USC

One of the key critiques of DEI — the identity-based preference system better known as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — is that it places workers in professional positions they’re clearly unqualified for. Often with devastating outcomes. Boeing, for instance, has been accused of favoring race and gender when hiring for its factory floor — factories that have turned out airplanes that have literally fallen from the skies. Disney, too, has seen its quest for race- and gender- and sexuality-based inclusiveness come at a cost — a steep slide in its stock price.  But no area of public life has been more fully infiltrated by DEI than the academy — and the results have been disastrously on display since the Hamas attack against Israel nearly seven months ago.

University of Southern California’s 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, will not be allowed to deliver a speech at the university's commencement ceremony due to, according to the school’s provost, security concerns. The cancellation comes following a wave of criticism over what groups such as US-nonprofit StopAntisemitism labeled “her authoring [of] an antisemitic social media post on her Instagram account.” This is a textbook attack on the principle of free expression in the name of security. The move is designed to avoid controversy and save face by unjustly silencing those whose beliefs and speech differs from that of other, often more powerful, groups.  You don’t have to agree with Tabassum. You may well see her position on Israel-Palestine as radical and impractical.

We knew Felicity Huffman from Desperate Housewives, but we didn’t know how desperate a mother she was until now. Huffman and Lori Loughlin of Full House are the two celebrities caught in the Operation Varsity Blues dragnet, along with 31 other individuals who paid as much as $500,000 per dimwit child to one William ‘Rick’ Singer, all so their pampered, ignorant, SAT-flunking little darlings could get into ‘good’ schools where they could snort Xanax, butt-chug ketamine, and slob around in sweatpants and flip-flops like inmates in a mental hospital — just like their more intelligent peers, apart from the Asians, who actually study and are America’s last chance. Let us count the ways in which college admissions are corrupt.