Fraud, Everywhere You Turn, Fraud

Thursday, March 12, 2026

By this time everyone has heard about, and forgotten, the massive Minnesota fraud, perpetrated largely by a gang of Somali immigrants.  Stories about the rampant covid-benefit related fraud in California never really caught on.  But the fraud runs both ways in California as the government continues to try and minimize or cover-up its ineptitude, if not malfeasance, in the devasting Palisades fire.  We seem to be fraught with fraud.  And yet those three stories only begin to scratch the surface, as two new stories of deeply ingrained fraud emerged this week.

The Free Press carried a piece on Tuesday about the extremely excessive levels of science fraud we are seeing these days – especially in the biological, biochemical and biomedical fields.  The article is long and detailed and therefore probably dull to those lacking training in scientific rigor, but the ramifications of such fraud should not be:

Or, as a final example, take the case of Eliezer Masliah, the man who ran the NIH’s National Institute on Aging’s neuroscience division. In 2024, Masliah was removed from his government post after a staggering 132 of his papers were found to have falsified so-called Western blots, common scientific images used to show the presence of protein. In his role as head of a division responsible for allocating a research budget of $2.6 billion, Masliah had enormous influence in deciding which Alzheimer’s research got funding.

“It is no stretch to think that the slow progress on Alzheimer’s disease is linked” to the amount of scientific work that has turned out to be fraudulent, Bhattacharya said during his NIH confirmation hearing.

Also on Tuesday, out of California, emerged a story about massive Medicare/Hospice fraud.  (Good commentary on this story here and here.)  Notably ironic is the fact that California, so rich in being defrauded on the outflow side, won’t let a soul sneak by, even if legally, on the financial intake side.

So here we are, 300 words in and have summarized billions of dollars of your and my money being taken from our governments via fraud.  And I am sure if I did more research I could come up with a lot more.  Considered in sum like this and you must note there is a big, meta-level, problem in this country.  This is a not a few people doing stupid, criminal things – or even a corrupt organization dong stupid criminal things on a large scale. This is a cultural trend.  What have we done to ourselves?

Taken individually, there are all sorts of places to place blame.  In Minnesota, it looks like the Italian mob of the old has been replaced by the  Somali gang of today.  California screams of “generous to a flaw” and simple government ineptitude.  But when you throw the science fraud into the mix, something deeper is at play here, something very deep.

It’s easy to look at this and say “It’s a blue state problem,” or “We all know how liberal those universities are.” But that is just too easy.  At a minimum we conservatives have been asleep at the wheel to let things get this far.  We have permitted ourselves to be distracted by some shiny bauble or the other to let them get away with things to this extent.  There is a problem here that runs deeper than the red/blue divide.

We can begin to unravel this mystery by noting that fraud in university research indicates that character no longer plays a major role in forming students these days.  Universities seem interested in passing on information to their students – but not caring what kind of people those students actually are.  When I was a student in science, admittedly a long time ago now, teaching integrity was a key component of my education.  Example, I once had to complete a mathematical proof that was notebook length.  Somewhere in the effort I dropped a constant – just this factor that you dragged through the computations, it did nothing but come along for the ride.  I dropped it about a third of the way through the proof and noted it missing about two-thirds of the way, so I just threw it back in.  It was an inadvertent and inconsequential goof and I figured the prof would only read the first and last parts of this tome to make sure I had mastered the computational formulas and reached the right conclusion.  I saw no need to rewrite (by hand – no computers back in that age) dozens of pages to include the constant.  I got a “B” because the prof did read through the whole thing, factor for factor, circled where I had reinserted the constant and wrote “Thought you could slip this past me, didn’t you?”  Integrity mattered when I was trained in science – but it seems that is no longer the case.

But why would our universities stop caring about character?  Lots of surface reasons come to mind – chasing dollars mostly.  But then I thought of That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis.  The fictional sci-fi story is about the battle of good versus evil as it plays out in a university setting – a university in the thrall of evil under the auspices of an ironically named organization “N.I.C.E.”.  And that fictious university seems to care more about imparting information than character to its students as well.

And so we see that the massive and widespread fraud that exists in our society right now is about more than stolen money.  It represents the death of character as a cultural value.  And when it is dead, evil will have won.

We are engaged in an extraordinary battle right now – one far beyond planes, missiles and bombs – one fought in the souls of men and women – one that demands a warrior church.  I wonder if today’s church is up to the battle?  If not, it is time to get trained up.