Five Quick Things: Rip-off U. | The American Spectator

Most of these will truly be quick things. I’m in Summer Mode.

Actually, I’m not. I’m just busy as hell with a summer project.

This isn’t intended as a shameless plug or anything, but most of our regular readers surely know that the other place where my daily writing stuff can be found is TheHayride.com, which is more or less the conservative site in Louisiana.

I’m not saying that to brag. I’m saying it as a complaint. It would be awesome if we had three or four different conservative sites in the state bouncing traffic off each other, but we don’t; we have me.

And my site hasn’t gone through a redesign since 2017. I’ve been wanting to get around to it, but I’ve had other projects in the way, and when I looked into building a new site with all the bells and whistles I wanted a couple of years ago, the price tag scared me off, and then there was general laziness. But now, I finally have a good idea of what I want to do, and I’ve gotten comfortable with Ghost, which is a new website platform a lot more user-friendly than WordPress, plus I’ve discovered Claude and begun to realize how good Claude is at writing code, and these things are coming together in a summer project which is eating all my time and attention.

Which is that I am building a brand-new site from the ground up for The Hayride, and hopefully it’ll be done by Labor Day. And I’m doing it myself, with Claude’s help.

It’s a whole lot easier than I thought, which is not to say it’s easy. But I don’t write code, so without Claude in tow, this project wouldn’t be possible.

Anyway, I know. Most of you don’t care. It’s a big deal to me, though, because it was probably going to cost t10n grand to get a new site built, and I’m going to do it for the price of the theme I’m buying — and when I’m done with this thing, it will look very much like a national corporate news site with lots of cool features.

For somebody who’s been publishing a website since 2009 (and spent eight years running a print publication before that), it’s a big deal. So that’s why I’m having trouble shutting up about it.

Anyway, here’s what you came for…

1. A Hundred Thousand Dollars a Year to Go to College at 16 Schools Across The Country

This is utterly ridiculous, and the people responsible for it ought to be ashamed of themselves.

But not as much as the people enabling it by failing to laugh before saying no.

When combining tuition, fees, room and board, books, transportation and other expenses, the cost to attend 16 colleges and universities across the nation tops $100,000 per year, according to new data from the Princeton Review.
“We just keep going up and it just never stops,” Jeff Selingo, author of “Dream School,” told CNBC, which reported on the data.
“For the 2026-27 academic year, 16 institutions — including Duke, Georgetown, New York University and University of Chicago — have a sticker price of more than $100,000, according to data exclusively provided to CNBC from The Princeton Review’s upcoming ‘The Best 392 Colleges’ list,’” the outlet reported.
“Others, like Brown University, Northwestern and Pepperdine, cost more than $99,000.”
In comparison, the costs during the 2024-25 school year hovered at around 98,000 for the most expensive colleges.
For 2026-27, Harvey Mudd College, a private STEM-based school in Southern California, tops the list at $104,512. In second-place is Duke University at $103,975, followed by the University of Chicago at $103,821.
“We have been moving toward this six-figure price tag for a long time, and now we are here — and for a lot of people that feels significant,” Selingo told CNBC, adding that now many families are opting for less expensive state universities.

Yes, most of these places have economics departments, and people actually will major in econ — while getting ripped off to the tune of six figures per year for a degree that 75 percent of the public thinks is bizarrely overvalued. (RELATED: Administering Colleges: 1960s and Today)

Sure, some of those places are very desirable schools to have a degree from. That doesn’t mean they aren’t rip-offs. Especially when most of the students at these places are on some form of scholarship ride. If you’re paying full price at a Duke or Northwestern, you’re nothing but a cash cow for the school.

This bubble is going to burst. For a lot of colleges, it already has.

2. The Sordid Sorsby Situation

College sports have become pro sports, as everybody knows, and while there are a few people lamenting the loss of anything that looks like the amateur character that built the system, for the most part, we’re full steam ahead on using NIL contracts to buy players and blurring the lines differentiating between the college leagues and the pro leagues. (RELATED: Gone With the Wins: College Sports Fiscal Insanity)

Santa Clara University, for example, played a basketball player this past season who had spent two full seasons playing professionally in the NBA’s G League. He was French, though, and the NCAA currently allows foreigners with pro experience, wherever gained, to be able to gain eligibility. (RELATED: Chasing the NIL Mirage)

In football, a judge in Mississippi gave Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss another year of eligibility without much more than a dismissive nod toward the fact he’d exhausted his college eligibility. Why Chambliss didn’t want to start his pro career when he would have been at least a second-round draft pick is a decent question; the answer is that Ole Miss pays more than an NFL rookie contract does. (RELATED: Eligibility, International Intrigue and NCAA Drama)

But the capper seems to be what’s happening at Texas Tech.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Texas Tech has suddenly risen to the pinnacle of college football under head coach Joey McGuire, not so much because McGuire is Nick Saban but because he has a booster named Cody Campbell who’s decided to become a stakehorse of major magnitude. Campbell played briefly in the NFL as an offensive lineman before getting involved in the oil and gas business, and his company, Double Eagle Energy Holdings, is a big player in the Permian Basin oil patch. As such, he’s now the chair of the Texas Tech University Board of Regents and a donor to the athletic program of more than $25 million in recent vintage.

With a massive backer like that, Texas Tech has gone on a spending spree the last couple of years that has turned their program into the juggernaut of the Big 12 Conference. And they’re expecting to have another championship contender of a team this year, except for a sizable snag they’ve hit.

Namely, that the quarterback Texas Tech signed out of the transfer portal, Brendan Sorsby, ran into eligibility problems when it was discovered that he’d gambled on football games while playing quarterback at Cincinnati last year.

Not just football games. Cincinnati football games.

But a friendly judge in Lubbock has just granted a Trinidad Chambliss-style injunction, which suspended Sorsby for only two games and then restored his eligibility.

And now all hell has broken loose, with schools around the country, including those on Texas Tech’s schedule, saying they refuse to play Texas Tech with Sorsby on the team, and the Big 12 has been in meetings all week trying to sanction Texas Tech for playing a gambler. There’s a lot of sanctimony here, to be sure, but gambling on your own team’s games seems like it’s a Pete Rose-style no-no. If you can’t draw the line here, where can you?

Ken Paxton, who isn’t just the GOP nominee for the Senate in Texas but that state’s attorney general, has just threatened a $200 million lawsuit against the Big 12 in the event the school is sanctioned. That might not be very helpful, but on the other hand, Paxton is really defending the state of Texas’s justice system as much as one of Texas’s state schools with that action.

And Campbell went on Dan Dakich’s show to defend Texas Tech, without really helping the school’s cause a whole lot. He said they’re just picking on Texas Tech because Texas Tech isn’t supposed to be this good.

None of this is a very good look. I guess the bright side is it’s showing the need for a bill — and there is legislation in Congress which would help — that would reimpose some sense of sanity for college sports on things like eligibility, NIL, the transfer portal, and so forth. Right now, we’re seeing the ill effects of an unregulated free market, and it’s making people queasy. (RELATED: ‘SCORE’-ing a Win)

That said, it’s worth saying that some of the teams being put together with the tools available to coaches in these sports are truly impressive. The Michigan basketball team, which won this year’s national championship, was a sight to see. So was that Indiana national championship football team. I don’t know how many of their players were betting on their own games, but the product on the court and field was terrific.

3. Billy Schmidt

I’m not really interested in doing a Karmelo Anthony thing. I touched on it last week in the 5QT, and Melissa and I did a Spectacle Podcast segment on it, so I’ve weighed in to some extent. Anthony was found guilty, because he couldn’t have been found anything else, and it hasn’t quite turned into the George Floyd retard-a-thon that I was afraid it might. Sure, you have mental defectives like Jasmine Crockett trying to make the case for cold-blooded murder of white people just because they’re there, and yes, it’s very undesirable to have to listen to black “leadership” pushing the insanity that nobody of their skin color can be racist. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Henry Nowak, the Inevitable British Civil War, and What It Means for Us)

Meet Dominique Alexander, the head of the NGO- Next Generation Action Network in Dallas.
He’s raging because he said Karmelo Anthony’s verdict was ruled because the jury was white.
Dominique has a serious criminal history that includes a 2011 guilty plea for causing serious… pic.twitter.com/eS2SqTPW4x
— Jammles (@jammles9) June 9, 2026

But the good news is this thing seems to be passing without the kind of rioting that, for example, the Steven Ogilvie case is bringing out in the U.K. And that’s a good thing. (RELATED: On Belfast)

Why? Among the downpour of reasons is Billy Schmidt.

You don’t know who Billy Schmidt is?

Was.

Billy Schmidt was a senior at Penn State who last weekend was at a bar in Philadelphia watching the NBA Playoffs, and then he was accosted on the sidewalk by a pair of street criminals, who were black, and one of them stole his phone. So he chased after them and one shot and killed him.

The other one then threw the phone under a car, where Schmidt’s father found it the next day. Meaning Billy Schmidt was killed literally for nothing.

And the killers haven’t been found yet despite some pretty hot leads.

The murder of 22-year-old Penn State student Billy Schmidt in South Philadelphia is heartbreaking and infuriating. A young man gunned down steps from his family home over a stolen phone after watching the NBA Finals. One suspect was caught on surveillance wearing a very… https://t.co/iJdZTP0qnK pic.twitter.com/AcxVUDTt1j
— Chris (@tradchris_shill) June 11, 2026

It can’t necessarily be said that Schmidt’s murder was a racial crime. The murder of Austin Metcalf wasn’t strictly racial, either, though everything around it certainly was. But there is something which seems to be prevalent within the black community — something a whole lot of black people will tell you is why they want no part of living in the geographic confines of “black” neighborhoods, which looks to have been the fuel for both incidents and lots of others.

Which is this idea that, because of “400 years of slavery and segregation,” black people are owed deference by white people, and if that deference is not delivered upon demand, kinetic consequences are called for and justified, all the way up to stabbing somebody through the heart or shooting them dead.

And people need to be very careful about trying to push that mindset onto an America that has a distinct case of fatigue with all things “civil rights” in the aftermath of Iryna, and Austin Metcalf, and the SPLC, and the Somali welfare fraud scams, and lots of other things. (RELATED: Some Obvious Truths From Minnesota)

The danger of white-on-black rioting, as we saw in the first half of the 20th century, isn’t all that high. But white deference to black criminal aggression is definitely not something anybody should count on. The mood is not right for it.

🚨 Dr. Stacey Patton, a professor at Howard University, wrote an article in which she blamed Austin Metcalf – and his family – for Karmelo Anthony’s decision to murder him.
Titled “Dear Jeff Metcalf: Your Son is Dead Because You Failed to Teach Him That Black Boys Have… pic.twitter.com/8IDsaYTVfY
— Patrick Casey (@restoreorderusa) June 11, 2026

And that’s enough on the subject.

4. Somebody Else We’ve Had Enough Of

I don’t know how Hasan Piker became a thing. I would argue he isn’t actually a thing; he certainly doesn’t belong as a thing, but as of now, it seems like I’m wrong and he is a thing.

I can say with confidence that he’s a bad thing and we shouldn’t have to debate idiocy like this…

Hasan Piker: “In the wealthiest nation on Earth, 700K people sleep outside every single night. I mean that’s preposterous. We have all of the opportunity to change this system and yet we don’t do it because this is the way the system is designed, this is the way capitalism has to… pic.twitter.com/jkZOB5lTel
— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) June 11, 2026

More than 90 percent of the homeless problem in America, at least in our cities, stems from mental illness and drug abuse, which are two things people like Hasan Piker refuse to allow us to address in ways that will work. (RELATED: The Crisis Behind America’s Mental Health Crisis)

What rankles is this weaponization of a problem they actively seek to create, while demanding to be recognized as the good guys.

Well, Hasan Piker isn’t a good guy. He’s a liar and a wannabe tyrant who goes to Cuba and shills for monsters and trashes the free enterprise system while it makes him rich. Assuming that his trips on private jets are paid for by business success and not hostile foreign action, that is.

5. Talarico

I don’t have anything important for this one. I just have this.

You probably saw that picture James Talarico’s camp put out, which has him at the wheel of a pickup truck dressed up like he’s Billy Bob Thornton in Landman. They’re trying so hard to sell him as a regular straight guy from Texas, but every time they do, he just comes off more and more gay.

Which leads to…