Me before the college-admissions scandal: Populism is a feral ideology favored by aggrieved miscreants who’d set the world on fire if they gained power.

Me after the college-admissions scandal: We should make hot dogs out of the rich.

It is not surprising that a child of privilege with zero interest in school, whose parents allegedly had to commit a federal crime just to get her into [stinkface] USC, would decide to blow off the first week of classes for a vacation in a tropical paradise. What continues to surprise is that someone this young, good-looking, connected, and vacuous doesn’t already have her own reality show. It’s not like she’s unknown either; her mom’s famous and she has more than a million “fans” on Instagram, where she does whatever it is she does. She’s basically the lost Kardashian.

Can I place a bet in Vegas that she’ll have her own show on E! by the end of the year or are they not even willing to offer odds on that?

Olivia arrived at her dorm back on August 16 of last year, posting a photo of herself with a few other social media personalities after moving in just a few days before her first day of classes.

She and her pals did not spend long checking out the campus however, as one day after classes began Olivia posted a photo of herself in Fiji.

She remained in Fiji for the entire first week of classes, and made no secret about the trip.

Olivia posted daily on her Instagram account, with galleries that showed her posing on the tropical island while her fellow co-eds were stuck in class.

She didn’t pay her own way. Evidently she was there with other, ahem, social-media “influencers” on a junket funded by the shopping app Dote. Which brings us to the most arresting line in the story: “Overnight she has gone from a college student making upwards of seven figures a years to an unemployed drop out.”

Is that how much Giannulli was pulling down to hawk make-up or whatever — upwards of a million bucks annually? Because if so, her parents’ decision to commit fraud becomes even more inexplicable. It’s a bad idea to force your kid to attend college if they show no interest and have no real aptitude, but it’s understandable if you’re worried about them easing into permanent unemployment and becoming a wastrel. Rich or not, they need to learn that they can’t depend on mom’s and dad’s money.

But … Giannulli wasn’t dependent. She was making bank. And now, thanks to the humiliation from the scandal, she’s lost all sorts of revenue streams as sponsors have dropped her. Between getting axed herself from the Hallmark Channel and the “Full House” reboot and the damage done to her daughters’ image, Loughlin has cost her family millions. Her daughter’s more dependent on her today than she was before the Great College Scam of 2018.

For now, I mean. They’ll get all of those millions back and then some once that reality show comes through. The rich in this country are never down for long.

Meanwhile, from YouGov:

We can quibble about the wording of the question there, which doesn’t mention “crime” or “bribe,” but I think it’s clear enough what’s implied by paying off college officials to “secure” a spot for your kid, particularly in the context of the news this week. A separate question asked parents more generally if they’d “pay to get their children ahead” assuming they had the means to do so. The split that time was 44/26. And questions like these are sure to elicit some false replies due to social desirability bias, with respondents not wanting to admit to a pollster just how corrupt they’re willing to be to help their children advance in life. There are many things we can say about Loughlin’s alleged crime but the impulse that drove her isn’t unrelatable, especially if she was honestly worried about what her daughters would do with their lives as they got older and the social-media interest in them began to fade. It’s possible that she didn’t want USC diplomas for them purely as a prestige thing but because she worried that they might eventually have ambitions that required a serious academic credential to realize.

Well, semi-serious. It’s USC.

I do feel a little bad for Loughlin. In the end she was betrayed by the promise of the American dream, to get so rich that you can do anything you want with zero accountability. Imagine her shock when she found out there’d be consequences — for, of all things, being an overzealous parent.

Update: This can’t be real.

Lifestyle vlogger Olivia Jade Giannulli, 19, took on fellow influencer Marissa Rachel and singer Rydel Lynch in a 2016 episode of Tap That Awesome App for a now defunct Verizon mobile phone channel.

But when Rachel was declared the winner in front of a live audience she says studio execs mysteriously stepped in and ordered producers to re-shoot the final few questions.

When the trivia contest resumed Rachel and Lynch were under orders not to buzz in with the correct answers, leaving Giannulli to take home first prize, a $5,000 donation to a charity of her choice, it’s alleged.

“What happened just didn’t seem right to me,” said Rachel to Daily Mail. Could just be sour grapes by someone who lost the contest fair and square, right? Well, no: The Daily Mail claims that a production source confirmed that Rachel won and that the ending was reshot to let Giannulli take the prize. Did Lori Loughlin offer to cut the producers a check or something? Or was this a case of the producers deciding to let the most “marketable” contestant succeed?