May 23: The UCLA Med School for Kids Who Can’t Read Good
Hunter Biden perjures himself; White House knew about European recognition of Palestine; Obama State Dept blocked FBI from arresting Iranians
The Big Story
More than 50% of recent UCLA medical school cohorts have failed their post-clinical rotation standardized tests, or “shelf exams,” on subjects such as emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics, according to a Thursday expose by Aaron Sibarium in The Washington Free Beacon. Professors describe students who are unable to “identify a major artery” or understand “basic lab tests” at the end of their rotations. “I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” one professor said. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”
According to multiple faculty and staff sources who spoke to the Beacon, academic standards at UCLA medical school have collapsed since 2020, when Jennifer Lucero, the vice chair of diversity, equity, and inclusion in UCLA’s anesthesiology department, took over as dean of admissions for the medical school. Sources said Lucero pressured the admissions office to “routinely [give] black and Latino applicants a pass for subpar metrics” while requiring white and Asian applicants to have “near perfect scores to even be considered.” Lucero, according to the sources, openly discussed doling out admissions slots and moving candidates up and down the residency ranking list on the basis of their race—in violation of both federal and state law—and retaliated harshly against any faculty or admissions staff who questioned these procedures, including by accusing them of racism and forcing them to attend mandatory DEI trainings.
These changes in admissions, which resulted in a steep decline in Asians admitted to UCLA medical school, came alongside similarly disastrous curricular changes. UCLA cut a year of classes from its preclinical curriculum so that students could have more time for “research and community service.” It also cut hard science and medical coursework in favor of mandatory courses on “Structural Racism and Health Equity,” in which students learn about “fatphobia” and are led in chants of “Free Palestine” by keffiyeh-clad activists praying to “Mama Earth.” One professor, speaking of the marked decline in the quality of students, said “it’s a combination of bad curriculum and bad selection,” and noted that some students are being accepted with grades so low “they shouldn’t even be applying.”
The result, according to several faculty sources, is an academic environment in which the bar for underrepresented minority students is “as low as you could possibly imagine.” Said one professor, “UCLA still produces some very good graduates. But a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.” Another faculty member told Sibarium, “I wouldn’t normally talk to a reporter, but there’s no way to stop this without embarrassing the school.”
Read the rest here.
IN THE BACK PAGES: The IDF is succeeding in Gaza, argues Andrew Fox. But Western analysts are too trapped in their own failed concepts to realize it
The Rest
→On Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee released new evidence that Hunter Biden perjured himself during his Feb. 28 closed-door deposition before the committee. In a press release, the committee identified three alleged lies from the first son.
First, Hunter lied about a July 30, 2017, WhatsApp message to Raymond Zhao, an associate at the Chinese energy firm CEFC, in which Hunter said he was “sitting here with my father” and threatened to “forever hold a grudge” unless Zhao fulfilled some unnamed “commitment.” In his testimony, Hunter claimed he sent the message to the “wrong Zhao” while “high or drunk” and that the recipient had no idea “what the hell I was even Goddam talking about.” But WhatsApp messages released by the committee showed that Raymond Zhao understood Hunter’s message and told him that “CEFC is willing to cooperate with the family.” A little over a week later, a CEFC-connected firm wired $5 million to Hudson West III, a joint venture between Hunter and CEFC official Gongwen Dong. Hunter and Zhao continued to communicate via WhatsApp for “months” after the initial threat.
Second, Hunter testified that he had no control of or affiliation with—and was not even aware of the existence of—a company called Rosemont Seneca Bohai (RSB). Newly released documents from IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, however, show that Hunter was the beneficial owner of a bank account in the name of RSB and that he used this account to receive his salary from Burisma. The committee also produced a signed April 2014 document in which Hunter affirmed, “I, Robert Hunter Biden, hereby certify that I am the duly elected, qualified, and acting Secretary of Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC.”
Third, the committee alleges that Hunter lied when he testified, about his activities at Burisma, that he was unwilling to do “any work” related to visas and that he would “never pick up the phone and call anybody for a visa.” The committee released a 2015 email from Devon Archer to Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharsky, with Hunter cc’d, in which Archer wrote: “Hunter is checking with [Mexican businessman] Miguel Aleman to see if he can provide cover to Kola [Burisma CEO Mykola Zlochevsky] on the Visa. … As follow up please send Hunter an email with all Kola’s passport and visa documents and evidence and copy me.”
This one, however, is less clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing. If Biden was helping Zlochevsky get a visa to the United States, that would violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act. But other emails released by the committee suggest that Archer and Biden were working on securing Zlochevsky a visa to Mexico—hence the involvement of Aleman.
Hunter Biden is set to face two criminal trials in the upcoming months: a federal tax fraud case in California, which was postponed to September earlier this week, and a federal felony gun case in Delaware, which is set to begin in June.
→Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is currently facing a maximum of 136 years in prison for a misdemeanor bookkeeping offense, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg upgraded to a felony on the theory that the false records—i.e., describing hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and lawyer Michael Cohen as “legal expenses”—were made in furtherance of another crime. Bragg never specified what that “other crime” might be, but Michael Colangelo, the former No. 3 at the Biden Justice Department who joined Bragg’s team to prosecute Trump, described it as a “criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 election” in his opening arguments during the trial.
A verdict in that case is expected next week.
→The Biden administration was warned that Ireland, Norway, and Spain planned to recognize Palestinian statehood, but did not raise significant objections, according to a report in Politico. One Irish official told the magazine that in private discussions, White House officials made clear that they “understand why we’re taking this step now” and “accepted it as an inevitable development.” “There was no real pushback,” said the official. According to the report, U.S.-Irish talks over recognizing Palestine:
included face-to-face discussions with senior National Security Council officials at the White House in March as part of St. Patrick’s Day-related diplomacy; multiple phone calls between Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin, who led the Irish initiative, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and final calls to Washington following the Irish Cabinet’s formal signoff on its decision Tuesday night.
U.S. officials have been mildly critical of the move in public. But behind the scenes, Politico notes, they “may be seeing the recognition of Palestine by these countries as a pressure point with Israel.”
→A top aide to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted emails to thwart Freedom of Information Act Requests and discussed using a “secret back channel” to pass messages to Fauci in order to avoid public oversight. The revelations come from a batch of emails released Wednesday by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
For instance, in an April 21, 2021, email to EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak about a planned Zoom call with Fauci the following day, Fauci’s aide David Morens wrote:
PS, i forgot to say there is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.
Yes, that’s the same Daszak who was recently banned from receiving federal grant money for three years for misleading the U.S. government about the nature of his gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Morens also let slip that someone inside NIH’s FOIA office was helping him shield records from the public. On Feb. 24, 2021, he wrote:
i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe.
And, in a final ironic twist, Morens wrote in a June 16, 2020, email to Daszak:
We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.
Apparently Morens was not quite as smart as he thought.
Read more here.
→The Obama State Department intervened to prevent the FBI from arresting individuals inside the United States suspected of illegally supporting Iran’s efforts to finance its programs for nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, according to whistleblower disclosures to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Johnson (R-WI). An internal FBI email included in a Wednesday letter from the senators to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Attorney General Merrick Garland revealed that on at least eight occasions between July 2015 and January 2017, the Obama State Department blocked the FBI from arresting suspects connected to Iran’s sanctioned weapons program, including one who was on the Terrorism Watch List. The FBI eventually arrested two of these suspects after Trump came into office, but the remaining six were never apprehended.
→Stat of the Day: $77 million
That’s how much The Washington Post has lost over the past year, according to a Wednesday presentation by publisher Will Lewis reported in the same paper. Lewis also noted that the paper had lost half of its readers since 2020. Post executives announced that they will begin experimenting with tiered subscription services and “new offerings,” including a “product targeted toward a Washington metro audience” and “a product focused on the relationship between the climate and the economy.” In addition, Lewis announced that the paper would be “looking for ways to use AI in its journalism,” according to X posts from Semafor’s Max Tani.
→Quote of the Day:
Keith Davis was adjusting his seat when he noticed his wife’s water glass vibrating. He reached over to cover it, fearing a spill. The next thing he knew, they were both airborne, hurtling toward the ceiling, he said.
His wife crashed into an overhead luggage bin and then landed in the aisle. His head went straight through a ceiling panel and he landed back in his chair.
That’s from a Thursday article in The Wall Street Journal featuring eyewitness testimony from passengers on Singapore Airlines Flight SQ321, which experienced one of the worst turbulence incidents ever recorded on a Tuesday morning flight from London to Singapore. A 73-year-old British citizen died of cardiac arrest—the first turbulence-related death on a commercial flight in almost 30 years—and at least 17 passengers have undergone surgery as a result of the incident. The airplane, a Boeing 777-300ER, experienced “sudden extreme turbulence” while passing over the Irrawaddy River Basin in Myanmar, in which it was pushed up 400 feet and then fell the same distance within the space of about a minute, according to data from the flight tracker FlightRadar24.
TODAY IN TABLET:
What Nellie Saw, by David Mikics
Good progressives are tossing the heady days of wine and wokeness down the memory hole. Lucky for us, there was a witness
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Israel Is Succeeding in Gaza
Western analysts think otherwise, because they are seeing Israel’s war through the lens of America’s own failed counterinsurgency doctrines
by Andrew Fox
As the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducts another assault in the north of Gaza, they face significant criticism from Western officials and analysts who are asking why the IDF is repeatedly going into areas they have already cleared and conducting further operations. Critics claim this behavior reflects a flaw in operational design, or is even proof that Israel’s campaign against Hamas has failed. The flaw, however, lies in their own assumptions.
These critics are looking at IDF tactics through the lens of Western counterinsurgency (COIN), the doctrine that U.S. and European militaries applied in the failed campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the “global war on terror,” Western tactics were to seize a chunk of territory and clear it of enemies through military force. The plan was then to hold the territory through forward operating bases (or FOBs) and try to conduct alternative governance in those areas while providing security. The system of FOBs meant that our enemies, embedded in the local civilian population, always knew where we were and what routes we were likely to use. They could mortar, rocket, and IED us at will. It was a recipe for endless violence and huge numbers of casualties.
In the case of the 2023-24 Gaza war, Western critics have almost comically misunderstood what the Israeli military is trying to do. The flaw in Western analysis is always the same: “We wouldn’t do it that way.” Yet the IDF has absolutely no intention of using the clear-hold-build COIN tactics the West tried in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why would it? Those tactics were an unmitigated disaster in both campaigns, which ended in humiliating defeats at the hands of technologically inferior armies.
COIN tactics are time consuming and costly. They also require huge troop levels to “hold” ground, for years if not indefinitely. Assuming Western doctrinal ratios of 1 soldier to every 40 civilians, Gaza would require an enduring deployment of 50,000 combat troops, before we even consider enabling logistics, engineers, artillery and the like. The economic costs of mobilizing the IDF’s reservist army on an enduring basis would be astronomical. Such tactics would also be insanely wasteful, since Israel has a safe base on the Israeli side of the Gaza border, and can therefore enjoy the luxury of only committing to intelligence-led operations at times and on ground of their choosing—advantages that the West did not have in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
So why is the IDF repeating operations in areas that it has already cleared—for example, in the Shifa hospital, or in ongoing operations in Jabalia, which they struck from the air at the start of the conflict. Critics call this approach “mowing the grass,” a phrase adopted in the West to describe the failure to deploy sufficient troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, leading to repeated clearances of the same areas after they were thought to have been “cleared.” I contend that the IDF is trying something completely different, and it makes sense.
Israel’s strategic aims are defeating Hamas and securing the Gaza border with Israel to prevent a repeat of Oct. 7. “Never again is now” isn’t just an empty slogan. IDF operational design is built around making sure Oct. 7 can never happen again. Absent the possibility of any enduring political solution, that is simply what success looks like.
In military terms, Hamas will not be destroyed, which means rendered totally combat ineffective. Hamas is too numerous and too entrenched within Gaza—where every male of fighting age is a potential future Hamas fighter. Their cellular structure makes them hard to target, and when a commander is killed, they have shown the flexibility to promote the next man up. They are also mainly backing away from a fight in Gaza, relying on booby traps, IEDs, and small arms engagements before melting away from decisive engagements. This makes them hard to kill.
What is possible, however, is defeating Hamas. In Western doctrinal terms, "defeating" an enemy means reducing it to 50%-69% of its fighting strength. As Gaza is neither a conventional war nor a counterterrorism operation in the classic senses of each, we can frame that percentage as the removal of Hamas’ ability to repeat Oct. 7.
So how does the IDF plan to achieve the aim of defeating Hamas? Through a political solution? Definitely not. No one on the international stage has expressed any interest in helping with governance in Gaza. Nor is there any evidence that these nonexistent partners would do anything other than act as human shields for Hamas, making it impossible for Israel to attack its foes when necessary. The idea that there exists some magic device to convert any sizable number of Gazans to embrace a political alternative to Hamas that would be in any way favorable for Israel can be generously termed a fantasy. According to polling, 2% of Gazans support an Israeli-backed administration. The majority want Hamas back.
Israel’s war cabinet has received significant domestic and international criticism for their lack of a “day after” plan for governance in Gaza, which has been echoed in recent days by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and war cabinet member Benny Gantz. IDF planners are therefore faced with designing operations to achieve a loosely defined goal, with no clearly articulated strategic end state for the operation from their political leadership—in part perhaps because the “end state” may be unsatisfying to Western ears. So how have they met this challenge?
If you look at what is possible, what the best version of “success” looks like, and what Israel is doing, I contend that in Gaza we are seeing a masterpiece of operational design within severe politically imposed limitations. The IDF is not trying to clear Gaza. With no ability to impose a political arrangement in Gaza, and a Gazan desire for continued Hamas rule, the IDF answer is: Let them have Hamas. But the version of Hamas that Gazans will get is one heavily degraded militarily, and, most importantly, with vast swaths of their tunnels and civilian-embedded infrastructure destroyed. In other words, the IDF aims to replace Hamas 3.0—the version that fought three wars against Israel and then launched the brutal Oct. 7 surprise attacks—with Hamas 1.0, which took over the Gaza Strip from Fatah in June 2007.
To accomplish that end, the IDF has methodically razed what Hamas infrastructure they could find in Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and now Rafah. They have secured the Netzarim corridor to control freedom of movement from south to north. It looks like they are trying to do the same thing along the Philadelphi Corridor and Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, to cut off the inflow of weapons and supplies to Hamas.
Facial recognition software in controlled areas allows the IDF to stop known Hamas commanders moving around. This posture also allows the IDF to strike when concentrations of Hamas are identified, to degrade their manpower, and then withdraw again: And that is what we saw at Shifa hospital and are seeing now in Jabalia.
At the same time, the IDF has methodically destroyed buildings to create a 1-kilometer buffer zone around the Gaza border—a measure that if enforced would indeed prevent a repeat of Oct. 7. If Israel has its way, nobody in Gaza is getting anywhere near the border again. However, whether Washington will come down against this policy remains to be seen, which is why for Israel, the key strategic goal in Gaza is arguably to limit as much as possible the internationalization of the Strip through fantastical plans for “the day after.”
As things stand, the operational end state looks like significant Hamas infrastructure is destroyed, its fighting capability severely degraded, and the border secured, with the IDF retaining the capability to strike into Gaza at will. All of this has occurred while shifting hundreds of thousands of civilians out of harm’s way and minimizing innocent casualties (Hamas’ human shield tactics aside). As John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has repeatedly pointed out, the efforts the IDF has made to protect civilians is unprecedented in modern urban warfare.
Both the tactical and strategic accomplishments of the IDF campaign in Gaza are entirely real. The operational design that allowed for these accomplishments does, of course, come with disadvantages. First, the destruction of civil infrastructure will require a massive reconstruction effort. While innocent civilian deaths are real and tragic, the almost 1-to-1 combatant-to-civilian death ratio remains very low compared to other conflicts. Second, the Egyptians have been very twitchy about Israeli control of the southern border.
However, we now know why. Since the start of the Rafah operation, the IDF has uncovered some 50 tunnels that run from Gaza into Egypt, suggesting a high and ongoing degree of complicity between the Hamas leadership and the military and political leadership in Cairo.
Militarily, the IDF is hamstrung by international pressure to slow operations, and uncertainty about what comes next in Gaza—a choice that may at least partially lie outside of Israel’s control. For our part, Western critics need to eat humble pie and accept that, on the evidence of the last 20 years, our tactics are not to be recommended. What we are seeing in Gaza is not a failure. It’s a quite brilliant IDF operational design, within the bounds of what is realistically possible.
Major Fox's article was excellent-The aim of the IDF is to render Hamas from repeating 10/7, not the conquest and holding of Gaza, and the IDF has been very successful in reducing Hamas' military capacity whenever and wherever it surfaces even in areas which the IDF previously took control of -all of which thankfully runs contrary to the unsuccessful American counterinsurgency strategy with minimal civilian loss
Anyone who is admitted to any university or graduate school solely under DEI criteria raises the question as to whether they can master the course material and be professionally competent. Any lawyer in a malpractice case against such a doctor would he well advised to inquire how well the person did in medical school, ,including the passage of the tests mentioned in the article.