Sen. Elizabeth Warren says she has “zero” sympathy for parents who tipped the playing field in their children’s favor in a bid to gain them entrance to elite colleges and universities, and also the University of Southern California.
The 2020 candidate’s comments came after U.S. attorneys announced charges related to a nationwide scheme in which parents could pay off university intermediaries to effectively buy admission for their children.
During an appearance on “Morning Joe,” Wednesday, Sen. Warren was quizzed on a variety of topics, including this scandal in academia.
“So, as a parent, how much sympathy would you have for these parents who are embroiled in this alleged cheating scandal?" host Mika Brzezinski asked during a “lightning round.”
“Zero,” Warren immediately replied, making the shape of a zero with her fingers for added emphasis.
Sen. Warren recently apologized for falsely portraying herself over many decades as an American Indian to boost her career as a law professor.
Earlier in the interview, Sen. Warren defended her plan to breakup American companies that use the Internet to sell their goods and services:
Let’s use the example of Amazon. Amazon runs two kinds of businesses. One, it runs a platform. And that’s the place where all the small businesses come and they trade and they — buyers and sellers meet. And Amazon runs that platform, but also sucks out tons of information from every single transaction. It then uses that information that nobody else is privy to to look out and say, ‘Oh, there’s a profitable business. We think we’ll go into competition with them.’ And so, it then puts out a product in competition with the pillow sales guy and then moves the profitable business back to page 6 and puts Amazon right at the front, Amazon’s own business. So, the way I see this, it’s a little like baseball. We’ll use a baseball analogy here. You can be the umpire, that’s the platform, or you can have a team in the game, that’s running these individual businesses that meet on the platform. But, you don’t get to do both simultaneously. So I think those ought to be broken apart.
Warren said she would also seek to break up Apple, Facebook, and Google. Critics have said her rules would also force the breakup of companies like Visa, Wells Fargo, Intel, Walmart, Cisco Systems, and AT&T.