September 21, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Hard Bigotry of Progressives.

This is just a refusal to acknowledge disparities not only in race and income, but in parental expectations, discipline, and an education system meant to fail children forward. It’s not segregation, money, teachers, or all the other people Jones has decided to blame that are holding black children in New York City back. It is the failure of parents to demand more from their children, and the failure of the teachers’ union and government to fail children forward. Black children in Mississippi don’t have universal school choice, a voucher program, or anywhere near the kind of money spent on black students in New York City, $52,349 in the case of Jones’s daughter’s school vs. $12,324 for the average school in Mississippi. Yet, the latter outperforms New York City students in testing.

Neither Jones nor her daughter can admit the hard truth that these black students didn’t have less when it came to school spending. In fact, because of New York City’s Fair Student Funding rule, she and her classmates actually had more.

In the comment section of the article, Jones said her daughter doesn’t believe she’s being hard enough on herself, and there’s a lot of truth to that. How did she knowingly put her child in an unsafe, failing school without supplemental tutoring? Why did she wait till the fourth grade to realize that none of her work was being graded? For someone who claims to be an education expert, Jones was constantly surprised. Still, aside from running to the principal or emailing the teacher, she didn’t do personalized follow-up to make sure her daughter met her standards. It’s question after question on a slow-moving train wreck that’s supposed to conclude with the thought that at least she was honest. But is that enough? Because if she had her way, her daughter would still be on track for a much harder life, where she failed to meet the basic needs of a college freshman. So she would have been left behind, and it would have been nearly impossible ever to catch up.

Jones worries that in fighting for all children and standing true to her values, she let her child down, but she’s asking the wrong question entirely. It’s not that raising your children with values rooted in your ideological framework is a bad decision; it’s the choice most parents make, whether that be based on religion, culture, or politics. The problem is that Jones’ ideology is inherently poisonous.

All of her answers to the problems were because of whiteness, structural racism, funding, poor teachers, or understaffing; on deeper examination, all of those explanations fall apart. Jones is so profoundly inept at analyzing cause and effect that at this point it’s a moral failing.

Metaphor alert:

Still though, Glenn noted in the very early days of Instapundit:

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

So as the proverbial liberal who’s been mugged by reality, welcome onboard, NHJ!

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

UNEXPECTEDLY: Mamdani: Quality of Life, Efficiency, Rooting Out Fraud Have “Somehow Come To Be Seen as Somehow a Right-Wing Concern:”

Life I said, unexpectedly:

Tweet continues:

See the entire defund the police movement and homelessness nonprofits in California. Gavin Newsom promised to end homelessness and instead it ballooned on purpose.

This is why there was such enormous flip out over Trump renovating the reflecting pool or Spencer Pratt’s campaign.

Once people realize that things can be improved a lot of nonprofits and public union/money dries up. There is a reason why cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and now Denver all look the same because they are all run by the same people running the exact same scam.

In May during L.A.’s Spencer Pratt boomlet, Christopher Rufo tweeted:

Spencer Pratt grew up in a California that delivered all of the public services in the background without much fuss, and consequently, one could live out the California archetypes of the surfer, the burnout, or the party animal, and it was more or less as depicted in the movies…Pratt has a better understanding of the California Dream than a rigid, humorless apparatchik like Nithya Raman, who views the state as raw material for an ideological formula.

In contrast, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2024 of Chicago’s Mayor Daley:

Daley was a real New Deal-style liberal, but he would have no use for Shorism or Lakoff-ism. He barely spoke American. He once declared he was proud to welcome the “poet lariat” of Chicago. He complained of his enemies, “They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me.” He famously defended the Chicago police (which, we should concede did some indefensible things) by saying “Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all—the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

But he knew how to get snow cleared.

Again, I’m not trying to romanticize Daley, but I guarantee you a great many current residents of Chicago (or New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.) would be far, far, happier to pay taxes for Daley-style government than to pay for what they have now—even if you convinced people that taxes are really just membership fees.

Democrats in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York would similarly accept a lot of corruption in their local government — if it still delivered basic services, such as fighting crime, putting out fires and repairing roads:

As Democrats continually move back and to the left, back and to the left, they continue to cede a massive amount of ideological ground to the right:

Screenshot

Not to mention, the English language itself. When even Van Jones notices how crazy the lefty lexicon has gotten over the past decade, and how off-putting it feels to those not in the cult, it may be too difficult to temporarily reel the smugness back in: ‘I’ve Never Met A LatinX:’ CNN’s Van Jones Tears Into Left-Wing Rhetoric.

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Bowling Alone. 

The New Hotness? Get outside, do things with the guys:

 

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ATTACK DOG WITH A SMILE:

Related:

Posted at 4:34 pm by Stephen Green

DENMARK TOOK IN 321 PALESTINIAN REFUGEES IN 1992. DECADES LATER, 61% HAD BEEN CONVICTED OF CRIMES:

 

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

PERSPECTIVE:

Posted at 4:03 pm by Stephen Green

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES ALWAYS HAS THE LAST LAUGH:

Posted at 3:32 pm by Stephen Green

REAGAN WAS RIGHT ON STAR WARS: More than 1,500 Iranian ballistic missiles have been intercepted before striking U.S. military targets and other targets in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The President who first proposed the  Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) nee “Star Wars” in 1983 was lambasted for proposing the impossible. Too bad those critics aren’t around today to see Reagan’s vision being fulfilled.

Posted at 3:31 pm by Mark Tapscott

VOTE AS THOUGH YOUR LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY DEPEND UPON IT*:

*Because they do.

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Do COVID And AI Rhyme?

Think about that for a moment.

Some of the people leading the race are now asking government to help slow the race.

Business titans generally don’t beg Washington to regulate their industries. When they do, it is reasonable to ask why.

Perhaps these executives genuinely fear what they are creating. Given the extraordinary capabilities of AI, that possibility should not be dismissed.

But there is another possibility.

Regulation is expensive. Giant corporations can afford armies of lawyers, compliance officers, lobbyists, engineers, and safety researchers. Smaller competitors and startups often cannot. What begins as a regulatory guardrail can eventually become a competitive moat.

Investor Steve Eisman, famous for anticipating the 2008 housing collapse, recently made precisely this argument, suggesting that AI companies warning of catastrophe may benefit from regulations that protect dominant firms from competitors.

That doesn’t prove motive, but it certainly makes the question worth asking.

And the political cavalry was arriving at roughly the same time.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

BUT GOOD LUCK NEUTERING THE TRIAL LAWYER LOBBY:

Posted at 2:29 pm by Stephen Green

FLASHBACK: The Banality of Leninism. “Historians often act like Lenin’s tyranny was a bolt from the blue: Who would have expected a bunch of socialists to be so bloodthirsty? Admirers of Lenin, in contrast, often paint him as a great innovator – at least as a strategist. A dictatorship of the proletariat run by a vanguard party of bourgeois intellectuals? Only Lenin could have conceived it. When you read 19th-century Russian literature, however, “Leninist” memes clearly predate the birth of Lenin. Contrary to many historians, Lenin’s atrocities were foreseeable. And contrary to Lenin’s admirers, his strategy of atrocity was pure cliche.”

This piece is from 2012 but is as timely as ever.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green