SIX ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS PARENTS MUST ASK ABOUT THEIR KIDS’ SCHOOLS, from Susan L.M. Goldberg at the PJM Parenting section, including:

4. Is the academic program geared towards academics or political messaging?

In fifth grade we were introduced to the concept of “multiculturalism”. My school district felt the best way to introduce us to other cultures was by partnering with another elementary school in the district for special programming on cultures of third world nations. This boiled down to one primarily white school meeting up with another primarily white school, splitting into carefully crafted groups that included at least one student of color, and watching a bunch of white teachers shake rain sticks at us to demonstrate the culture of Africa. Sound highly hypocritical? It gets better.

We were told to work together to create group names. The “person of color” in our group was a goof off from my own class. When he suggested a name I felt was stupid, I as much told him so. Everyone else agreed. When the teachers came around to see how we were doing, the “person of color” accused me of bullying him. “That’s not nice, Susan. We have to respect other people’s cultures. I think that’s a great name for the group. That will be your name.” The name was “The Orange Juices.” Totally multicultural and reflective of his native culture, I’m sure.

Contrast that experience to the one I had in my gifted classes led by a very old school teacher, Mrs. Lenox. Our first class focused on learning Bloom’s Taxonomy, a method of study that would guide how we would approach every topic over the course of the year. Not only did she lay out topics of study, she explained the method she’d be using to teach. Everyone was on the same page from day one and it made sense.

If you want your child to grow up to be an independent thinker and a leader, take a look at the curriculum with this question in mind: Is your child being taught to learn in an objective fashion, or play political ball in a bureaucratic system?

Well, playing political ball in a far left bureaucratic system is what teachers do, so it’s no wonder they want to pass that “skill” onto the kids they indoctrinate teach. As Glenn noted in his 2014 book, The New School, it’s not a coincidence that the typical school is modeled after the factories of the early 20th century and is designed to churn out cogs to fill their assembly lines, even if there are less and less of them in the US. “Thus, the traditional public school: like a factory, it runs by the bell. Like machines in a factory, desk and students are lined up in orderly rows. When shifts (classes) change, the bell rings again, and the students go to the next class. And within each class, the subjects are the same, and the examinations are the same, regardless of the characteristics of the individual students.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 859.

EUROPE’S FAILING DREAM:

If French presidential elections were held today, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, could come out on top in the first round. Ms. Le Pen would easily beat the current president, François Hollande, and might even edge out the center-right’s most likely candidate, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, according to recent polls. Voters hostile to the National Front would still band together to hand Marine a defeat in the second round if elections were held today, the same polls show. She would, however, end up carrying between 41 and 45 percent of the vote.

And that poll was held before the migrant crisis convulsed Europe.

The National Front, the party founded by Ms. Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972, has never been as popular as it is today. At the height of his own popularity, Mr. Le Pen won 16.9 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, but was soundly defeated in the second round. His daughter, who took over the party leadership in 2011, beat her father’s best showing on her first try, coming in with 17.9 percent of the vote in the 2012 elections. With the atmosphere in France increasingly uncertain, she may well have the shot in 2017 that her father never did.

And the National Front is not the only far-right party on the popularity upswing. All across Europe, far-right parties are making big strides. In Hungary, the ultranationalist Jobbik party, whose members have been accused of holding rabidly anti-Semitic views, is riding high in the polls and is now the second strongest party in Hungary. In April of this year, Jobbik’s Lajos Rig defeated the favored candidate from the ruling center-right Fidesz in a by-election that the party’s gloating leader, Gabor Vona, described as “historic.” Similar successes are on display in Austria, where the Austrian Freedom Party had one of its best performances in 2013 when it captured 20.5 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections; in Denmark, where the Danish People’s Party is the second largest party in parliament as of the 2015 elections; in the Netherlands, where the anti-immigrant PVV is currently pulling ahead of the mainstream VVD in aggregate polls; and in Finland, where the euroskeptic True Finns have joined the government after getting 13 percent in the latest elections. Even in traditionally left-leaning Sweden, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats are the number one force in the country. With far-right parties becoming a rule rather than the exception in mainstream politics, the political landscape in Europe has been transformed.

Who could have seen this coming?

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: North Korea says it has restarted its nuclear facilities, threatens the U.S.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Wary of Russia, Estonian volunteers rush to join militia.

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: My USA Today column: Jared Polis (D-CO) and the War on College Men.

ALEX GRISWOLD: No, Hillary: Rape Victims Don’t Have A “Right To Be Believed.”

Does Hillary Clinton believe her husband is a rapist?

Now before you bite my head off, the question is a fair one given what the Democratic candidate said in a speech before a “Women for Hillary” event earlier today:

“To every survivor of sexual assault…You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. We’re with you.”

The vast majority of conservatives and liberals who are deeply concerned about sexual assault will agree with Clinton’s larger point. I don’t think anyone would disagree that victims of sexual assault who come forward have a right to be heard, a right to be taken seriously, and a right to have their claims thoroughly investigated. But Clinton goes a step further and says they have “the right to be believed.”

Well, as it happens, her own husband has been accused of sexual assault. Not once, but several times. And contrary to Clinton’s bold new standard, the media and Democrats alike elected not to believe a single accusation. “In media accounts, [Paula Jones] tends to be portrayed as a trailer-park floozy digging for money and celebrity,” Newsweek admitted back in 1997. Clinton’s own stalwart ally James Carville was just as blatant: “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, there’s no telling what you’ll find,” he said.

Accountability is for the little people.

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Hungary shuts key refugee route amid widening clampdowns across Europe.

Also: Migrant crisis: Hungary declares emergency at Serbia border. “From Tuesday, anyone who crosses the border illegally will face criminal charges, and 30 judges have been put on standby to try offenders.”

And: Germany Reinstates Passport Controls.

And this take:

And, of course, there’s this:

UPDATE: Finland Closes Its Border With Sweden.

REAP THE WHIRLWIND: Advocates Of Political Correctness Now Complaining About Blowback. If this is the best case they can make — especially with Obama himself targeting campus PC — then I’d say they’re in trouble.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Consequences of Obama’s Weakness.

GOOD IDEA: Scott Walker proposes ban on government unions.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker laid out a proposal Monday to completely overhaul the nation’s labor union laws, calling for eliminating most of the advantages private-sector unions have under federal law and prohibiting public-sector unions altogether.

The proposal, if enacted, would represent the most radical change to federal labor law in almost a century, making Walker’s labor reforms in his home state seem modest by comparison. They also would be a massive blow to the strength of organized labor, a major player in Washington politics and staunch ally of the Democratic Party.

Walker said the proposals were aimed at strengthening the rights of individual workers, which under current federal labor law are often sacrificed to bolster union strength. Unions would still exist, but they would be voluntary organizations with workers able to join or leave whenever they felt.

Related: Non-Union Workers More Happy With Work Than Union Members.

FROM THE MAN WHO HELPED BRING YOU THE ECO-PARANOIA THAT DEFINED THE EARLY 1970s: Quite a coup for Mark Steyn — Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, discovers Mark Steyn has a new book out questioning Michael Mann’s increasingly limp hockey stick and does not like what he reads.

Considering that much of what Ehrlich helped inspire in the early 1970s now sounds like Reefer Madness with bell-bottoms and long sideburns, that’s quite a glowing “reverse endorsement” indeed for Mark:

(Here’s the YouTube link if you’d like to watch the complete version of Matt Novak’s 2010 Paleofuture video, which nicely sums up the doomsday zaniness of the 1970s.)

THAT’S OKAY. WE’LL TAX THE RICH, OR PRINT MORE MONEY, OR SOMETHING. WE HAVEN’T RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY YET! Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose liberal call to action has propelled his long-shot presidential campaign, is proposing an array of new programs that would amount to the largest peacetime expansion of government in modern American history.

In all, he backs at least $18 trillion in new spending over a decade, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal, a sum that alarms conservatives and gives even many Democrats pause. Mr. Sanders sees the money as going to essential government services at a time of increasing strain on the middle class.

His agenda includes an estimated $15 trillion for a government-run health-care program that covers every American, plus large sums to rebuild roads and bridges, expand Social Security and make tuition free at public colleges.

To pay for it, Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent running for the Democratic nomination, has so far detailed tax increases that could bring in as much as $6.5 trillion over 10 years, according to his staff.

Hey, Hugo Chavez just didn’t implement socialism correctly. . . .

HIGH NOON: CARSON VERSUS TRUMP: As Roger Simon writes, “indeed, it’s not difficult to envision Ben Carson as a kind of Gary Cooper-type for our time, come to clean up America and return her to her former greatness.  The more humble he is in the process, the better, the more likely to succeed in the deepest sense:”

Of all candidates, Carson’s qualifications to handle the first of these disasters is unparalleled.  We know less of his qualifications for the second, but he says he has been boning up on foreign policy and (hello, Hugh Hewitt) he should be tested on that at the debate Wednesday.  My guess is that, unlike Donald Trump, Carson will know the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah.

This is not to say I bear any enmity toward Trump.  On the contrary, his influence on the electoral season has been hugely positive on balance.  He has brought attention to a process that is often largely ignored.  But more than that, his focus on the immigration crisis has proven prescient, not just because of the murderous domestic behavior of illegal aliens (Fisherman’s Wharf, etc.) but because of the escalating migrant crisis in Europe and the Middle East that is bound to hit our shores.  He has also spoken out definitively against the Iran deal.  Bravo, Donald!

I just think, however, that the time is ripe for Gary Cooper.  The bigger question is whether America is ready for him. Do we deserve Ben Carson if he is as moral a person as he appears to be?  Or will his political inexperience prove to be more important than some of us think? Is a decent man unfit to be president in the modern world?

RELATED: A Timely Reminder from Eisenhower and Reagan.

EVERYTHING’S A MONEY LAUNDRY OR A SLUSH FUND WITH THESE PEOPLE: Obamacare’s Blue State Money Laundry: Is Andrew Slavitt using failed exchanges to facilitate the creation of Democrat slush funds?

hen Maryland’s Attorney General announced last summer that his office had negotiated a settlement whereby $45 million would be recouped from the IT contractor that botched the state’s Obamacare exchange, it was widely reported as good news for taxpayers. It appeared that their investment in the mismanaged project would not be a dead loss. But the AG’s statement included this curious passage: “The agreement… will lead to the recovery of funds for both Maryland and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS].” What’s so odd about that? Well, the state didn’t contribute any money to the project.

All of the money used to build the failed exchange, as well as its hastily constructed replacement, came from federal start-up grants. Maryland received more than $179 million in such grants. About $73 million was paid to the original contractor, Noridian Healthcare Solutions, and another $41 million was paid to the firm that cleaned up the mess. Yet, according to the Maryland AG’s office, the state is in negotiations with CMS concerning how the $45 million will be divided. But why would Maryland receive any part of the settlement if all the money used to build and repair the exchange came from Washington?

This very question, as it happens, occurred to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch when he got wind of the Maryland deal. Hatch’s committee has been pressing Obama administration official