January 19, 2024

Friday, January 19, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

Biden visits North Carolina, a state he hopes to win in November, to promote internet access.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled $82 million for North Carolina to help connect 16,000 new households and businesses to high-speed internet, delivering an election-year pitch about policies he says are “just getting started” at improving the United States.

Biden, the Democratic incumbent who is campaigning to win a second term, coupled his economic message with a few jabs at his predecessor, Donald Trump, currently the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his most likely future challenger.

Biden brought up Trump’s recent comment that he hoped the economy would crash soon because he doesn’t want to preside over job losses if he were to be reelected in November. Biden told his audience that Trump already was like Herbert Hoover, who held office during the 1929 stock market crash.

“He’s the only president to be president for four years and lose jobs,” Biden said of Trump.

Biden administration unveils plan to halt falling student achievement.

The Biden administration wants to reverse the trend of declining test scores and dropping student attendance that accelerated during the pandemic.

Driving the news: The U.S. Department of Education announced Wednesday a plan for states to provide more tutoring, after-school and summer programs and funding to tackle chronic absenteeism.

• The administration said stepped-up accountability, reporting, grants and technical assistance will help states improve student achievement amid worries test scores have not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Quick catchup: Reading scores for elementary school students plunged to their lowest levels since 1990 during the first two years of the pandemic, according to national test results released in 2022.

• Math scores dropped for the first time in the history of a nationally representative test dating back to the 1970s. The tests were administered from January to March in 2020 and 2022.

• The pandemic disrupted virtually all aspects of the educational experience — and experts warn that the daunting task of student recovery could take years.

• The chronic absenteeism rate reached about 31% in 2021-2022 because of COVID-19.

Zoom in: New Mexico, the state with the highest percentage of Hispanic residents, ranked dead last nationally on the results from the test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), or the Nation's Report Card.

• Before the pandemic, the state regularly ranked 50th on several benchmarks in education despite increased state funding.

Details: The plan unveiled by the administration urges states to adopt chronic absenteeism as an indicator in their federal statewide accountability requirements.

• The administration also vowed to seek more federal funds to help increase attendance and develop more after-school and tutoring programs.

• Some of the funding is already available through the American Rescue Plan and other programs, the administration said.

What they're saying: "The bare minimum that we aspire to is to get back to what it was in 2019. (But) 2019 data wasn't anything to write home about," Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said during a virtual press conference.

• Let's fight complacency. We need all hands on deck."

• New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said programs like extended learning have helped some school districts with a large percentage of Native American students improve student achievement.

• Lujan Grisham said the challenge is convincing school districts to adopt it.

Yes, but: Challenges remain in getting school districts to expand after-school and tutoring programs like transportation and hiring qualified staff.

• Many states have had to battle an ongoing teacher shortage thanks to retirements from Baby Boomer educators and teachers leaving the field due to low pay and stress.

What's next: State legislatures in session may have to pass measures to add chronic absenteeism to their accountability requirements.

• Parents and teachers may fight extended learning programs or increasing school calendar days without a pay increase. (Axios).

Joe Biden worked his magic once again.

House, Senate pass short-term bill averting government shutdown until March.

Congress on Thursday passed legislation to keep the federal government open into March, approving the third stopgap spending bill in four months as lawmakers struggle to agree on long-term government funding plans.


The bill extends deadlines to March 1 and March 8. Money for roughly 20 percent of the government — including the Transportation Department, some veterans’ assistance, and food and drug safety programs — had been set to expire just after midnight early Saturday. The remainder — which funds the Defense and State departments, among other critical functions — would have expired Feb. 2 without the new extension.


The Senate passed the legislation, 77-18, Thursday afternoon. The House followed suit, 314-108, hours later, after GOP hard-liners launched a last-minute pressure campaign to attach partisan border security measures to the funding package. The votes send the legislation to President Biden to sign into law and avert a partial shutdown ahead of the deadline.


The stopgap spending bill, called a continuing resolution, or CR, is intended to give lawmakers in both chambers time to draft and vote on a full slate of annual spending, or appropriations bills, for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.

“We have good news for America: There will not be a shutdown on Friday because both sides have worked together,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor Thursday.


Schumer and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) agreed to a $1.66 trillion appropriations deal earlier in January, covering all of what’s known in federal budgeting as discretionary spending. But lawmakers didn’t have time to negotiate and enact the finer details of the package before this weekend’s deadline.
[Congress has a deal to fund the government and not much time to pass it]


That deal, which largely follows an agreement Biden struck with Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), in 2023, would increase total spending this year by $28 billion over the previous fiscal year’s $1.63 trillion in discretionary spending — an amount that, accounting for inflation, represents a cut in real dollars.
Lawmakers will have to move faster than appears to pass the 12 appropriations bills. The House and Senate are only in session together six days between Friday and March 1, the first deadline of Thursday’s bill, and 10 days between Friday and March 8, the second deadline.


The deal could exacerbate tensions between the speaker and the House Freedom Caucus, a group of archconservatives who have been a thorn in the side of GOP leadership for nearly a decade.


Hours before the Senate approved the funding extension, the Freedom Caucus made a final appeal to Johnson to consider attaching border security policies amid a faceoff on the issue between the White House and Congress.
The group’s chair, Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), and other members pitched Johnson a plan to attach House Republicans’ partisan bill without some controversial policies that would require employers to verify a potential employee’s immigration status. In exchange, they would support a rule vote — a procedural hurdle they have voted against in the past to stall floor business — that would allow the funding bill with the border security legislation to move forward for a vote.


But Johnson rejected that deal, Good told The Washington Post and the speaker’s office confirmed, and the Freedom Caucus chair said the group would retaliate by throwing sand in the gears of Johnson’s plans for floor action.


The speaker has been leaning on Democrats to support bills through a process called “suspension of the rules,” which avoids certain procedural steps but allows bills to pass with a two-thirds majority of the House. The chamber used the same tactic for the temporary spending bill Thursday.


“If you don’t need our votes for the material bills that matter for the country — such as funding the government and our major spending packages — and you continue to pass those under suspension of the rules with predominantly Democratic votes, then don’t presume you’re going to have our votes for the messaging bills that don’t matter, that make us feel better, but are dead on arrival in the Senate,” Good said.


Johnson did not commit to changing plans. Doing so would have irritated the rest of the GOP conference, many of whom have pushed Johnson to ignore the hard-right flank’s demands, which often cannot be met. It also would have delayed consideration of the Senate’s continuing resolution. The House Rules Committee would have had to meet, and the House would have had to conduct several hours of debate before they could vote on the Freedom Caucus’s preferred measure. House leadership already canceled votes for Friday to allow members to head home to their districts ahead of snow expected in the morning in Washington.


That strain between the speaker and the hard-right faction has begun testing the patience of other Republican lawmakers and especially among appropriators, who must negotiate and draft the annual spending bills.


“In order to move the conservative agenda forward, we need to have Republicans vote for the rules so that we can move those issues forward. And we’re having a problem with that. It’s not a surprise. We knew that this was going to happen,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), an Appropriations Committee leader, told The Post earlier in the week.

 “Folks who are obstacles to bringing Republican bills to the floor? They might they call themselves what they want. They’re not conservatives.”


Democrats throughout Congress have applauded Johnson’s stand against the Freedom Caucus. Schumer has repeatedly hailed the speaker’s resolve against “the hard-right’s bullying,” which he called “MAGA extremism in a nutshell” on the Senate floor Thursday.


“It is an absolutely phony process that these Freedom Caucus guys are pursuing,” Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (Md.), a long-standing Democratic member who sits on the Appropriations Committee, told The Post on Thursday. “We ought to just make them irrelevant. And the way we make them irrelevant is to make a deal with one another because [Republicans and Democrats] together, we’ve got over 300 votes.”


Freedom Caucus members were furious as the day unfolded.
“It is Groundhog Day in the House chamber, all the time, every day, spending money we don’t have,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), a stalwart of the group, said on the House floor.


The Freedom Caucus earlier this month demanded that Johnson abandon his larger funding deal with Schumer in favor of insisting on spending cuts that restore the federal budget to pre-covid levels. Some also called on the speaker to link government funding to new immigration restrictions along the U.S.-Mexico border.


But Johnson rebuffed those calls. His deal with Schumer adheres to the wider agreement that McCarthy made with Biden in the spring as part of negotiations to suspend the nation’s debt limit. (McCarthy resigned from Congress at the end of 2023.)


Johnson’s deal claws back $10 billion in Internal Revenue Service funding in 2024 and $6.1 billion in unspent coronavirus emergency aid.
“We forged forward. We got the top-line agreement. And in spite of what people are saying on both sides, this is a better agreement than we had,” the speaker told reporters Wednesday. “We went in and carved it up. We got $16 billion in real cuts out of the IRS slush fund and covid slush fund that the Biden administration was so jealously guarding and protecting, and that’s an important improvement.”


[More] money is helping the IRS. Republicans still want to cut its budget.]


He said that House appropriators would look to add policy provisions to the final spending bills, which could complicate their final passage before the March deadlines.


House Republicans have previously sought to attach riders that restrict access to abortion medication and increase U.S.-Mexico border security. Those provisions face long odds even in the House, where Johnson has signaled he will lean on Democrats to help pass spending bills. And they would be non-starters in the Democratic-controlled Senate.


“We’ll wait and see — and I agree with a lot of what the House is trying to do,” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), told The Post on Thursday. “But in the Senate, you have to compromise. The House has to recognize that.” (Washington Post)

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Republicans oppose protecting the earth, and making the world more fair. Naturally, they are attacking ESG investors.

In addition to evaluating company’s financial situation and opportunities, ESG investors evaluate companies with regard to 3 considerations:

environment –

how the company’s policies and values impact environmental issues which affect the community, the region, the country, the planet, the universe.

social –

how the company’s  policies affect people, including its staff, its customers, its community… with regard to racial, gender, economic and climate justice.

governance – how is a company governed. how was the CEO chosen? how was the board chosen? how are employees hired? Promoted? how is the company governed? By whom? Are the policies governing employees fair? And so on.

ESG investors argue ESG factors are material to identifying companies that will outperform.

ESG assets will hit $50 trillion by 2025, representing more than a third of the projected $140.5 trillion in total global assets under management, according to Bloomberg.

Republicans are taking legal actions to stop professional investment advisers from using ESG principles as a consideration in investing.

Here are some examples. 👇  Get ready to fight back.

Making ESG a Crime - Bloomberg

Republican lawmakers in New Hampshire are seeking to make using ESG criteria in state funds a crime in the latest attack on the beleaguered investing strategy.

Representatives led by Mike Belcher introduced a bill that would prohibit the state’s treasury, pension fund and executive branch from using investments that consider environmental, social and governance factors. “Knowingly” violating the law would be a felony punishable by not less than one year and no more than 20 years imprisonment, according to the proposal.

Pensions & Investments reports:

"Executive branch agencies that are permitted to invest funds shall review their investments and pursue any necessary steps to ensure that no funds or state-controlled investments are invested with firms that invest New Hampshire funds in accounts with any regard whatsoever based on environmental, social, and governance criteria," the bill said.

The New Hampshire Retirement System "shall adhere to their fiduciary obligation and not invest with any firm that will invest state retirement system funds in investment funds that consider environmental, social, and governance criteria, as the investment goal should be to obtain the highest return on investment for New Hampshire's taxpayers and retirees," the bill said.

Investors aren’t allowed to consider governance! Imagine if this was the law; imagine if it was a felony for an investment manager to consider governance “with any regard whatsoever.”

We talked yesterday about Elon Musk’s plans to extort billions of dollars of free stock out of Tesla Inc. by (1) owning a big chunk of Tesla stock, (2) selling a lot of that stock to raise money to pursue his distracting personal hobbies, and then (3) telling Tesla’s board “well, you know, I don’t own enough Tesla stock to really make it worth my while to work on Tesla; if you want me to do my job as CEO you’d better double my stake to keep me motivated.” Unless the board gives him a ton more stock, he posted, “I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla.” (Bloomberg).

Here’s What to Expect in the ESG Space in the 2024 Legislative Sessions.

Key Takeaways:

• The term ESG” (which stands for environmental, social, governance), in all of its various meanings and applications, has cemented itself as a premier issue for state and federal lawmakers alike.

• In 2023, there were two primary categories that ESG legislation: those related to financial investments and business decisions, and mandates surrounding corporate disclosures and transparency around issues like corporate greenhouse gas emissions, workforce diversity, gender equality, fair pay, and ethical supply chains.

• The 2024 state sessions will play out in the background of what is likely to be a hotly contested and politically volatile presidential election. We should expect the political rhetoric at the federal level to have some effect on the politics at the state level and thus may see a large volume of pro- and anti-ESG legislation introduced throughout the country.

• Another important development within the ESG space in 2024 will be the release of the SEC’s finalized climate change disclosure rule. We may see Republican-controlled states introduce legislation to contradict the federal rule. On the flip side, Democratic-controlled states will likely propose legislation that goes beyond the requirements of the SEC rule.

• Finally, watch out for pioneering states with Democratic trifectas to be the most likely states to actually enact novel ESG legislation in 2024 (ex: California, Colorado, Washington, New York, Minnesota, and Massachusetts). (Multistate.us).

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Bill Ackman dissected by Kurt Andersen.

I have no patience for masters of the universe like the Billionaire Hedge-Fund Investor Bill Ackman who thinks he is the smartest guy in every room on every issue, especially when they use their money as a sledge hammer for endless bullying.

In the witty put-down that follows below, Kurt Andersen, himself once an editor of the Harvard Lampoon, a journal devoted to parody and humor, dissects Ackman’s tweets and attitudes.

I am choosing not to wrap a dissection within a dissection by commenting on Andersen himself and his writing and attitudes. Instead, I leave Andersen himself alone.

I hope you will find this fun to read, especially if you share Andersen’s and my scorn for Ackman, but please remember the damage caused by Ackman and those like him is not funny.

Bill Ackman Is a Brilliant Fictional Character

A close reading of his remarkable social-media posts

By Kurt Andersen

Before last month I knew next to nothing about Bill Ackman. I probably would have recognized his name. I guess I knew he was a hedge-fund billionaire, and his reputation as kind of a jerk. “He has been straddling that line of public recognition for some 20 years now,” a New York writer explained last week, with a “formula for notoriety” based on “making big controversial calls” as an investor “and picking messy, high-profile fights.”

My interest was piqued when I learned that he was part of the group publicly attempting to purge Harvard’s first Black president. Ackman attended Harvard roughly a decade after I did, and he has donated roughly $50 million more to the university than I have. Claudine Gay had just started the job last July, but he was angry because he thought she hadn’t condemned (or disciplined) Harvard’s anti-Israel, pro-Palestine, Hamas-apologist protesters quickly enough or strongly enough. That gambit failed to convince Harvard’s governing board, even after Gay’s very inept congressional testimony about free speech and the advocacy of genocide. But then a number of arguably minor instances of plagiarism were unearthed in her Ph.D. dissertation and other writing, which Ackman and the gang promoted as additional reasons for her to resign or be fired—and two weeks ago, that worked.

The first news story I ever read that focused on Ackman came shortly thereafter, in The New York Times: Journalists at Business Insider had found a number of arguably minor instances of plagiarism in the Ph.D. dissertation and other writing by Ackman’s wife, who’d been a tenured professor until 2020 at MIT, just down the street from Harvard.

Karma, people said online, and I figured that was the end of my curiosity about Bill Ackman. Until last Thursday, when I came across a post of his on Elon Musk’s website, the first I’d ever read. The self-promotion of his little preface was exceptional: “This is the best and most important thing I have ever written.” He writes this about a tweet. “Don’t miss it.”

This was a post that went on and on and on and on, a 5,626-word piece of prose about the Business Insider articles on his wife’s plagiarism, longer than the articles and longer than I thought social-media posts could be. But I was hooked. I had never hate-read anything at such length. Then I found more of his recent posts, many more, one (5,297 words) about plagiarism, another (4,054 words) explaining why diversity, equity, and inclusion “is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people” and asserting that Harvard’s pursuit of DEI is “the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard.”

Taken together, these recent posts of Ackman’s are like a novella, an exquisite piece of satirical fiction in digital epistolary form. They have the voice of an absurdly self-regarding unreliable narrator, a hot-headed, self-righteous, born-rich billionaire investor who considers himself intelligent and virtuous, persecuted by villains as he fights for justice and the honor of his defenseless goddess wife—and reveals his foolishness and awfulness and possible derangement in the course of a week-long public tantrum.

The Ackman character is a dark-comedy hybrid of Kendall Roy from Succession and the narrator/protagonist of Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote, whose punctilious academic analysis of a long poem by someone he knows morphs into a delusionally grandiose conspiracy theory starring himself. If Ackman’s posts were actually a work of fiction, some readers would find it too over-the-top, too filled with implausibly pat parallels and ironies, the protagonist’s surname a bit too Nabokovian or Pynchonesque. But all in the permissible range of satire, I say, and in this instance brilliant.

His monologues struck me in this way just now, I’m sure, because I’m in the middle of writing a novel set in the near future, all of it in first person, with one character an activist trillionaire. Maybe also because I’ve published a novel in the voice of Donald Trump, and once co-wrote an off-Broadway theater piece in which actors performed unintentionally funny transcripts of scenes from real life. And because years ago I had a relevant relationship with one of the main characters in Ackman’s little drama.

When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community,” Ackman posted while on holiday in the Caribbean, the day after he’d helped force her out over her plagiarism. But now, given her handling of the Harvard anti-Israel protests, he’d realized she was “not qualified,” having been chosen by a board looking for “a DEI-approved candidate.” And by the way, “in light of the amount, nature, and degree of plagiarism that had surfaced in her work,” why wasn’t she also booted from her tenured Harvard professorship?

The very next day, speaking of pat parallels and ironies standard in fiction but not so much in real life, came the first Business Insider story about plagiarism by his wife, an artist-designer-technologist and former MIT professor named Neri Oxman. In real life, one would expect a response from the plagiarist like the abashed explanation and apology Oxman immediately posted on X, and then the chatter would run its course over the weekend, and the attention and embarrassment would dissipate.

But that would have been too boring for the Bill Ackman character. Ackman, with his 1.1 million followers on X, surely saw an opportunity for a fight, for more attention, for the story to continue with him as its star. He simultaneously complained and bragged about the attention being given to the news stories about his wife’s misdeeds. “It is now the number one trending item on X,” he posted a couple of days after the articles appeared, “with 35,600 posts versus number two which is the Princess of Wales with 3,174 posts.” Even before he’d really put his weight behind it. An effort that would—tragic irony!—inevitably make his wife’s mistakes still more widely known, extending and perhaps deepening her pain.

What a character. And so many fine little fictionlike character-revealing moments in his posts. Such as his aside to the rich people who have entrusted him with investing $16 billion of their wealth: “And for investors who are concerned about my time management,” given the tens of thousands of words he was tweeting, “I am posting while on the elliptical for better time management.” And his repeated stock phrases: “first class” (three times, two of them about people with whom he had only a phone call), “around the world” (13 times), and “unethical” (five times, all concerning Business Insider).

And metafictional touches as well. Like quote-posting a news story containing a quote from the spokesperson for the company that owns Business Insider, about how “most people underestimated the way that Bill Ackman is completely losing it.” And his side conversations on X, in which he’s a tiny investor, with the owner of that company, the king of arrogant anti-woke attention-addict billionaires, whom Ackman declared guiltless of “antisemitic intent” last fall. And Elon Musk telling him: “I recommend a lawsuit” against Business Insider and that in his experience as Tesla’s CEO, “BI is the new Gawker: evil to the core.”

A fictional character like this—the graceless, rich bully desperate to convince the reader that he’s magnanimous and noble—always goes overboard. “I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities,” Ackman writes—and “have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand”—just before concluding that affirmative action is too much help.

A few days after proudly gloating about the firing and humiliation of one successful woman—“Today was an important step forward for the University”—such a character naturally says about the humiliation of his wife, “Try to imagine how she feels. Seriously, try hard.” Be empathetic, like Bill Ackman, who “in business and in life” has “always believed that the best way to understand someone’s perspective is to reverse places with them. Pretend that you are sitting in their seat.”

Such a middle-aged character would naturally have a new second wife he preposterously overpraises, blurbing the greatest trophy wife of all trophy wives ever. Her “scholarship is breathtaking in its creativity, vast in its scale.” She is “one of the most acclaimed designers and scientists in the world,” indeed “one of the most creative, brilliant and talented people in the world, and she has been recognized as such.” She “is also one of the kindest, most loving, and gentle human beings in the world,” as well as “a gorgeous, incredibly talented and charismatic person.” And then the perfect punch line for the elitist in his bubble addressing his million randos on X who don’t know anyone who’s ever heard of his wife: “But don’t take my word for it, ask around.”

He had slagged Harvard’s announcement of its investigation into Claudine Gay’s work for having “characterized the plagiarism as ‘unintentional’ and invented new euphemisms, i.e., ‘duplicative language’ to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.”

As in a movie or novel, cut to a week later and the ironic comic payoff, Ackman going to far more ridiculous lengths to pretend that his wife didn’t really plagiarize at all. His invented euphemisms include clerical errors. He invents a statistical metric as well: because only a few of the 2,774 paragraphs in her thesis contained text copied from elsewhere without quotation marks, she had “an error rate of 0.1141%,” which is “pretty darn good,” and her “error rate for sentences” “even better.”

Defending her 15 uncredited cuts-and-pastes of passages from Wikipedia, of all sources, the pathos and comedy are extreme. “I am sure that when Neri wrote her dissertation”—she was 33—“she thought that there was nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as a dictionary,” he writes the day after the story broke. In his later, longer apologia he reveals what he thinks is a gotcha loophole that exonerates her completely. “The good news” is that their lawyers used the Wayback Machine to discover that “MIT’s Academic Integrity Handbook did not require citation or even mention Wikipedia until 2013, four years after Neri wrote her dissertation.”

Another only-in-fiction parallelism: This bit of absurd lawyerly hair-splitting recalls Gay’s lawyerly hair-splitting in her congressional testimony. When asked three times whether calls “for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment,” she just kept answering that it depends on “the context.”

And if you hadn’t already gotten the idea that the Ackman character at his most witless thinks he’s being brilliant, he posted a new 2,137-word-long chapter this past weekend. “I found a great leader who is looking to run a huge business that has lost its way,” he writes. “I recently made a large investment in this opportunity.” This goes on for 600 words—a 600-word-long blind lead vibrating with pride in its own cleverness—before getting to the point: that Ackman, once a fan of the horrid, rich MAGA Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, would now be backing the liquor heir and gelato merchandiser Dean Phillips’s vanity campaign for the Democratic nomination. “This is not a joke,” Ackman oddly says. “I am totally serious.” “I am wiring $1 million a political action committee that supports Dean’s run” he writes, making “by far the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office.” “Dean has meaningful skin in the game”—a few million of his own. “This is how democracy happens”—rich people financing their own campaigns. A preening multibillionaire acting as if $1 million is a game-changing presidential-campaign donation: If this were fiction, coming just after “this is not a joke,” readers would understand it as a reference to Dr. Evil in Austin Powers announcing his plan to “hold the world ransom for … $1 million!”

But back to the main plot, the exposure of his wife’s embarrassing minor plagiarism and his decision to make the collateral damage he brought down on her a much bigger, messier, more memorable episode than it would have been otherwise. And putting the Ackman persona—hyperbolic, entitled, imperious, sanctimonious, self-serving, perpetually somewhere between peevish and furious—on spectacular display.

For starters, the Business Insider pests were seeking prepublication comment about their first plagiarism story while Ackman and Oxman were on vacation in the Caribbean with only “weak WiFi.” The journalists gave them until noon to reply, and then four hours more, but that required Ackman and his wife to “postpone our flight” back to New York—on my Gulfstream, the character would have revealed in fiction—and “arrive about four hours later than planned.” The next day, back home, when Business Insider sought comment about Oxman’s at least 15 uncredited lifts from Wikipedia, he noted that the email arrived at 5:19 p.m., “after sundown last Friday, after the beginning of Shabbat.” (I will note that the arrival of sundown on Fridays does not seem to prevent Ackman from posting to social media.)

“The good news,” he writes after the Business Insider articles appeared, “is that none of the above will interfere with Neri’s success,” because she’d made the “brilliant decision to leave academia behind” in 2020, “in some part due to her marriage to me,” and that she had already “in stealth mode” raised tens of millions for her start-up business, OXMAN.

In his mammoth post on January 10, however, four times he called the Business Insider reporting “catastrophically damaging,” not just to his wife but somehow also “to me and my … business.” The articles about her (minor) plagiarism, which he insists is so inconsequential that it isn’t plagiarism at all, are nevertheless “much worse and more damaging” for her than being charged with insider trading—a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison—would be for him. “Business Insider’s campaign to destroy Neri could have literally killed her”—and did not only because of the “profound love and support from me.” Don’t forget: I’m the hero, her savior.

“We all should be grateful that X is owned by Musk,” he wrote on X about the thousands of words he was posting, because “Musk is a free speech absolutist which I respect,” and otherwise “Neri and I would not have had the ability to respond in a rapid fashion in a public forum where free speech is allowed, encouraged, and respected.” Such over-the-top ironic hypocrisy, like in fiction: Because Claudine Gay had said that Harvard’s “commitment to free expression” means “we do not punish or sanction people” for “views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous,” such as the extreme anti-Israel rhetoric of student protesters, he wanted her to be fired or resign. “I was simply trying to help her address the rise of antisemitism on campus,” he explained in one of his long posts. “Unfortunately, she did not respond to my first letter or any of my efforts at my outreach to her, nor did the Corporation board. To this day, neither former President Gay or the Corporation board has ever responded to any of the three letters I wrote.” The nerve.

His off-with-their-heads threats to individuals and large groups are like those of a fictional villain. Last fall, he wanted Harvard to publish the names of all the members of student organizations that signed onto an imprudent pro-Palestine letter so he could compile a blacklist for prospective employers.

The exposure of his wife’s plagiarism, he writes, “has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews. “We will begin with a review of the work of all current MIT faculty members … for plagiarism”—1,000 academics, as well as MIT’s president (whom Ackman also wants fired for her indulgence of pro-Palestine protests) and all of its many dozens of board members. “Last night,” he posted the next day, like a boy imagining that he’s a Bond villain, “no one at @MIT had a good night’s sleep.” After his post about his MIT plagiarism review, “I am sure that an audible collective gasp could be heard around the campus.”

His wild threats are always cloaked in pseudo-virtue, like those of gangsters, at least the ones in fiction. “It has been the case since as far as I can remember in business and in media,” he writes, “that family was off limits,” but “Business Insider broke this sacred code.” And this, exactly like some fictional tough-guy character’s line of dialogue: “The code of the road was that you can attack the protagonist as much as you want, but not his wife and not his kids.” Indeed, it was metafictional, with the protagonist telling this story by referring to “the protagonist.” Throughout these hypotheticals about players in the arena, Ackman refers to his wife.

The passage is also another fine illustration of the character’s hypocrisy: Apparently as part of his ongoing campaign to get MIT to fire its president, last fall he accused its board chair of tax fraud because MIT had made donations to the man’s wife’s charity, a “non-profit in the DEI space.” And when he was called out the other day on X for using her to besmirch her husband, who is, like Ackman, a rich professional investor, he protested—so tautological, so perfect—that he’d simply “had to mention her” because he’d chosen to besmirch her husband by alleging that he was corruptly funneling money to her nonprofit.

And then, inevitably in such a story, the protagonist tries to pull strings, certain he can get other rich and powerful and prominent men, his peers, to order Business Insider’s journalists to make the articles he didn’t like disappear.

“I assumed that with a call or two, I would be able to convince BI or AS”—Axel Springer, the large German media company that owns the publication—“to suspend the stories,” says the master of the universe blithely, oblivious as ever to his self-own. “This seemed like an easy request to me.” But should they not agree to fold right away, “I proposed that AS announce that an investigation was pending … The stories could then be corrected, or I thought, more likely, depublished.”

In his short X prologue that hooked me in the first place, Ackman also says the sort of implausible thing a character might say at the beginning of a certain kind of novel. “Toward the end is the best part,” he promises, “because I name names.”

The first of the names he names is Henry Kravis, “one of my inspirations for going into the investment business.” He’s a co-founder of KKR, which is Axel Springer’s largest shareholder, and sits on its board. “I have known Henry Kravis, not well, but for 20 or more years … and have always had a good but not significant relationship with him.”

Kravis’s appearance as a character in this particular role is ironic, and in a work of fiction would prompt a quick flashback—in which, irony upon irony, I turn up as a minor character. I knew Henry Kravis, not well, nearly 30 years ago, when KKR controlled the media company that owned New York magazine. In the mid-’90s I was New York’s editor in chief. One day Kravis invited me for breakfast in his 26-room Park Avenue triplex to tell me that the magazine’s coverage of Wall Street displeased him and his friends and associates, and that I should end it. I didn’t, and six months later I was fired. In other words, I had a significant but not good relationship with him. (At the time, Kravis declined to comment, and the company that ran New York denied he played any part in that decision.)

So now, in 2024, Bill Ackman says he “reached out” to Henry Kravis, obviously to ask him to inappropriately intervene in Business Insider’s journalism. As Kravis had done with New York on his own account in 1996.

In his introduction of the Kravis character, Ackman immediately veers toward a sneaky violation of the code of the road, whereby wives are supposedly off-limits. “Henry is married to Marie-Josée Kravis,” Ackman writes, neglecting to identify her as the chair and former president of the board the Museum of Modern Art, “who happens to be a big fan of Neri’s [artwork]. Neri does not sell her work to individuals except in extremely rare cases. There are only four people in the world who own Neri’s art, and I am one of them. The other three are special people for whom Neri has made an exception. Marie-Josée is one of them.” This odd digression is a perfect satirical twist—the narrator trying too hard to guide the reader to share his sense of betrayal by his intimate when it happens, as if forgetting he’s just admitted that he has a “not significant relationship” with Kravis.

Before Kravis replied, Ackman called a Business Insider board member he knows for help. They “spoke for 31 minutes,” and Ackman says the guy, whom he agreed not to identify publicly, promised to “resolve the issue with a four-part plan including an investigation of what went down, an opinion piece he was writing for BI on plagiarism … and two other steps which I don’t remember.” So unintentionally funny, that two other steps I don’t remember at the end.

A call or two, an easy request, boom, done—so he texts Kravis to say never mind, it’s all good, “but Neri and I would love to see you and MJ.”

But the fix was not in. That afternoon, Axel Springer announced that it was looking into how the Business Insider articles had come about, but that “the facts of the reports have not been disputed.”

Ackman persists. “I had multiple people reach out to me from around the world to tell me that Mathias Döpfner, the Chairman and CEO of AS, is a wonderful, first-class person.” Yet when they finally spoke, “he was remarkably unaware that there were factual issues with the BI stories”—by which Ackman evidently means his own curious insistence that his wife’s plagiarism doesn’t fit the definition of plagiarism.  Fantastic little character detail: Imagine the megalomania required to say it’s “remarkable” that someone running a multibillion-dollar media company isn’t focused on the details of some inconsequential stories about you in one of his scores of publications.

“I sent a short-form summary of the facts in a series of Whatsapp texts” and “asked Mathias to get back to me,” Ackman says on January 10. “He has not returned my texts or emails since. Early this morning, I sent Mathias an email proposing we sit down and resolve this. I have not heard back from him.” Given that Döpfner was a newspaper reporter and editor for nearly 20 years before he became an Axel Springer executive, one imagines he has encountered and proceeded to ignore many, many angry Bill Ackmans.

(After the internal investigation, the CEO of Business Insider announced on Monday that it had found “no unfair bias or personal, political, and/or religious motivation in the pursuit of the stories,” and Axel Springer said it “stands by Business Insider and its newsroom.”)

“I was misled by the BI board member,” Ackman writes grimly. And now “after 110 hours or so of trying” to get Business Insider to capitulate—oddly precise-but-imprecise number; nice detail—“I haven’t been able to achieve this objective.”

But on the tantrum goes. Kravis and the others are “responsible for Business Insider’s illegal and unethical journalism,” he says, then amends that a few minutes later. “I should have said: ‘Those responsible and profiting from Business Insider’s illegal and unethical journalism.’” Profiting, adds the ruthless professional-investor character with evident disgust. “Now, why do I say you are responsible? Because,” he explains, answering with a line only used ironically nowadays except by cringe characters like Bill Ackman, “with great power comes great responsibility.” He is “incredibly shocked”—shocked!—“by the conduct of a company controlled by KKR, a firm that I have had enormous respect for.”

He’s desperate to convince readers that he is the good guy, seeking only to improve the world. “We need to decide what kind of world we want to live in.” And then a rhetorical question: “Do we want to live in a world where journalists go after your life partner and your kids?”

But he’s also the angry weenie working hard to seem sinister, as usual, threatening anyone who’s dared to disrespect him––here in implicit gangster fashion. “In that world, one would respond to an attack on one’s wife and family by going after the owner of the media company and his wife and family.” If you get my drift. “How would [the co-CEOs of KKR] feel if it was their wives and kids rather than mine? How would Henry Kravis and [his co-founder] react to this experience?” He says one of the co-CEOs could “stop this madness,” and had better, because “his inaction here is about to cause enormous reputational damage to KKR.”

On X, Ackman has been hinting at litigation—“Business Insider’s and @axelspringer liability just goes up and up and up”—and this past Sunday issued another of his would-be tough-guy lines: “Business Insider is toast. You will hear from us in a few weeks. It will look something like this,” pointing to a clip from Gladiator with a decapitated head and Russell Crowe telling his soldiers, “At my signal, unleash hell.”

Is he playing a manic character? Or has he actually become unhinged, maybe delusional? At the end of a weird 375-word passage beginning with the title “Being in the Spotlight,” in which he repeats the word spotlight a dozen times, he announces, “I am now going to turn the spotlight around to the people responsible for this unbelievably disastrous mess.” (At this point he begins referring to Mathias Döpfner as “Michael” five times, but intermittently, although in a correction says it was only twice and blames autocorrect.) Kravis and Döpfner and the rest “are finally in the spotlight, and yes, they are in the spotlight for wrongdoing.” Then he switches to the second person, addressing them directly: “How does that feel? Not great I am sure.” Ackman’s posts are “the spotlight”?

“This has been the biggest story on social media and the world, and you all are in the media business,” he finally screams at his new adversaries. “How could you not be following it?”

And then he issues them an ultimatum under the boldfaced headline “What Needs to Happen Now.” Axel Springer “needs to immediately depublish all of the Neri Oxman plagiarism stories,” and its board and management “need to issue a public apology for defaming my wife … Michael [sic] needs to get on a plane and come to meet me in New York immediately” and then “Michael [sic], Henry, and I need to sit down tomorrow and resolve this mess.”

Finally, he says, the money from “any settlement that Neri receives should go to her company OXMAN,” because “$70 million has been invested in her launch, but more capital will help.” Funny. And then the perfect last line as the protagonist very convincingly descends into madness: “The time for this madness to end is now.” (The Atlantic).

Kurt Andersen is the author of Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent HisTory.

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The saddest news of the day.

The Police were so afraid of the gunman’s AR-15 that they let almost 3 dozen children die.

Department of Justice Uvalde report says law enforcement response to school shooting was a failure.

Washington — The Justice Department on Thursday released a hard-hitting report on the response by law enforcement to the 2022 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, pointing to a series of "cascading failures" by the police chief and others that ultimately left nearly three dozen elementary school students and their teachers trapped inside a classroom with the gunman while police stayed outside.

Launched in late May 2022 at the behest of Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin soon after the shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers, the "critical incident review" sought to provide an independent account of law enforcement responses and identify lessons to be learned and applied to future active shooter events. It provides a federal accounting of the events that took place at Robb Elementary School and shocked the nation and Uvalde community, which is still reeling from the massacre.

Garland identifies major failures in response

"A series of major failures — failures in leadership in tactics, in communications, in training and in preparedness — were made by law enforcement and others responding to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary," Attorney General Merrick Garland said during a news conference from Uvalde. "As a result, 33 students and three of their teachers, many of whom had been shot, were trapped in a room with an active shooter for over an hour as law enforcement officials remained outside."

The attorney general reiterated a key finding of the Justice Department's examination, stating that "The law enforcement response at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, and in the hours and days after was a failure that should not have happened."

"Lives would've been saved and people would've survived" had law enforcement confronted the shooter swiftly in accordance with widely accepted practices in an active-shooter situation, Garland said. (CBS News).

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Spelman, a Historically Black Women’s College, Receives $100 Million Gift.

The donation to the private school in Atlanta is believed to be the largest ever to an H.B.C.U.

Spelman College, the women’s school in Atlanta, announced on Thursday that it had received a $100 million donation, which its officials called the largest-ever single gift to a historically Black college.

Ronda Stryker.

The gift comes from Ronda E. Stryker, a trustee of Spelman, and her husband, William D. Johnston, chairman of the wealth management company Greenleaf Trust. Ms. Stryker serves as director of the medical equipment company Stryker Corporation, which was founded by her grandfather.

In an announcement, Spelman College said that $75 million of the gift had been earmarked for scholarships, and that the remaining money would go toward improving student housing and developing an academic focus on public policy and democracy.

Helene Gayle, President of Spelman College.

In a statement, Spelman’s president, Helene Gayle, said the college was “invigorated and inspired” by the couple’s generosity, adding, “This gift is a critical step in our school’s mission to eliminate financial barriers to starting and finishing a Spelman education.”

Billionaires known for their education philanthropy, Ms. Stryker and her husband had previously donated $30 million to the college.

Along with her husband, Ms. Stryker, a former special education teacher in Kalamazoo, Mich., also endowed a medical school at Western Michigan University, a school that the couple attended, and made a major gift to Harvard. Ms. Stryker has served as a trustee of Spelman College since 1997.

Ms. Stryker could not be reached for comment. But in a statement, she said: “It’s important to me that all women be provided an opportunity to explore their talents, challenge their self-doubts and realize the power of achieving individual success.”

Spelman is one of only two all women, historically Black colleges and universities.

Philanthropists have increasingly focused on H.B.C.U.sand other Black nonprofit organizations after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which ignited a national reckoning on race.

Last week, the United Negro College Fund announcedthat it had received a $100 million grant from the Lilly Endowment that would be used to fund 37 Black colleges, including Spelman and its companion men’s school, Morehouse College.

The two colleges were also among those that had received major gifts from the philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, who has donated more than $500 million to H.B.C.U.s in recent years. In 2020, Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, and his wife, Patty Quillin, also donated $120 million to Spelman, Morehouse and the United Negro College Fund.

Spelman and Morehouse are among the better-known and most prestigious of the about 100 American colleges regarded as historically Black, a designation meaning that the schools were formed to educate Black students before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when many colleges and universities barred their admission. (New York Times).

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