Category Archives: culture

Hardly Overreach

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President Donald Trump (R) has offered nine universities preferential access to Federal funds if they sign on to an agreement that, among other things, bans race or sex in admissions, freezes tuition, and caps international enrollment. Whether or not that’s a good idea, or unsavory, or… can be debated.

However, the tenor of the hue and cry over the offer is badly overwrought and illustrative of the outright timidity of far too many.

[T]he proposal provoked strong reactions across higher education, with some decrying it as federal overreach….

There is no Federal overreach in the offer. No one is forcing these schools to sign up. They can do—they have been doing all along—with “ordinary” access to Federal funds. Moves to reduce or deny access to Federal funds by schools that are openly antisemitic or supportive of terrorist-supporting entities on their campuses is an entirely separate thing.

Many States and localities offer enormous financial incentives in return for making movies in those locales. Offering Federal financial incentives to companies, foreign and domestic, to produce goods and services in the United States or to increase current domestic production is a widespread and long-standing practice, and it is a far cry from withholding Federal funds from businesses who do not so produce or increase production.

This offer to nine schools is no different from those other financial incentives.

It’s sad, it’s a mark of how far fallen is an education system that produces such timid ones, and it’s an indication of how far we are—four generations–from our last struggle for our national sovereignty. Too many who should know better have gone soft and weak in the knees.

Hard times make strong men; strong men make easy times, easy times make weak men, weak men make hard times. We’re in a dangerous phase of that cycle. Western Civilization’s last weak time interregnum lasted 800 years.

“We cannot normalize”

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ICE and CBP are patrolling downtown Chicago and arresting criminals along the way. DHS noted that (with accompanying images)

11 violent rioters were arrested last night in Chicago outside the ICE detention facility: these are two guns that were taken off rioters in Chicago right against the fence at our ICE detention facility. An investigation is underway into what appears to be some sort of explosive device found last night near the ICE Chicago detention facility.

Progressive-Democrat Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is dismayed, and he’s hyping the fact that ICE and CBP agents are armed in a dangerous city while they go about their intrinsically dangerous job of law enforcement. He said this, too:

We cannot normalize militarizing American cities and suburbs. Make sure you know your rights and stay alert.

Neither can we normalize violent lawlessness, even in Chicago. We do know our rights, we are staying alert, and so do—and are—those law enforcement personnel. Pritzker, though, would rather protect the criminals rampant in one of his State’s major cities than protect the residents of that city.

Political CYA

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors waxed opinionated on the matter of government efforts at stifling free speech, centering their wax-on piece on Sundar Pichai’s letter (formally written by an Alphabet lawyer) excusing (the editors generously called it a mea not-so-maxima culpa) Alphabet’s Google’s (read: Pichai’s) mistaken role in censoring Conservative podcasts—purging them from YouTube—during the Wuhan Virus (my term; the editors continue to euphemize with “Covid-19”) situation. The editors also nattered on about the hypocrisy of the Left’s getting on the Trump administration over the Kimmel business compared with the Left’s downplaying of the Biden administration’s role in that Alphabet (et al.) censorship.

What interests me about this editorial, though, is this bit from the penultimate paragraph:

Progressives intimidated companies into believing that if they failed to toe the line on certain issues, enforcement could follow.

This is those companies’ managers—including Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta, whom the editors also cited—conscious choice to be “intimidated.” I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about the flaccid-kneed nature of senior managers, at the pinnacle of their professions, who allow themselves to be so easily managed by others. Men and women of good character would have refused to kowtow and challenged in court any enforcement that might have followed, and won easily (if initially expensively, but long-term much more cheaply) on free speech grounds.

And the editors’ close:

Alphabet’s letter to Judiciary is notable for its commitment that the company “has not and will not empower fact checkers to take action on or label content across the Company’s services.” That’s good to hear, but Google would have done better if its accounting had come before the electoral winds shifted. The company’s letter is an admirable statement of principles. Let’s hope it sticks.

This is a sham shift, not at all a statement of principles. This is merely a political CYA claim, done at the convenience of political winds. There’s no reason to believe it will stick. Pichai already has amply demonstrated the strength of his character, and tomorrow may bring an administration of a different feather.

Wrong Answer

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This time it’s Jason Riley, of The Wall Street Journal, who’s missing the street for the potholes. He wrote in his Tuesday op-ed,

The latest results from the National Assessment of Education Progress were released earlier this month, and they weren’t pretty. High-school seniors recorded the worst reading scores since 1992, and math scores were the lowest since the current test began two decades ago. Elementary-school students have also lost ground. Just 31% of eighth-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the science assessment.

And,

The ramifications extend far beyond our borders. The Program for International Student Assessment exam is a global assessment of 15-year-old pupils. In 2018 only 8% of US test-takers scored in the top tier in mathematics, compared with 15% in Canada, 18% in Japan, and 29% in Hong Kong. Today’s students will populate tomorrow’s labor force, and employers who rely on workers with math, science, and engineering backgrounds have been complaining for decades that too many Americans are uninterested or ill-prepared to fill these jobs.

 

But then he wrote,

Which brings us back to Mr Trump, who wants to make it harder for US companies to hire foreign nationals. On Friday the president announced that he was imposing a new $100,000 fee on applicants for H-1B visas, designated for skilled migrants who disproportionately specialize in science, technology and math occupations.

It’s true enough that we benefit from suitably skilled foreigners who enter our nation legally—those immigrants and Riley’s “migrants.” But the problem, which seems to have blown right by him, even as he wrote it, is identified by those employers…complaining for decades that too many Americans are uninterested or ill-prepared to fill these jobs.

The answer to the problem is not making it easy for qualified immigrants to enter our nation legally, even as that helps at the margins. The answer is to fix our education system. That must begin with eliminating, root and branch, the rent- and fee-seeking teachers unions who collect massive dues and lobby (too successfully) for government money while they work just as assiduously to block local, State, and Federal efforts to improve the public school systems those unions hold in thrall. An early move in this beginning step would be to recognize that teachers and their unions who work for public schools are public servants and public service unions just as are the civil servants and their unions working for any other arm of government, and bar them from striking, just as many civil servant unions are barred.

Our education system would be further improved by getting those unions and their hip-pocket politicians at the various levels of government out of the way of voucher and charter schools and home schooling, accepting that competition works toward product improvement in education as well as it does in industry.

At that point, the cherry on top would be to have local, State, and Federal funding not go directly to the schools, but instead follow the student to the school or home to which he transfers, or with which he stays after having transferred, for use then by the school or parent receiving the student.

The Party that Invented Political Weaponization

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians have been bleating for most of this year about the alleged weaponization of the Department of Justice. However, Party invented that weaponization with ex-President Barack Obama’s DoJ and his Attorney General Eric Holder, who swore fealty to Obama with his “I’m his wingman” oath, and then proceeded to use his AG office to go after us American citizens for daring to disagree with Obama’s pen and phone activities. Obama expanded that weaponization with his use of the IRS to go after Conservative nonprofit political organizations.

Biden expanded, while particularizing, that Party weaponization with his DoJ and its subordinate FBI categorizing concerned mothers as domestic terrorists and traditional Catholics as far-right extremists that bore watching. He and his followers engaged in explicit, politically motivated prosecutions of Trump over the riots at the Capitol and over his concerns about election integrity in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Trump has been attacking political opponents during his second term? Or is he going after wrong-doers who happen to be, also, in the other party?

Whatever those answers might be, here’s Party’s House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D) promising more, explicitly more, Party weaponization with promised attacks, not just on Trump, but on anybody “doing the bidding of the Trump administration.”

One thing to understand as people who are flirting with the Trump administration, or doing the bidding of the Trump administration, or engaging in the “pay to play schemes” of the Trump administration, the statute of limitations is five years…there will still be accountability to be had. And that process begins now, but it will not be complete until there is an independent Department of Justice and certainly an independent House of Representatives in Democratic hands.

In Democratic hands—my irony meter pegged hard.

This is the level of integrity Party has on offer for 2026, 2028, and in the out years.