Left: Rachel DeLoache Williams; right: “Anna Delvey,” really Anna Sorokin in Marrakech.

She posed as a German heiress planning to lease for her own foundation a Manhattan building for a visual-arts center dedicated to contemporary art, which would also house a lounge, bar, art galleries, studio space, restaurants, and a members-only club.

She met fashionable young New York professionals at chic restaurants and bars where, Ooops! her phone failed to work when trying to charge the check, and she hadn’t bothered carrying a credit card. So her new friends obliging picked up the tab this time.

She took the dazzled Rachel DeLoache Williams, who worked at Vanity Fair, on a little outing to a [£5,485 a night] villa she’d booked at Marrakech. But it did not work quite the way Rachel was expecting.

Stylist:

On the morning we were supposed to leave, she asked for my help booking the flights because there was a problem with her card. I didn’t think too much of it; this was just the way she was: disorganised. I’d seen her book things last minute so many times and I knew she would reimburse me.

From there, it was a trickle effect. At the airport, Anna ‘accidentally’ checked her wallet, which meant I had to pay for everyone’s dinner (she brought a photographer and her personal trainer, too). Her card still wasn’t working for the rest of the trip, so I began adding things to a tab (dinners, kaftans). I had presumed our villa was pre-paid, but at some point the hotel manager began asking to speak with Anna.
The penny drops

On the third day of the trip, I walked into our villa and the hotel managers were standing in the doorway. Anna was sitting with her phone on the table in front of her, like she was waiting for something. A call, apparently. One of the managers turned to me and asked if I had a credit card. They were firm. I looked to Anna and she said ‘use it for now’. My stomach sank. It would have felt weirdly ungrateful to show my annoyance, so I gave it to them. I was told the charge was only temporary – it wasn’t – and I left the next morning, a day before she did.

This is when everything started to unravel. Every day I asked her for the money back and every day she promised it would arrive. I thought she was just doing a characteristically bad job of following through with logistical things. It was $62,000 [about £48,800] in total.

This went on for an excruciatingly long time – two months – and my life started falling apart. I was having panic attacks constantly, not sleeping. It took me a strikingly long time to even ask myself the question: what if she never pays you back? Because that would mean I’d have to look at how that would impact my life, and I knew if I did that, I would’ve lost it. I already wasn’t saving any money – New York is expensive, and I was barely breaking even – so to be set back 60-something thousand dollars? It felt like, ‘I am never going to get out of this hole. This is where it ends for me. I’m not going to get to buy a house, I’m not going to get to be a real adult, I’m never going to have kids.’

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More book excerpts at Crime Reads.

But, cheer up, Rachel wrote up the story of her misfortunes as a book, My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress, and she will probably come out ahead in the end.

link

and he is demonstrably a well-educated fellow.

HT: Ed Driscoll via Karen L. Myers.

According to witnesses, a group of approximately 50 people were within 5-10 feet of the bison for at least 20 minutes before eventually causing the bison to charge the group. https://t.co/ThjGGamn7m via @billingsgazette

— Tom Lutey (@TomLutey) July 24, 2019

Bruce Hay.

How smart are the elite intelligentsia really? Should ordinary Americans be more deferential and start bowing to the consensus of the elite on Global Warming, on Social Justice, and on Donald Trump?

Before you make up your mind read the introductory comments by Rod Dreher below and follow the link to the original New York Magazine story.

Sit down, my people, and read the craziest true story you will read this year or maybe even this decade.

It is written by a journalist named Kera Bolonik, who has made an extremely complicated story comprehensible, in the sense that she recalls a logical progression of events. Nothing else about it makes sense. It’s a story about a liberal Harvard Law professor who is a world-historical boob — and about how two grifters (a transwoman and his best friend) stole his house and used Title IX to further ruin his life.

In 2015, a mysterious young woman named Maria-Pia Shuman flirted with Prof. Bruce Hay in a Cambridge hardware store. Hay, who makes Pajama Boy come off like Vin Diesel. is married, but he and his wife, Jennifer Zacks, live together with their children as roommates, no longer lovers. What would a little fling with the sexy young woman hurt? …

Read it all. Trust me. I’m not going to go further here, because to tell even just a piece of it without telling the whole story would not do it justice. You have to read to see what these insane grifters did to this moron and his innocent wife and kids. It really does read like Fatal Attraction meets a transgender Bonfire of the Vanities. Golden quote: “I just really hate the patriarchy, that’s it.”

Taki recently had some unkind thoughts about today’s rising generation, all their talk about trigger-warnings and microaggressions, their complaints about being made to feel “unsafe.”

[L]et’s [discuss] the young, or snowflakes, as they’re called nowadays. Last year I spent a week on the beaches of Normandy in the company of some military historians preparing their books for this year’s 75th anniversary of D-Day. We visited the first German bunker to be hit right on the edge of the beach about fifty yards from the sea. James Holland, the noted British historian, pointed out that the first Victoria Cross was awarded to a Scot grenadier who blew up the bunker, killing all the Germans inside. I pointed out to him that the defenders were mostly men over 50 and some youngsters of 16 and 17. They had a couple of machine guns and a Panzerfaust—bazooka—as weapons. Looking out, they had seen 6,700 ships or so firing their huge guns at them. No one had run. They had stood and died at their posts. It was not a popular argument—everyone was British—but the courage of the German soldier was not disputed. Nor, of course, of the invading American, British, and Canadian troops.

What does the above have to do with the hissy fits sparked by our youth of today? Everything! The men who fought on the beaches 75 years ago never saw themselves as worthy of special treatment. None of them were “offended” or “upset” when ordered to jump into the water under a hail of bullets and hit the beaches. Ditto the Germans when ordered to stand and fight against incredible superior odds. When the snowflakes complain about some rape scene in a long-ago-published book, and the fact they had not been warned about it, I wonder what the men who fought on those beaches must think. (Thank God for the brave men, very few are left alive to read such BS.) But dear readers, try to imagine these phone zombies, selfie addicts, and me-me-me gamers of today being ordered to attack or defend those beaches. They would expire before the first shot was fired. Long live us oldies.

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US President Donald Trump pumps his fists as he arrives for a “Make America Great Again” rally at Minges Coliseum in Greenville, North Carolina, on July 17, 2019. (Photo by Nicholas Kamm / AFP) (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

The New York Times’ derisive response to the 50th Anniversary of America’s triumphant landing on the Moon made the blood of many people boil, but really wasn’t anything new.

The liberalism of the American Establishment moved significantly in the direction of the rancid radical Left in the six years between the death of JFK and the Apollo space crew’s moon landing. Even as far back in 1969, as Steven Hayward notes, the liberals were turning against the Space Program.

[W]e shouldn’t underestimate how dramatically liberals turned against the Apollo project at the moment of its triumph—a sign of the larger collapse of liberalism in the 1960s. The moon landing had been set out as a lofty goal by the liberals’ hero, John F. Kennedy, and the moon landing was an occasion of national pride and celebration for most Americans. Here, amidst the rubble and gloom of the 1960s, was something that had gone splendidly right. Many leading liberals, however, could only sniff that while the moon landing was undeniably impressive, the money for the moon landing would have been better spent on social problems on Earth. The popular cliché of the time went: “Any nation that can land a man on the moon can [fill in the blank].” (The total cost of the decade-long moon landing project was less than three months’ worth of federal spending for social programs in 1969.)

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield said that “The needs of the people on earth, and especially in this country, should have priority. When we solve these problems, we can consider space efforts.” Even the brother of the man who issued the call to go to the moon, Sen. Ted Kennedy, expressed weariness with the space program: “I think after [the moon landing] the space program ought to fit into our other national priorities.”

This may have been the moment when liberalism certified that it had become a crabbed and negative force in American life. It has never recovered.

RTWT