"I review books for a living, and I’ve noticed a worrying trend of what I call “instagramming the Holocaust.” (1 / 9)"

"Bestselling novels about the Holocaust tend to be “uplifting” and sentimental. They have romantic subplots. Jewish characters only exist to be rescued by the (often American) protagonist. The cinematic, three-act structure culminates in a redemptive ending."

"What these books offer (and they sell in the millions) is a sanitized version of the Shoah in which brave Americans bravely battle Hitler, the reader learns a lesson about Kindness and Not Being Prejudiced, and there are no sticky questions about who did the killings, and why."

"Jewish novelist Dara Horn has observed that memoirs and novels written by actual Holocaust survivors typically don’t sell—because there are no pat resolutions, no redemptions, no heartwarming moments where the Jewish prisoners see the good in their Nazi captors."

"Anne Frank’s (excellent) diary became the entry point into the Holocaust for most of us because she had not yet experienced the worst of it – because she hadn’t yet learned that some people aren’t “truly good at heart.” It’s just safe enough not to disturb us."

"And we love “uplifting” Holocaust novels because we don’t want to be disturbed, not really. This is the real reason why books like Maus offend the sensibilities of middle-class parents, because they bear witness to a truth about human nature that we don’t want to confront."

"And the “message” of the Holocaust is not that people are truly good, or that we need to be kind and tolerant (though that is true). The message is that six million people were murdered, and millions of ordinary folk were complicit, and millions of others looked away."

"This compulsion to sanitize the past, to sanitize the world, is one of the overlooked roots of white nationalism. We want to seal ourselves away from the experiences of others because we fear what they might say to us. We want reality to be pastel-hued and instagram-filtered."

"When the spring semester began, Southwestern College professor Elizabeth Smith felt good. Two of her online classes were completely full, boasting 32 students each. Even the classes’ waitlists, which fit 20 students, were maxed out. That had never happened before...By the end of the first two weeks of the semester, Smith had whittled down the 104 students enrolled in her classes, including those on the waitlist, to just 15. The rest, she’d concluded, were fake students, often referred to as bots. 

'It’s a surreal experience and it’s just heartbreaking,' Smith said. 'I’m not teaching, I’m playing a cop now.'

She’s far from the only professor dealing with this trend. Ever since the pandemic forced schools to go virtual, the number of online classes offered by community colleges has exploded. That has been a welcome development for many students who value the flexibility online classes offer. But it has also given rise to the incredibly invasive and uniquely modern phenomenon of bot students now besieging community college professors like Smith. 

The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.  

...Community colleges first started seeing bots managed by fraud rings invade classes around 2021. Those bots seem to generally be real people managing networks of fake student aliases. The more they manage, the more financial aid money they can potentially steal. Four years later, there are no clear signs it’s slowing down. During 2024 alone, fraudulent students at California community colleges swindled more than $11 million in state and federal financial aid dollars — more than double what was stolen the year prior. 

Last year, the state chancellor’s office estimated 25 percent of community college applicants were bots.

...Finding the fraudulent students early is key, though. If they can be identified and dropped before the third week of the semester, when Southwestern distributes aid funds, the bots don’t get the money they’re after. It also allows professors to open the seats held by scammers to real students who were crowded out. But dropping huge amounts of enrollees can also be frightening to teachers, who worry that should their classes not fill back up, they may be axed.  

Even after dropping the fraudulent students, though, the bot nightmare isn’t over.  

As soon as seats open up in classes, professors often receive hundreds of nearly identical emails from purported students requesting they be added to the class. Those emails tended to ring some linguistic alarm bells.  

They feature clunky phrases that are uncommon for modern students to use like 'I kindly request,' 'warm regards,' or 'I look forward to your positive response.' Much of that stilted language lines up with what she’s seen from the AI-generated content submitted by bot students. That mad bot-powered dash for enrollment has left some students unable to register for the classes they need.

...But exactly what colleges like Southwestern will do long-term isn’t entirely clear, at least partly because what they do will have to keep changing. The bots, like the AI technology that often undergirds them, are constantly evolving, leaving some leaders feeling like they’re playing a high stakes game of whack-a-mole. It has also made it difficult for leaders to stay ahead of the bots, said Mark Sanchez, Southwestern’s superintendent/president. 

The college has launched an Inauthentic Enrollment Mitigation Taskforce that meets regularly to game out ways to stay ahead of the bots. But as of late, district officials have been more proactive in their bot-attacks. A recent report concluded around 1,600 of the college’s 26,000 enrollees were bots. District leaders then dropped the suspected bots en masse from classes and required them to come in to prove they were real. Few did.  

Sanchez has treated exactly how the college has identified suspected bots almost like classified spycraft...Ultimately, though, he thinks much of the burden to catch bots needs to fall on the state. When students apply to Southwestern, they use a statewide application system. So, by the time the college gets a list of enrollees, it’s already littered with fraudulent students. 

'What we’ve asked the state is to put really solid protocols in the CCC Apply system,' Sanchez said. 

The California Community College system has put more resources toward detecting fraudulent students, partnering with a handful of tech companies, like ID.me to authenticate students. But that still hasn’t stopped the bots. As of March, scammers had already swindled nearly $4 million in federal and state financial aid. 

Tracy Schaelen is Southwestern’s distance education faculty coordinator. In that role she interfaces with many of the college’s online instructors. The current status quo, where teachers spend hours upon hours vetting suspicious students simply isn’t sustainable, she said.  

'Teachers are hired to teach. That’s their expertise, and that’s what their students need from them,' Schaelen said. 

That solution also can’t be the wholesale elimination of online classes, Schaelen said. Students have increasingly chosen online options, particularly the older, working students community colleges cater to. What’s really needed is a technological solution, she said. 

This is great because it keeps the momentum! The MAGAs wanna pretend this accomplished nothing but it did so let’s continue!

Movements that don’t continue with their momentum go nowhere and that is something that we can NOT afford!

Just an extremely Normal thing to say

Reminder they want to increase the budget for ICE from 3.5 to 45 billion dollars.

Reminder the majority of that will be for building new detention centers.

Reminder ICE are *currently* detaining tourists who can pay for a plane ticket home and people with visa issues that were already resolved, because they have to make quota so Trump can brag about the numbers going up.

Reminder most of these people were already in the immigration system - that's why they were easy to detain.

Reminder this is all at taxpayer expense.