NEW YORK, NY — Liberals around the country prepared to commemorate the anniversary of October eighth, the day Israel attacked Gaza completely unprovoked.
Progressives gathered to hold moments of silence for those killed on the first day of Israel’s stunning attack on the peaceful Palestinians living in Gaza.
“We will never know why the Jews decided to be so violent on this day,” activist Kristina Mac told friends. “We need to have a protest and condemn Israel’s cruel and evil actions against the poor, benevolent people living in Gaza. These people were simply minding their own business, standing around being peaceful, when the Israelis rolled in. It’s still so hard to understand.”
Democrats have long railed against the Jewish state for their shocking, groundless actions on October the eighth. “Israel, out of nothing but spite, slaughtered 40 billion Gazans in cold blood,” said local Democrat Marcus Haynes. “The Zionist scum attacked the happy, basket-weaving pacifists of Palestine simply because they could. We will always mark this dark and sad day in history, remembering the kindly Gazans who lost their lives for no reason.”
At publishing time, liberals had also condemned the invasion of Normandy during WWII as a disproportionate attack on the peaceful Germans.
In what is clearly an existential war, will the French government fight back and, if it doesn’t, will the French people? Or, more importantly, can the French people?
France’s urban areas have extremely large Muslim populations. I mean, extremely large. Now, those same populations are rampaging through the streets, attacking people, and setting buildings on fire. This is an existential problem for France, and it’s unclear whether the government will stop it and, if it doesn’t, whether the French people (mostly disarmed, of course) will step up to save themselves.
Let me take this step by step. First, how big is the urban Muslim population across France? Because France is an aggressively secular nation, it does not officially collect religious data, so the numbers are estimates and can be a little confusing, as they encompass both urban centers and the suburbs ringing those centers. Still, the data are useful. I asked ChatGPT to assemble the available data, which I present here. Please follow this link to see the caveats it attached to this data, and this link to see its source material.
Now, combine that data with reports of riots across France. This AP report gives a little background:
Thousands of arrests, hundreds of injuries, schools set on fire in France. When the summer vacation ended and the new term started just a month ago, few could have imagined that the academic year would so quickly descend into nationwide student protests — and turmoil.
In a country beset by crises — both foreign and domestic — the eruption and rapid spread of protests by unhappy teenage high schoolers caught France off guard.
Friday brought more of the scenes that have dominated streets this week: vandalism, garbage fires, teens confronting and taunting police. Officers charging, firing tear gas and making more arrests. By early afternoon, the education ministry reported protests impacting 560 schools.
Lest readers get upset, the AP hastens to assure them that (a) street protests are a common feature in France (that’s true) and (b) that the high school students have a level of professionalism, right down to masks and goggles to protect against tear gas.
Ostensibly, the protests are about bad schools:
High schoolers are expressing broad grievances — mainly, schools are under-resourced, with dilapidated facilities and insufficient staff. Still, spending on education is one of the costliest items in the state budget that Macron’s government proposed this week, with 65.5 billion euros ($74 billion) set aside for schools in the next year. That’s more than the proposed 63.4 billion euros for defense.
Students also complain that school days, which often start at 8 a.m., are too exhausting and the university entrance system too complex. Some university students also joined the protests this week.
Yeah, maybe. But footage on the ground suggests that the protesters aren’t students who want nicer buildings and better teachers. Instead, a lot of the footage suggests that the protesters are Muslim immigrants flexing their muscles:
Not coincidentally, the flags the protesters are flying aren’t French at all…
It’s ironic, really, that the French national anthem is La Marseillaise, named after the city in France with the largest percentage of Muslims and the most aggressive Palestinian…er, Muslim…er, student rioting.
As the AP report quoted above notes, the French police have been busy arresting the rioters. But I doubt the efficacy of that approach. I also doubt many, if any, will have serious jail time or any jail time at all. The left is allied with Islam, and the left fears Islam. That means Islam is in the driver’s seat.
Given an anticipated weak French response, will the French population act? Despite France’s periodically dismal war record since Napoleon’s downfall (despite some victories, it’s failed enough to be a standing joke), the French have been a warlike people, and darn good at it, too. Their generals have been awful, whether at Agincourt in 1415 or during WWI and WWII, but the French citizens used to be brave.
Are they still brave? And does bravery matter when you’ve voluntarily disarmed yourself in an orgy of virtue signaling, as all good citizens across Europe have done?
Currently, France has fewer than 12.7 million civilian-held firearms, compared to the 400 million or so in the U.S. Even adjusting for America’s larger population, that works out to ~120.5 firearms per 100 people in America, and only ~19.6 per hundred in France. Are they going to throw champagne bottles and frogs’ legs at rampaging “second- and third-generation migrants” who have a living culture of violence, rather than just a faded history of warfare?
Unrecognized at the time, Europe basically died in WWII. America kept it on life support for a long time, and it went through the motions of living. But once Europe embraced leftism and, through that, unlimited Islamic immigration, it began dismantling the very values that created it.
What’s happening now is tragic to watch, but it feels terribly inevitable. The European train is already halfway across a collapsing bridge stretched high over a bottomless abyss.
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Home-educated students do notably better on standardized academic tests on average than those in institutional schools, according to a powerful new study reviewing available data.
In an exclusive interview, the researcher behind the analysis expressed surprise that homeschoolers continue to perform so well even as the movement diversifies and grows ever larger.
For years, parents struggling with the decision of how to educate their children have wondered if homeschooling really provides as strong of an academic base as a conventional school. In the last 50 years, homeschooling has gone from being perceived as a fringe experiment to a form of education serving around six percent of American school-age children; that is about 3.4 million K-12 homeschool students.
This mainstreaming of homeschooling has led to a lot of questions regarding the effectiveness of home education — especially whether children are really learning.
National Home Education Research Institute chief Dr. Brian Ray, widely considered the nation’s top academic in this field, sought to answer this and other questions.
Groundbreaking New Study
Just this summer, Dr. Ray published one of the largest nationwide studies of its kind on the subject. It is the first national academic-achievement study of home education in more than 15 years.
The results were clear and overwhelming: Home-educated students continue to perform well, scoring 25 to 29 percentile points above the national average.
The average student is at the 50th percentile. Dr. Ray found that the average homeschool student is scoring in the 75th to 79th percentile range.
This study used numerous tests and examined reading, language, math, science, and social studies.
Although standardized tests are not a perfect way to measure the likelihood of success, they are still a meaningful metric that deserves to be looked at when evaluating academic abilities, Dr. Ray said.
Similar studies have been done in the past, although more than 15 years ago. Over the last 15 years, homeschoolers have continued to stay ahead of the norm, even as the homeschool community continues to diversify.
When Dr. Ray was asked whether anything surprised him about the results, he responded that he thought it was possible to have more regression toward the national mean, as the reasons for homeschooling have continued to grow.
Over the last 15 years, homeschooling has changed at an astonishing pace. These are just some of the reasons that Dr. Ray and his team sought answers.
The Methodology
The researchers used several well-established tests and examined students across five core subjects. But they did not stop there. Instead, the researchers considered variables such as household income, parental education levels, sex, number of children per family, ethnicity, and several other factors.
Some critics claim that homeschoolers simply do better because their families are wealthier or the parents have better education. These are among the claims that the researchers sought to examine.
The results were surprising, even to the researchers. They found that neither household income nor parental education levels had a meaningful relationship with the child’s educational achievement. Ethnicity made almost no difference either; neither did government intervention.
All of this would seem to go against what would be expected. It is in stark contrast with typical research on public and private institutional-school education, where economic and ethnic factors play a major role.
Benefits of Homeschooling
When Dr. Ray was asked why these trends did not hold true in home education, he offered several hypotheses.
“When you have more individualized attention, when you have a more customized curriculum, when you have less bullying, when you have a safer environment, when you have more academically engaged time, when you have more caring and nurturing relationships — all of those things, from social science research on human relationships and experience, generally make for a better education,” said Dr. Ray.
In short, Dr. Ray believes the very structure and nature of homeschooling itself is among the key factors that produce better outcomes and a more level playing field for all children.
While this is the largest and most up-to-date study of its kind, researchers cautioned that it does not prove homeschooling is better for every child, that every homeschooler will score above average, or even that homeschooling causes higher-than-average test scores.
Standardized tests are limited and do not measure every academic area. Scoring high on a test and having a successful education are not the same thing.
However, the study is important, as it shows homeschoolers’ performance relative to the national norm, as well as relationships between demographic variables and homeschool achievement.
Resurgence in Homeschooling
After the recent surge in homeschooling — NHERI estimates almost 3.5 million U.S. children are now home-educated — questions about how this happened are coming to the forefront. But the reality is that, throughout most of American history, homeschooling was the norm.
It was not until the early 20th century that home education began to decline. But according to the pro-government-regulation Coalition for Responsible Home Education, by the 1980s, it was slowly gaining popularity again.
The resurgence in homeschooling has fueled debate over whether parents can provide an adequate education without the help of the government. The new study offers still more evidence that they can — and do.
Even after such a large and comprehensive study, parents still have questions. Dr. Ray said he is already collecting data and formulating yet another nationwide study on homeschooling, although not much information has been shared publicly yet.
Answering the Critics
Despite all of this, homeschooling still has its critics. Questions about home education being discussed in legislatures nationwide and around the world right now go beyond academics, too.
Will homeschooled children be prepared for adulthood? Will they integrate well into society? Can parents really provide a well-rounded education?
Asked about which of these questions and criticisms, if any, should be taken seriously, Dr. Ray said parents need to take homeschooling seriously and do it responsibly, “with care and diligence, without being anxious or stressed out about it.”
“You don’t get to be lazy or sloppy; you need to put solid effort into it,” added Dr. Ray, who homeschooled his own eight children. “There is criticism against some parents, but it’s only some parents, and within the homeschool community, let’s watch out for each other and help each other.”
When asked about the strongest criticism that could be made of his study, Dr. Ray cited its limitations. “In research, we talk about limitations,” he responded. “If research is well done, you talk about limitations, whereas people who like to attack a researcher use the word ‘flaws.’”
The study also does not show why homeschoolers score so much higher than the national average, or whether the impressive results are directly attributable to home education, he explained. That means more research is needed.
“I would say that for the genuine scholar who thinks the limitations of this study or other studies are too much, I would encourage him or her: Go do your own study and show us what we are missing, rather than just opine and make critical comments,” he said. “Get the data yourself and do the study — please do the study.”
The sixth Assisi gathering will feature 384 religious representatives from 53 countries and promote what organizers describe as the ‘spiritual unification’ of the world.
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Leo XIV will travel to Assisi on October 27 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the controversial interreligious prayer gathering launched by Pope John Paul II in 1986, together with representatives of the world’s religions.
On October 6, a press conference organized by the Community of Sant’Egidio announced that the international meeting marking the 40th anniversary of the World Day of Prayer for Peace convened by John Paul II in 1986 will take place in Assisi from October 25 to 27. The event will bring together 384 representatives of religions, cultures, and institutions from 53 countries, with 155 speakers participating in 24 thematic forums. Pope Leo XIV will preside over the Christian prayer service in the Lower Basilica of St. Francis and will deliver the concluding address in the square in front of the basilica.
Marco Impagliazzo, president of the Community of Sant’Egidio, quoting the historian Alberto Melloni, stated that Assisi interreligious gatherings represent “a turning point in contemporary Catholicism’s attitude towards other religions, and a turning point in the vision that non-Christian religions have of Christianity.”
Over the course of the gathering, 13 separate venues will be used for simultaneous prayer by the different religious groups, which organizers say is intended to avoid the appearance of “religious syncretism,” in keeping with John Paul II’s original vision. At the conclusion of the meeting, participants are expected to sign and proclaim a joint message of peace addressed to the world.
In addition to the Pope, Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi will also be present, not only in his capacity as president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference but also as a leading figure within the Community of Sant’Egidio, as well as Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, archbishop of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The gathering will feature Andrea Riccardi, the founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio; the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople; Nasaruddin Umar, Indonesia’s minister of Religious Affairs and imam of Jakarta’s mosque; and Hala al-Karib, a Sudanese activist. Chief Rabbi of France Haim Korsia will also be present.
On September 28, during the Pope’s apostolic journey through France, together with other representatives of religions, Korsia signed the Metz Appeal in the presence of Leo XIV, a document that echoes the “Spirit of Assisi” and once again proposes all religions as necessary instruments for “disarming” the world.
The topics of the 24 scheduled forums cover a broad range of issues, including disarmament, climate change, and migration. These discussion sessions will feature representatives of major secular and globalist organizations, foremost among them the Gates Foundation, as well as a number of secular intellectuals.
“The theme of the spiritual unification of the world is something that is truly important … to infuse a discourse on universal fraternity, Fratelli tutti, into different cultural and religious contexts,” Impagliazzo stated.
According to Impagliazzo, the “spiritual unification” of the world is necessary to counter the resurgence of nationalism, which he says is undermining the multilateralism promoted by international bodies such as the United Nations and the European Union. Religions, on his account, can serve as useful instruments in the hands of these institutions for reaffirming their vision of the world.
During the press conference, Impagliazzo also made critical reference to the objections raised by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre from the time of the first 1986 gathering: “I remember the Lefebvrists, the most ferocious critics … because it was believed that continuing these meetings would pose risks of turning the Church into a spectacle … or even of syncretism…. No syncretism: everyone according to their own traditions.”
On October 27, 1986, at the invitation of Pope John Paul II and with the close cooperation of the Community of Sant’Egidio, which decided not to limit the “Spirit of Assisi” to a one-time event, 130 representatives of various Christian denominations and world religions gathered in Assisi for the World Day of Prayer for Peace.
The event immediately provoked indignation in broad sectors of the Church. Among the most controversial episodes was the placement of a statue of Buddha on the tabernacle inside the Church of St. Peter in Assisi.
On October 28, 1999, John Paul II renewed the interreligious gathering with a new large assembly held between Rome and Assisi. On that occasion, Bishop Bernard Fellay of the Society of St. Pius X sent a formal letter of protest to the pontiff, denouncing the revival of a scandal that placed the one true Church founded by Christ on the same level as pagan and heretical religions.
Subsequently, on January 24, 2002, the third interreligious gathering took place in Assisi, once again convened by John Paul II in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York. Particularly scandalous for many Catholics was the joint prayer of Catholic representatives alongside non-Christian religious leaders.
With the election of Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican hierarchy attempted to recalibrate ecumenical dialogue, but events such as his visit to Istanbul’s Blue Mosque on November 30, 2006, demonstrated substantial continuity with the line of the “Spirit of Assisi.”
On October 27, 2011, Benedict XVI convened the fourth Assisi interreligious meeting, to mark the 25th anniversary of the first prayer gathering. At this meeting, Pope Benedict decided to include atheists and non-believers among the official guests invited to the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels.
On September 20, 2016, Pope Francis presided over the fifth interreligious gathering marking the 30th anniversary of the original event, bolstered in part by the significant influence of the Community of Sant’Egidio on the agenda and orientation of his pontificate.
Regardless of why Putin might have held off on this for so long, he’s now arguably motivated at least in part by the tantalizing possibility of reaching big-ticket resource deals with the US after the conflict ends, the details of which his and Trump’s envoys have been negotiating for over a year already.
The New York Times cited allegedly intercepted Russian communications to report that Russia plans to obliterate Ukraine’s power, heating, and water systems this winter. While their claim can’t be confirmed, it aligns with Putin mildly “escalating to de-escalate” over the summer in response to Zelensky’s strike campaign, which has taken the form of ramping up attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. If the report is true, then Russia doesn’t just aim to sever Ukraine’s military logistics, but to bring Ukraine to its knees.
Putin has thus far eschewed this arguably due to his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are kindred people. Some have suggested that Russia might not have had the drone and/or missile capacity to do so earlier, however, whether due to low production till now and/or to hedge against the scenario of a hot war with NATO. In any case, Putin now seems to have made peace with the humanitarian consequences of ending the war on Russia’s terms sooner rather than later, or at least on as many of them as possible.
He might be motivated by more than just Ukraine’s “war of attrition” against Russia that began over the summer with American backing and interestingly enough France’s as well. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly told his Russian counterpart over the summer that no business deals are possible so long as the conflict continues. Since then, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with Putin to discuss such deals among other topics, after which Kirill Dmitriev traveled to the US to follow up on that.
For background, Putin boasted in late February 2025 that American companies “will make a decent profit” from investments in Russia’s resource industry, and Trump’s Special Envoy to Belarus John Coale recently confirmed that he received approval to pitch a Belarusian-like deal to Putin. It would involve sanctions relief in exchange for the release of “political prisoners”. Putin’s ally Alexander Lukashenko already agreed to several such deals and is now negotiating a massive potash one with Trump.
Just last week, Lukashenko also proposed a trilateral Belarusian, Russian, and US fertilizer plant deal, but that requires the US lifting its sanctions on Gazprom. Russian officials from Putin on down have called for the West to lift its sanctions on Russia, and while the US might lift some if Putin agrees to a Belarusian-like quid pro quo, the Ukrainian Conflict will first have to end for this to happen at scale. Their resultant resource-centric strategic partnership could then revolutionize the global economic architecture.
The Russian economy has survived the West’s unprecedented sanctions onslaught, largely due to the combination of its natural resources and national payment system, but its Economic Development Ministry expects only 0.6% GDP growth this year. United Russia’s landslide victory during last month’s Duma elections, the first since the large-scale phase of the Ukrainian Conflict began, gives Putin the mandate to do whatever is needed to win the war and deliver more prosperity to his people afterwards.
It’s therefore within the realm of possibility, consistent with Russia’s policy of demanding the lifting of Western sanctions, that Putin is motivated at least in part to end the conflict on as many of Russia’s terms as possible sooner rather than later so as to then reach big-ticket resource deals with the US. This imperative, which could revolutionize the global economic architecture and deliver more prosperity to his people, contextualizes the New York Times’ report about him planning to bring Ukraine to its knees
This is long, but I think it is important. We are fighting Leftists in the government and media who exclaim the virtues of Socialism, but we forget that there are legions of young people that the Left has been mercilessly (and without consequence to them) indoctrinating young people for decades without any countervailing information. This encounter I detail in this thread shows just how much and how prevalent this is. It was (for me) my first chance to drill down on young people to see just how deep and fervent their indoctrinated beliefs are.
Our Republican Town Committee (RTC) set up a booth, and we had about four to six of us staffing it from about 8:00 AM to 3:30 PM. We had campaign signs for our preferred candidates, free candy, water, political handouts, free pocket Constitutions, and a free raffle that was intended to draw people in for discussion.
Last Saturday we had a festival in my Leftist Blue State/Blue Town of about 10,000 people, where they blocked off the streets and invited vendors and groups to reserve a lot to set up a booth, with vendors and subjects covering everything from household cleaning materials and jewelry to martial arts.
Everyone knows that nearly any religious or political thing causes people to avert their eyes and walk faster as they pass the booth, so the free raffle, stocked with things like a portable Bose Speaker, movie and supermarket gift certificates, and books was intended to draw people in. (my contribution was two books by Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics-A Commonsense Guide to The Economy and Economic Facts and Fallacies…I wanted to get his bookVision of The Anointed, but I couldn’t get a copy for under $80, and wasn’t willing to spend that.)
The raffle also allowed, if someone wanted to, the ability to opt-in on our email group with the goal of increasing our membership, which now stands at maybe a couple of dozen.
We had a great time. I had a sandwich board I created that had our three prime candidates people should vote for on the front, and on the back, I had this:
But this most impactful thing that ensued over the course of the day was a group of teenagers (averaging in age of about 16-17, all males) who were obviously part of some debating club or socialist club I guessed, and in retrospect, were there with the goal of confronting Republicans to make them look ridiculous.
I say they were “obviously” part of some debating club or high school socialist club, because they came well prepared with a plethora of Leftist talking points.
I was impressed that they would make the attempt, since I understand it is a challenge for some teenagers to engage adults in this type of discussion. So they got points with me for that. I will outline our discourse below. It is a long read, but it is illustrative regarding the draw that Socialism has for young, indoctrinated people who aren’t being told anything differently, know little or nothing about economics or the real world.
I was interested, because having no children, I don’t have a direct window into how heavily they are being indoctrinated, or what they are being indoctrinated with.
One of them, obviously the spokesman or leader, had an unusual face that appeared to me to resemble the face of a Praying Mantis when viewed straight on. It was unusually triangular, broad and flat on the top, narrowing in straight lines to a very pointed chin. He came across as very self-assured and intelligent. He did most of the talking, and when he made a point that we would counter, as he spoke his piece to us and we listened, when we answered, the others would start furiously typing on their phones, and then interject points. It didn’t realize it initially, but they were undoubtedly consulting what I assumed was ChatGPT or some other AI agent.
(Note: I am a fan of Dan Bongino, and one of the points he makes repeatedly in his podcast, which I agree wholly with, is that the Left is terrified of AI that they do not have control over, the reason being-they are afraid it will tell the truth. I leveraged that repeatedly to great effect when I realized that they were leveraging ChatGPT or some other agent in real time to form their rebuttals.
We did not use AI on our side. We spoke of what we knew.
I was curious. I was really interested to find out what the intellect of these high schoolers was like. I am not one to decry young people for their beliefs these days, because I realize many of them have not been taught how to think critically, but have instead been indoctrinated by our teachers.
I will make one more observation: the adults I have interacted with and had discourse with have no deeper understanding of this hoax and political perpetual motion machine called Socialism and Communism than the young people they indoctrinate. I felt a palpable sense of relief at realizing this, even as dangerous as they are as mindless bots of the Leftist agenda.
In the mental health industry, one talks of “anxiety disorder” and “attention deficit disorder” and “mood disorder.”
The underlying implication? These diseases or disorders are the problem. Get rid of the problem, and you’ll be fine.
Cure the disease; and there will be no more symptoms.
But what if the things we call the disease are actually … just the symptoms?
Nobody ever seems to ask: Aren’t these disorders consequences of underlying problems? Are what we call mental disorders or diseases the RESULT of something that’s causing them?
Maybe what we call mental disorders are the result of mistaken thinking or self-defeating behaviors, accumulated over time. When you do the same wrong thing over and over again, and then get a poor result — lots of anxiety, or a downcast mood — maybe the problem is in your actions, choices or thinking. The mood or anxiety problem? That’s just the result.
For example, when you love someone who doesn’t love you back, or when you love someone who defines love as power and control (which aren’t love), then you eventually end up either extremely frightened or extremely sad. A psychiatrist will say, “You’ve got mental illness. You have a disease called depression.” Or anxiety disorder.
But doesn’t this mistake the symptom for the cause? Doesn’t labeling and conceptualizing things this way distract a person from the fact that he or she has more control over his or her resulting emotional state than the psychiatric industry assumes?
I know these are complex matters. But what troubles me most is that nobody even explores these questions.
I know the status quo represents an excellent deal for the mental health industry and anyone else invested (financially or ideologically or psychologically) in the status quo of looking at everything as a disease or disorder rather than error.
But I don’t know how good a deal this is for the person in pain or confusion.
The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.”
— Friedrich Hayek
“Social justice” is not voluntary. It’s enforced by law. Later, by gunpoint. Ultimately, by prison camps.
Social justice is a secular theology believed by elite leftists who do not practice it, but impose its absurdity on regular people. It always ends in bloodshed, impoverishment and despair.
*****
“Affordability” is the mantra that has everyone under some kind of concept-numbing sedation.
So, affordability matters more than liberty, choice, competition, independence, prosperity, taxes under 90 percent, free speech, gun rights, borders, fighting violent crime, better quality of life for your kids than you had, freedom from nuclear blackmail ….
Seriously, America? A slightly lower gas price (which won’t happen because of the $50 trillion in spending socialists have planned) matters more than your core freedom?
*****
President Trump’s judges in their 30s outnumber Biden’s and Obama’s. Trump has appointed 31 federal judges in their 30s at the time of appointment across his two terms, with at least two more nominees in that age group pending, far more than his predecessors, a Politico analysis of government data found. Appointments are for life. (Newsmax, 10-4-26)
A ray of hope. But if federal judges are like Supreme Court justices, then the conservatives vote far less consistently than the leftist judges. And all leftist judges are openly, ruthlessly partisan. Conservatives can be all over the map. On the Supreme Court they vote leftist half the time, while leftists never deviate from the Party line, which is always anti-liberty, anti-Constitution. Time will tell … Assuming that the totalitarians now taking control of the Democratic Party don’t establish an outright dictatorship in the coming few years.
Tennessee didn’t just fail to execute Christa Pike, argues anesthesiologist and intensive care doctor Joel Zivot in a New York Times opinion piece—it exposed what lethal injection really is. Zivot, hired as a medical expert by Pike’s legal team, says he warned that her small veins and medical history made a botched execution more likely. On Wednesday, pentobarbital was injected into her veins; when the first dose didn’t stop her heart, a second was given. Her arms turned purple, her lawyers say, and she reported extreme pain before an ambulance was finally called more than an hour after the process began. “In a matter of hours,” Zivot writes, “she had gone from a prisoner the state was trying to kill to a patient doctors were trying to save.”
Pike is now in an intensive care unit, unconscious, and on a ventilator, with doctors treating what they would describe as a poisoning. Zivot argues that lethal injection is a staged imitation of medicine that reliably risks pain and respiratory distress, citing autopsies showing fluid-filled lungs and prior botched Tennessee executions. “Gov. Bill Lee has said that as far as he knows, the Department of Correction followed its protocol exactly,” writes Zivot. “I take him at his word. That is the problem. Lethal injection failures are not glitches; they are features of the process.” If Pike survives, he notes, physicians “will hand her back to the state that may try to kill her again.” For Zivot’s full argument, read the piece in the New York Times.
American higher education is in retreat. It’s shrinking. The for-sale signs have gone up. It’s time for “inventory reduction.” Forty-nine colleges have closed since 2020. Forty others have merged with neighbors. The Huron Consulting Group says that 400 colleges are at risk of closing in the next decade. The prospect of insolvency has now moved beyond small colleges. Larger ones are closing programs and laying off faculty.
Not counting community colleges, trade schools, online-only outfits and clandestine thinkatoriums, some 2,700 four-year institutions are currently authorized to hand out college degrees in the US. That compares with 4,150 licensed hot dog stands in New York City alone and 267,000 licensed massage parlors across the country. The market for hot dogs and massages is holding steady.
The market for college degrees? Not so much. It is the old story of more supply than demand: too few students for too many seats. People who build things imagine customers will keep coming forever, until they don’t. In the 1930s, 16 major railroads folded and in the 1970s, 23 more ground to a halt. All was not lost. Americans ended up with some excellent bike paths.
At the top of the list of higher education’s woes is a demographic cliff. During the 2008 recession, young couples became baby-averse. The birthrate plunged and stayed low. Those children who were never conceived would now be freshmen, and the system built to educate them finds itself like a large bus carrying a handful of passengers.
The cost of running the bus doesn’t decline in sync with the loss of riders. Fixed expenses don’t like falling revenues. Moreover, the dearth of children will continue for at least 15 more years. Colleges can’t wait it out.
Higher education knew this was coming and tried to offset it by recruiting more students from abroad and cajoling more Americans unsuited to college to enroll anyway. The ditching of SATs at 90 percent of the institutions marked the advent of the enrollment-at-any-cost era. The gains were marginal and the cost to academic reputation was large.
There are other reasons why college enrollment is in crisis. For one thing, Americans of all political persuasions no longer trust colleges and universities as institutions. The latest Gallup Poll shows that 77 percent of Republicans and 50 percent of Democrats distrust American higher education – a figure that continues to grow.
The distrust comes from the cratering value of the education they provide. Most colleges have become sandboxes for indolent students. The teachers pretend to teach, the students pretend to learn and everybody gets an A. It isn’t all the teachers’ fault. They have to deal with students who have been haphazardly recruited and often subjected to 12 years of “Social Emotional Leaning.” The majority are “book virgins” who have reached college without ever reading an entire work cover to cover. They aren’t going to start with The Republic.
But as teaching standards have fallen, tuition and expenses have surged. Americans now carry a total of $1.863 trillion in student-loan debt. That’s the second largest sum of consumer debt, behind home mortgages. A house, however, has intrinsic value. A college degree is worth only what the graduate can make of it. Student-loan debt impedes graduates who want to get married or change jobs. It cannot be defaulted on. It can linger even into one’s retirement years.
Then there’s the matter of waste and bloat. More than half the salaried employees of colleges and universities are now in “student services” rather than education. What students get for their tuition dollar is a full range of counseling, stroking, reassurance and diversion from the actual acquisition of knowledge and skills.
If the students can’t be relied on to read more than a page or two per week, what can a professor do? He, or more likely she, can profess. Teaching students about racism, sexism, colonialism and the myriad forms of injustice embedded in “late-stage capitalism” is one approach. The list of the top 20 most-assigned college texts incudes The Communist Manifesto and Edward Said’s Orientalism, but the real story is not what books are assigned, but what the professors communicate in class.
Wokeness isn’t in the syllabus; it’s in the air. Gender dynamics also play a role. More than 60 percent of undergraduate students are women. Men increasingly turn away from college as something that doesn’t meet their educational and career goals. They are also turned off by the high degree of bias against men in both the curriculum and campus culture.
Besides, only 17.8 percent of posted jobs even require a bachelor’s degree or higher. More than half list no educational requirements at all. Indeed, with all the debt and opportunity cost now involved, a college degree can be an impediment to the start of a promising career, not counting hot dog provider or masseuse.
AI threatens the entire edifice. Artificial intelligence has made it child’s play to avoid reading assigned texts or writing essays on assigned topics. Many faculty members have capitulated, seeing no way to resist the tide. Some have enthusiastically embraced it as a new way of learning. AI has also dented the proposition that a college degree is an all-purpose, adaptable credential for employment. Some employers still think a college degree testifies to useful knowledge and skills, but they will soon learn better.
This is no reason to despair. These institutions have been making themselves obsolete for a long time. Better not to get in their way.
Peter Wood is the President of the National Association of Scholars. He is author of 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project and A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now.
