator of "fake news, " is going great guns on this story of wealthy people blithely bribing coaches and proctors to sneak their under-achieving kids into colleges that by rights should be out of reach for them – that is, if we're playing fair.
Now we have actresses and CEOs paying off university coaches and their pal Rick Singer – a crooked "consultant" with a fraudulent non-profit organization – swept up in a brilliant sting operation by our own FBI that we thought was good only for exonerating the guilty and conducting pre-dawn SWAT team raids against the innocent.
Let's not forget: the American people never liked cheaters.
In fact, there is such a sense of outrage now that a group of parents of students who failed to gain acceptances at top-tier colleges are suing the rich kids' parents, who, they claim, stole their children's rightful place in those universities.
I view that as more of a crass action lawsuit than a legitimate class action one, and I hope some judge throws it summarily out of court on the grounds that we can't possibly know whether their children would have been accepted, and $500,000,000 in damages for Junior's would-be brilliant career looks like wishful thinking, not to mention awfully venal.
However, it is a good measure of parental anger. Parents understand how unfair these shenanigans were. My hope is that they now will take a closer look at the admissions process, where they can find a far more egregious injustice that impacts their offspring. Consider that this breaking scandal affected only some 50 people – maybe a dozen or two dozen students. But every year, thousands of qualified students are rejected from the colleges of their choice due to legal, rather than illegal, cheating. I refer to diversity quotas. If your child is white, he goes to the end of the line. If your child is male and white, any female student, along with any black or Hispanic student or other student "of color," regardless of his scores, grades, and other qualifications, gets a head start over your son.
This policy of favoritism was overturned by voters in California in 1996, but the colleges keep sneaking it in. The real unfairness, the systemic cheating, is that done in the name of multiculturalism and diversity. If you don't believe this, read Heather Mac Donald's excellent book The Diversity Delusion.
If the current parental outrage can be channeled in that direction, we might be well on our way back to the only system of college admissions that makes sense: a colorblind, merit-based system. No exceptions.
What makes me consider this possibility, and allows me to rejoice over the exposure and arrests of the bribing parents, is that we're seeing law and order and justice in action. The American people are so disgusted by the unethical, immoral, illegal, and – if I may say so – unsportsmanlike behavior of these super-rich, entitled parents and corrupt school officials – that this scandal may actually go far toward making morality great again. Just think about the implications of that!
A nationwide surge of indignation against fraudsters should make it all the easier for the Justice Department, now under Attorney General Barr, to go after those other miscreants who've committed far worse crimes against the American people than bribing college coaches – i.e., all those D.C. Deep State insiders who used falsified "evidence" against our duly elected president in their desperate attempt to oust him from office. Astonishingly, after two-plus years of the Mueller probe that found no wrongdoing on the part of our president, they are still hell-bent on overturning the votes of 63 million American citizens by manufacturing another phony "impeachable" offense against President Trump.
In a word, they are cheaters – and seditious ones at that. The truth, as they say, will out, and the American public needs to know the truth. I'm hoping and praying that an even greater tidal wave of righteous indignation and outrage will sweep across our land until we see justice done in the halls of Congress and in our Courts and we have a national revival celebrating honesty, truth, integrity, and justice for all.
Originally published at American Thinker
© Cherie Zaslawsky
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
