Scam Fam!
Have you missed me? I have missed you, except I did enjoy a week off from the utter panic I am seized by every time I click send on this thing. So basically, same same. We're all back now, and A LOT has happened since we last got together.
We did not get a chance to discuss this awe-inspiring Go Fund Me scheme, and all the fallout. (For my money, this is the most fun grift of the month, and you should probably just click on over and explore rather than entering the depression factory I'm opening up below, but we all choose our choices.)
Our NPR-endorsed tomatoes are super fake (the piece is a year old, but it made the rounds again this week). Because I am just, like, a little bit better than you, I've known about this in vague terms for a long time. That said, I hadn't understood the details, and they're fantastic—read all about it!
New York City's highest-earning official is a debt collector for predatory lenders. Cool cool cool.
There's more, gang, as you know scammers are EVERYWHERE in the form of strangers and friends who haven't robbed you yet, but today I want to discuss a late breaking, deeply upsetting scandal out of Louisiana (and, TBH, New England as well as a whole bunch of other places fancy colleges live, but we'll get to that).
As brilliantly reported by Erica L. Green and Katie Benner for the Times, this guy Michael Landry and his wife pulled off what I call a classic Katie Meyler and created a totally unregulated school for an underserved population where a lot of dark stuff went down, and not in a fun Donna Tartt way.
Here's the dek on the story, which should give you a pretty good sense of what we're working with: "T.M. Landry, a school in small-town Louisiana, has garnered national attention for vaulting its underprivileged black students to elite colleges. But the school cut corners and doctored college applications."
According to the Times, "Classes are optional." The classroom education the school does offer involves students watching YouTube or teaching one another (🤔). The founder taught students to say "I love you" in many languages, including one he invented called "Mike-a-nese" in which the word was "Kneel." That is yikes-a-plenty, but it gets way worse: "The Landrys also fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse, students and teachers said. Students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated." This next bit is a minor crime in comparison, but it's pretty essential to the scam part of things: Landry wholesale faked transcripts for students!
So, uh, why did families send their kids there? Well, let's hear from Landry himself:
“So what, we’re not accredited,” Mr. Landry said at a recruiting event this year. “Three years in a row, Harvard took us. Stanford has taken us.”
The story goes into much more detail about why black families were desperate for a school that offered real opportunities to their kids, which is among the many reasons you should read the whole thing, but let's stick with Harvard for a hot minute here. The first time I read the piece, I did so from start to finish through clenched teeth. The second time I just went ahead and hit that ctrl + f and typed in Harvard. Here's a sampling:
A video of a 16-year-old student opening his Harvard acceptance letter last year has been viewed more than eight million times. Other Landry students went on to Yale, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Wesleyan.
Mr. Landry also convinced students that he had special relationships with college deans, particularly at Harvard, and that he could use them to help students get into college — or to keep them out.
“Write whatever you want to write about us on the negative side,” Mr. Landry told a reporter. “But at the end of the day, my sister, if we got kids at Harvard every day, I’m going to fight for Harvard. Why is it O.K. that Asians get to Harvard? Why is it O.K. that white people get to Harvard?”
The things we do for temples of inequality that most assuredly do not love us back!
As with many things, the crux of the matter is summarized better by a rando on Twitter than by me:
The whole thread is A+ (official grades, not the pretend ones that T.M. Landry will send to a college for the low, low price of $700/month), about how plenty of these kids did just fine at the elite institutions an abusive charlatan helped them enter, proving:
"The real takeaway of this story is that no one thinks twice about letting in a white kid with a decent transcript if they seem like a hard worker, but if you're poor and black, you better hope you have access to a high school that will fraudulently depict you as a living miracle."
Ladies, if he's fundamentally racist and responds disproportionately to emotionally manipulative viral videos and fake-as-heck personal records, he's not your man (well, I mean, he might be, I don't know your life), he's an elite educational institution. Keep him close, though, he runs a good scam.
Catch you bbs on the flip side,
Ruthie
My week in consumption:
I’m reading The Street by Ann Petry, and I won’t lie: It’s kind of a slog at times (it's so long!), but it's also crazy relevant and some of the writing just completely blows me away. I can't believe I didn't even hear of it until recently, it's a true classic.
Speaking of books, this is among the best best-of lists.
What the Constitution Means to Me is a masterpiece IMHO.
I am the literal 331,000th(ish) person slash bot to discover Martha Stewart's personal Instagram (via Amanda, my not-fraudulent living miracle of a sister-in-law), but y'all, it's great.
Queen Kayleen is going to help us escape the corset!
Rest in Power, Rookie, you were one of my all-time favs.