Emma Watson Cannot Have It Both Ways in Her Feud with J. K. Rowling

By Caroline Downey

Thursday, October 02, 2025

 

When it comes to her toxic treatment of J. K. Rowling in the trans debate, Harry Potter star Emma Watson thinks she can have her cake and eat it, too. She thinks she can publicly gesture for goodwill after years of jabbing at the author to whom she owes her career.

 

As with the twisted activist argument that a gender transition marks the death of one person and the birth of a new one, Watson has suggested that the inspirational author she once knew and worked with ceased to exist somewhere around 2020 — and was replaced by an unrecognizable TERF (“trans-exclusionary radical feminist”).

 

Appearing recently on the Jay Shetty Podcast, Watson, in carefully crafted, PR-conscious terms, said she can still “love” Rowling and be “grateful” to her. She continued: “I just don’t know what else to do other than hold these two seemingly incompatible things together at the same time and just hope that one day maybe they will resolve or like cojoin themselves or maybe accept that they never will, but that they can both still be true.”

 

Even if Watson thought she was extending an olive branch, the implication is that the current Rowling is a stranger now, all because Rowling has stayed true to what women’s rights really mean.

 

It would be one thing if Watson said, “I disagree with Rowling on the trans issue, but I deeply love and respect her as an intellectual and person.” Instead, her comments conveyed the message that she has a faint and fond memory of a good person who no longer exists.

 

So it’s no surprise that Rowling reacted negatively. As the author theorized in her scathing response to Watson on X, her PR team probably urged her to ease off on the defiant leftism because the zeitgeist has changed. Slowly but inexorably, both the U.S. and the U.K. are waking up to the trans insanity. Watson evidently assumed that Rowling would welcome a détente. Hogwash, Rowling retorted.

 

In the podcast interview, Watson acted as though she has been the peacekeeper all along, not at all interested in escalation but only in love and magnanimity. This is the same actress who once threw a sly, nasty jab at Rowling. As the presenter of the British Academy Film Awards in 2022, Watson opened the ceremony by saying, “I’m here for all of the witches.” After a slight pause, she smiled and mouthed, “Barring one,” to the hoots and merriment of the audience.

 

Perhaps what’s most insulting about Watson’s portrayal of Rowling is that Rowling has been a consistent feminist her entire professional life. When transgenderism emerged, she logically applied her embrace of women’s rights — no doubt informed by her experience as a young mother with an abusive husband — to women’s spaces that faced invasion by men claiming to be women. Rowling notes the simple fact that womanhood is not an act, a part to play, or a costume, but an immutable biological reality, and she further notes that women must be protected from male predation, even if it’s disguised as the so-called marginalized trying to claim equal opportunity.

 

During another part of the interview, Watson broke down as she told Shetty how cold and cutthroat Hollywood was to her after she left the Harry Potter cocoon, where she started as a child and made friendships over a decade. It’s fair to feel this way, but the coddled, protected environment that Watson enjoyed on the set of Harry Potter was made possible only by Rowling. You’d think Watson would be grateful, instead of mealymouthed, toward Rowling for creating this safe space.

 

Contrast Watson’s behavior with that of Tom Felton, who played antagonist Draco Malfoy in the movies. Asked by a reporter at the June Tony Awards whether Rowling’s position on the trans issue affects his work, Felton replied, “I can’t say it does. I’m not really that attuned to it. The only thing I always remind myself is that I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world, here I am in New York. I have not seen anything bring the world together more than Potter. She’s responsible for that, so I’m incredibly grateful.”

 

This is the proper attitude toward the visionary who gave you your big break. Watson is entitled to her free expression, as Rowling points out. But it’s another thing entirely to expect forgiveness from someone who has faced a barrage of death, rape, and torture threats — for having taken a stand in one of the most combustible cultural debates of our time. Watson can say what she likes, but then she must accept the consequences of what she’s said.

 

As Rowling put it: “Adults can’t expect to cozy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public — but I have the same right, and I’ve finally decided to exercise it.”

Unmined Diamonds

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, October 01, 2025

 

Botswana has a lot going for it, including a stable history of relatively ethical and responsible government sustained by a fast-growing economy and a GDP per capita that puts it a world ahead of neighbors such as Zimbabwe and Namibia, an economy that is experiencing much-needed diversification but one in which diamond mining and diamond cartels still play an outsized role. There was a peaceful transfer of power after the Botswana Democratic Party was turned out by voters in the 2024 elections after 58 years in power. Rooted in the country’s national liberation movement, it was the only party that ever had held power in the country and had been the longest-ruling party in the democratic world.

 

Botswana is doing reasonably well. But if it is not doing as well as it could be, it is because it is not making the most of the resources with which it is blessed. I don’t mean diamonds.

 

I mean the people.

 

Continuing as a diamond-based economy becomes less tenable by the day. Lab-grown diamonds have led to a collapse in demand for mined stones, which has been nothing short of disastrous for Botswana, where diamonds account for 25 percent of GDP and 80 percent of exports, as well as about half of government revenue. In late September, the state-run diamond trader put 1 million carats of diamonds up for sale in an auction that failed when no bidder would pay the reserve price.

 

Once noted for its prudent governance, the country has seen rising public debt (projected to double to more than 40 percent of GDP in the coming year, which would be relatively low for the United States but is high for such a country as Botswana) and recently suffered a credit downgrade of its sovereign obligations.

 

The economic vectors do not look promising: The price of natural diamonds has declined by 26 percent since 2022, which surely is a lagging indicator chasing the fact that the price of synthetic diamonds has declined by 74 percent since 2020. But if the price of aesthetically pleasing hunks of carbon tells a sad story for diamond diggers, there are three other numbers that do a lot more work in demonstrating what ails Botswana and what needs to be done to encourage the emergence of broader and more durable prosperity in the country: 23, 70, and 2.

 

The first number indicates Botswana’s unemployment rate, which recently has hovered around 23 percent—and the figure is worse for young people. That is a great deal of human capital on the sidelines. But the next two numbers point to an even less tractable problem: About 70 percent of the Botswanan workforce is employed in agriculture, collectively producing about 2 percent of GDP—which is to say, the great majority of the country’s workers are employed in an industry that produces almost no value. If you want to create real economic value in agriculture, then you’re talking about those big “factory farms” and commodity crops that so bother the sentimentalists. Disorganized, small-scale farming creates a lot of jobs but not much output in return for all that hard work.

 

Sometimes, a job is not the solution to an economic problem. Sometimes, the job is the problem. But that can be hard for a certain kind of person to see. Those people instead worry what is to be done with all those Botswanan farmers if the farm jobs go away—not that they dream of their own children laboring in sorghum fields, of course.

 

I hesitate to go so far as to insist that Paul Ehrlich is a racist, but I will note that his infamous 1968 book, The Population Bomb—a would-be prophecy that has proved wrong on every single major point but remains shockingly influential—was inspired by the crowds of brown people the author observed in Delhi and by what he believed to be the dysgenic fecundity of Indian families, while the movement he midwifed into existence has long regarded population growth in Africa and Asia with especial horror. Strange that nobody complains there are too many Norwegians in the world or an excess of Swedes who will, as the Malthusian logic insists, eventually deplete the world’s supply of herring before it can be pickled.

 

With the economically advanced nations desperately trying to work out a viable solution to the threat of demographic collapse that hangs over the rich world, too many of us—on both sides of the political aisle—cling to an economic superstition based on a version of Ehrlich’s error: that human beings are a liability rather than an asset, and that there are too many workers in the world and not enough jobs to go around, that people are simply mouths to be fed and that a job—any job—is the way to feed them.

 

But creating jobs is no problem, as Botswana’s farms demonstrate so ably: All that is needed is a mode of production that is sufficiently inefficient. We could create 10 million new jobs in the United States tomorrow if we would simply abandon our high-tech farming equipment and go back to hand tools—and then create 100 million new jobs the day after that if we traded in our shovels for spoons. We’d probably starve to death in great numbers, but there would be no unemployment.

 

It is dead simple to create jobs.

 

World War II created millions and millions of jobs—jobs killing people, jobs destroying the physical apparatus of human civilization, jobs building advanced instruments for the industrial-scale killing of people and the worldwide destruction of economic assets (and cultural treasures and churches and homes and hospitals and nurseries) but the world was no richer for all that extra employment. Those who think World War II ended the Great Depression in the United States should probably ask themselves why, if that was the case, rationing was necessary in those years, or ask themselves why household consumption, including spending on basic goods and services, continued to decline in the war years in spite of the supposed recovery. War may be a necessary evil, but it is no less an evil for being necessary, and people do not improve their standards of living by massacring one another and destroying cities.

 

This is a fact that was well-understood by no less a soldier than Dwight Eisenhower:

 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

 

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

 

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

 

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

 

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

 

It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.

 

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

 

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

 

That is dramatic stuff. But in cold-eyed terms, what Eisenhower is talking about here is the repurposing of capital from life-enhancing projects to life-destroying projects, which is to say, in less exciting terms, from productive uses to non-productive uses. And while there may be less moral urgency in the case, keeping millions upon millions of workers (in Botswana or anywhere else) employed in nonproductive work—or in marginally productive work—has about the same economic effect as drafting them all into the army and marching them from place to place to no end, or, to invoke the economists’ cliché, having them dig holes and then fill them up all day. That isn’t war, exactly—but it is a war on prosperity.

 

Consider a point for comparison: There was a brief recession in the United States in 1980, with a total economic contraction of 2.2 percent of GDP—a larger dip for U.S. GDP than the complete elimination of agriculture would represent for the GDP of Botswana today. That is not much output in return for the time and effort of the great majority of a country’s workers. Nobody enjoyed the 1980 recession, but the lost economic production was hardly catastrophic. It surely is the case that 2 percent of GDP isn’t nothing, but it isn’t what you want 7 out of 10 workers keeping busy with.

 

People who romanticize a life of living in traditional communities while following ancient folkways and eating locally grown produce ought to move to rural Botswana for a year or two and see how they really like it. Botswanans in the villages do not seem to like it very much: Like much of the rest of Africa—and like the United States not that long ago—Botswana has seen high levels of rural-to-urban migration for many years, a trend that is unlikely to be reversed. There are few if any truly universal observations, but this one gets close: Given a choice between low-level agricultural life and almost anything else, people will choose almost anything else, a fact that has been demonstrated time and again by people ranging from English serfs in the 14^th century to African Americans in the early 20^th century to Botswanan farmers today.

 

And it is not as though the workers of Botswana are simply unable to do anything other than engage in agricultural activity limited to something somewhere between subsistence farming and modest commercial production—the country’s factories already produce (and export) some industrial goods, such as insulated wiring, along with clothing and other similar consumer goods, while food processing and ore refining are going concerns. The government would very much like to encourage more investment and development of domestic industrial capacity, a project that it has tried to execute with methods that are at times clumsy—e.g., over the summer the president announced a ban on the export of raw minerals (diamonds, copper, etc.) and a requirement that these be processed domestically before export. The method probably is the wrong one, but the goal of climbing up the value chain is one worth aiming at.

 

For millions of people and their countries, the first step toward prosperity is a step off the farm. Most modern farming is a capital-intensive, high-tech endeavor with relatively modest labor requirements. Low-capital, labor-intensive farming is generally unproductive, which is why there is so little of it where people have other choices. Happily, there is much need for workers everywhere else: Human action is inherently valuable, and there is always a market demand for it.

 

Paul Ehrlich’s great antagonist was Julian Simon, the economist who won that famous bet with Ehrlich and who wrote a book that answered Ehrlich’s population pessimism and then some, titled The Ultimate Resource. Simon’s view—the people-are-assets view—is based on an intelligent and generous understanding of human dignity, one that is by necessity universal. Botswana has a good deal of human capital at its disposal, but that capital needs development, investment, and opportunity, if only because there is a world of difference between an economy in which 70 percent of the workers produce 2 percent of the value and one in which 70 percent of the workers produce 70 percent of the value–or more.

 

To put it in more concrete terms: Leaving all those workers on the farm is like leaving diamonds in the mine.

Patton for Dummies

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, September 30, 2025

 

Pete Hegseth’s unusual address this morning to an assembly of America’s generals and admirals was destined to be either the most frightening moment of the second Trump administration (so far) or the most embarrassing (so far).

 

That made it hard to write about in advance. If you assumed the worst, that the White House might be preparing to purge its top officers or demand that they pledge their loyalty to the president personally, you’d look ridiculous if it didn’t happen. And I didn’t think it would: America is assuredly en route to becoming a third-world country, but there’s plenty of residual patriotism and honor among the military that still needs to be drained before an authoritarian coup of the Pentagon stands a chance of succeeding.

 

If, on the other hand, you didn’t assume the worst, you risked looking fatally naïve. If ever there were an administration that really might try something as nutty as attempting a putsch at a gathering of top military officers, it’s this one. Donald Trump is an old hand at putsch attempts, you may recall.

 

Menace and cringe are the two core components of his politics, distinguishing characteristics of virtually every scheme he hatches, and today was no exception. But it mattered a lot which component dominated this particular scheme. I’m pleased to report that the assembly was somewhat more cringy than it was menacing, a case of two men who radiate neurosis about their own toughness lecturing a roomful of actual tough guys about how to be tough.

 

It had the feel of Pop Warner players scolding a group of NFL linebackers about the importance of hustle. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might even have missed the menacing parts.

 

Cringe.

 

In a world where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t exist, Hegseth would be the most embarrassing member of the administration.

 

Rather than pay his deputies the respect of addressing them in a professional way, he appeared onstage before a comically enormous American flag and strode around performatively while speaking. It was what you’d expect at a Turning Point USA event or an infomercial (he plugged his own book at one point), not a major military summit. And that stands to reason: One of the two qualities that landed him this job was his talent as a host on Fox News, where the toughest thing he had to do was maintain his poise on camera after taking a shot to the balls.

 

He’s a performer, not a strategist. Today was plainly his way of fulfilling his fantasy of delivering a performance like the one George C. Scott delivered in the famous opening of Patton.

 

I suspect his insecurity about being out of his depth partly explains his obsession with toughness. Hegseth is a decorated veteran, but he now commands thousands of men with far more military and policy experience than him, none of whom are primarily known for being a talk-show host. He’s too smart not to grasp that he’s ended up where he has only because the president can’t distinguish right-wing television from reality. As such, his recurring resort to talking points about “lethality” and “warriors” reeks of overcompensation, as if he thinks he might earn the respect of his underlings by impressing them with sheer militaristic bravado.

 

Which, ironically, probably makes him seem to them like even more of a poseur.

 

He used his face time with his officers today, which required many to travel thousands of miles to attend in person, to issue important reminders that soldiers shouldn’t be fat, shouldn’t wear dresses, and shouldn’t worry about climate change or support diversity initiatives. At one point he stared at the camera and said with a self-congratulatory smirk, “To our enemies: F-A-F-O,” which instantly became either the most embarrassing televised moment of the second Trump presidency to date or the second-most embarrassing. It’s the sort of juvenile taunt to which you would stoop if you were a made-for-media right-wing blowhard who approaches global conflicts as if they’re schoolyard fights. Go figure.

 

But as I say, every menacing Trump stunt comes with some cringe and every cringy Trump stunt comes with some menace. Hegseth delivered on the menace.

 

The second quality that appears to have convinced the president that he was defense-secretary material is Hegseth’s apparent belief that morality, at least in war, is for suckers. To hear him talk, you would think there’s nothing wrong with the U.S. military that can’t be fixed by having it behave more like the Russian military. He lobbied Trump during his first term on behalf of troops accused of war crimes and, as recently as last week, made a point of announcing that the soldiers who massacred Native Americans in 1890 at Wounded Knee won’t be stripped of the Medals of Honor they received.

 

He’s a perfect choice for Trump’s Cabinet and for American populism more generally insofar as he seems to believe that greater ruthlessness, not intellect, is the solution to all problems. “No more politically correct, overbearing rules of engagement,” he promised the generals during this morning’s speech, which, in light of his history, sounded like he was giving them the green light to practice the Russian way of war by targeting civilians. For good measure, he also vowed to overhaul the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General—the same one that’s investigating him, incidentally—which should further reduce internal scrutiny of corruption.

 

It’s hard to imagine any soldier in Pete Hegseth’s military being disciplined for wanton murder in the field or any officer who’s demonstrated support for the president being disciplined for anything else. We might call that Putinization. Or, given the secretary’s servile authoritarianism, contempt for legal restraints on force, paranoia about the free press, and performative machismo, we might call it something else.

 

Speaking of which, the president also spoke this morning.

 

Menace.

 

Trump’s speech was cringy in classically Trumpy ways. He rambled for more than an hour. He hopped from topic to topic, digressing about everything from the “Gulf of America” to the proto-wokeness of changing the name of the Department of War to “Defense” in 1949 to other subjects that weren’t entirely coherent. He looked and sounded exhausted and slurred some of his words.

 

He was greeted by silence instead of sycophantic cheers as he walked onstage. When I say that America isn’t yet a third-world country, that’s what I mean.

 

The difference between the president and his defense secretary is that Trump had a strategic point to make. (One that was more complex than “F-A-F-O,” anyway.) He wanted his officers to understand that their duties will oblige them to make war on American citizens, not just on foreigners, in certain circumstances.

 

“We’re under invasion from within,” he told them, remembering that several of his illustrious predecessors had deployed troops on U.S. soil. “No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”

 

“Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances,” he said elsewhere. “This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”

 

He was clear about who’s to blame. “The [cities] that are run by the radical left Democrats—what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They’re very unsafe places and we’re gonna straighten them out one by one,” the president said. “And this is gonna be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

 

At another point he criticized the Biden administration for not authorizing military pay raises. “They did not treat you with respect,” Trump warned. “They’re Democrats. They never do.”

 

He didn’t demand a loyalty pledge from them, as some doomsayers feared might happen at this event. What he did, essentially, was make a case that they should pledge that loyalty without being asked. If the other party doesn’t respect the military, if it’s churning out the equivalent of enemy combatants in parts of the country that it governs, why wouldn’t the officer corps align itself forthrightly with Republicans?

 

He also reminded them, and us, this morning that he’s getting more insistent about reconceptualizing crime as “war,” having used the same word a few days ago to describe the supposed state of play in Portland. Doing so scratches the fascist itch to frame all social problems as emergencies that entitle the executive to extraordinary powers. It encourages the military to take sides, as soldiers by definition can’t be neutral in matters of war. And it potentially justifies the troops’ use of what the president delicately described in his statement about Portland as “Full Force” in trying to win.

 

Even the most hawkish of traditional hawks have begun to squirm about all this. “There has to be a line between crime and war,” John Yoo, author of the so-called “Torture Memos” during the Bush administration, said recently to Politico of Trump targeting supposed seaborne drug traffickers. “We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.”

 

Can’t we? Anything that harms the country is potentially a matter for the military is a nice précis of authoritarian logic, actually. The military is the most lethal force in the country, it’s under the president’s direct command, and Americans broadly accept that it should have more leeway to kill than civilian law enforcement forces have. Under Pete Hegseth, that leeway is now functionally absolute. Corralling the army into acting as muscle in its persecution campaign against its enemies is basically the political endgame for postliberalism.

 

Besides, it’s not like American troops will have anything else to do.

 

Strategy.

 

A few weeks ago Hegseth was asked about Russia’s recent incursions into Polish airspace. “We’ve projected power for a long time in far-flung places that had a nebulous connection to our own security in the homeland,” he replied. “We’re securing the homeland.”

 

Some hawks heard an uncomfortable historical echo in those comments, but Hegseth wasn’t just spitballing. The new National Defense Strategy he’s preparing follows through on those priorities, the Washington Post reports, “centering the Pentagon on perceived threats to the homeland, narrowing U.S. competition with China, and downplaying America’s role in Europe and Africa.” Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Dan Caine is allegedly one of several top officials concerned that his boss and the White House appear poised to retreat from great-power competition with China and to diminish the military’s ability to respond to crises around the world.

 

Two days before that news broke, a separate story appeared in the Wall Street Journal about Chinese supremo Xi Jinping pursuing some sort of grand bargain with Trump in which the U.S. would formally shift from “not supporting” Taiwan’s independence to actively “opposing” it. That sounds like a minor rhetorical shift, but it isn’t. “Driving a wedge between Washington and Taipei is the holy grail of the Taiwan problem for Beijing,” one expert told the paper. The semantic change being sought would “undermine Taiwan’s confidence and increase Beijing’s leverage over Taipei.”

 

Wasn’t it obvious from the start that things were headed this way?

 

The American right of 2025 has no deep ideological objection to Chinese totalitarianism like the American right of 1985 had to Soviet communism. Nationalists’ core grievance against China has to do with the offshoring of manufacturing jobs; if Xi can figure out a way to satisfy Trump on that point, such as by pledging to have Chinese companies open plants in the U.S., I expect he’ll get his grand bargain. “America First” doesn’t care about Taiwan. It’s right there in the name.

 

The thought of beating the Chinese doesn’t get postliberals out of bed in the morning. What puts a spring in their step is the prospect of dominating their internal enemies. Nationalism, as I’ve said before, is a politics of tribalism that seeks to establish the hegemony of one’s own tribe over domestic rivals. It doesn’t worry much about foreign tribes in “far-flung places” until the ones closer to home have been subdued.

 

That’s why nationalists prefer a foreign policy based on “spheres of influence” to one based on international law. They’d rather have a global order in which major powers like the U.S. and China get to persecute their domestic opponents and threaten local tribes in their near-abroad to one in which major powers are limited by norms and treaties in their ability to bully disfavored weaklings.

 

The remarks this morning by Trump and Hegseth were of a piece with that. In different ways, the president and his defense secretary lobbied the country’s top military officers to overcome the moral squeamishness toward nationalist priorities that 80 years of the American-led rules-based international order have bred into them.

 

Trump wants the military to treat certain American tribes as enemies the same way it does foreign powers, starting with the Democratic Party that shields and encourages criminals. Hegseth wants the military to regard ruthless brutality toward America’s enemies as a virtue, unbothered by the Geneva Conventions and other attempts to make war slightly less inhumane than it needs to be.

 

They’re asking military officers to relinquish their qualms about using “full force” against their own countrymen. Trumpism abhors self-discipline of any kind, moral or otherwise; its new leaders want the U.S. military to be less disciplined.

 

That’s a little different from what George C. Scott asked of his men at the start of Patton, but the country that produced Gen. Patton isn’t the same country that produced Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. I wonder how many officers in the audience had a hard reckoning with that fact this morning.

Why the Left Can’t See the ‘Mississippi Miracle’

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, September 30, 2025

 

Charlie’s piece on the paradigmatic revolution in Mississippi that has produced dramatic improvements in students’ test scores is vital. So, too, is Rich’s column detailing the steps Magnolia State educators took to achieve what its proponents are calling the “Mississippi Miracle.” Both are based on a report in The Argument bylined by Kelsey Piper, an intrepid journalist who has made a noble habit of confronting her compatriots on the left with discomfiting information about the world around them — often the sort that has long been known to conservatives. As Frederick Hess recently explained in National Review, Mississippi is one of four Southern states that are seeing a surge in student achievement.

 

Mississippi students’ impressive improvements are not exactly unknown to the left. They have just been ignored by those who are disinclined to take the state’s test results at face value. Not long ago, however, that was not the case.

 

The educational trends in Mississippi are not exclusive to Mississippi. “In 2019, blue states had higher average NAEP scores on all four major tests (4th and 8th grade reading and math),” Tim Daly observed in the Education Daly. “By 2024, red states had taken the lead in three of the four.” That story receives little attention in mainstream pedagogical circles because “these are SEC states,” he notes. And as Charlie observed, in blue states where teachers’ unions hold sway, educational success stories in which the unions are written out of the story have recently failed to elicit the attention of progressive social commentators.

 

Initially, however, some on the left who were invested in repairing the teachers’ unions’ unsalvageable reputations set out to discredit the notion that anyone not beholden to that monolith could possibly know the first thing about education. That was what L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik set out to do two years ago, as the Mississippi Miracle was only just becoming a thorn in progressives’ sides.

 

At the outset of Hiltzik’s July 3, 2023, piece, he casts a skeptical eye on the results emanating from Mississippi and implies that Jackson has succeeded only in manipulating statistics to make it appear as though students were outperforming their peers in blue America. He cites the work of the late columnist Kevin Drum, who, along with a colleague, showed that the “apparent gains may be a statistical illusion.”

 

That was what Drum found, at first. But he subsequently revised his opinion that same month. “It looks like I might have been wrong again,” Drum admirably admitted. “Something really did happen in Mississippi. After the switch to phonics, their kids could read a lot better than before.” That seems rather straightforward, but Hiltzik was too invested in his own prejudices to similarly revise the record.

 

And those prejudices are laid bare.

 

To “consider the social and political landscape in Mississippi” is to gaze into a “black hole,” he wrote, and not just when it comes to educational policy. Hiltzik spends the remainder of the column castigating Mississippi’s abortion laws. He scolds Mississippians for its health-care policies, specifically its reluctance to expand access to Medicaid under Obamacare. He takes an especially dim view of Mississippi’s minimum wage schedule and its laws protecting the right of non-union workers to work in typically unionized fields.

 

What does any of this have to do with education? Hiltzik explains why “the focus on instructional technique” when attempting to boost student performance is hopelessly flawed:

 

Education expert Paul L. Thomas has identified the key factors as “food and work security, healthcare, [and] class size.” Those get largely ignored in the literacy debate, he observed, “even though these conditions combined would dwarf any measurable impact of teacher quality or program/standards quality.” [Emphasis his.]

 

Mississippi’s answer to Hiltzik’s supposition is quite simple: no, they don’t.

 

Indeed, the impossibly obtuse supposition that students suffer wherever the entire suite of progressive desiderata is not at the forefront of the social contract is illustrative of the problem facing the American education establishment. Its members — particularly an activist class that is drawn to political organizing at least as much as to actually educating — seem to have genuinely convinced themselves that ensuring universal access to health insurance, for example, contributes as much to student performance as the scholastic fundamentals.

 

That is a nifty trick to play on yourself if you’re looking for permission to abdicate your professional duties and pursue flights of fancy that are more exciting than the rote mundanities of daily life in a classroom. It is an abdication, nonetheless.

 

Hiltzik did his best to reinforce the activists’ delusion in his readers. But the data speak for themselves, and Hiltzik has not revisited his conclusions. Perhaps he never will. To do so would be to concede that the most pilloried state in the Union — the butt of every progressive joke about the hill folk who populate flyover country — is beating the left at what it believes is one of its core competencies.

 

Kelsey Piper deserves credit for acknowledging the evidence of her own eyes. You can’t say the same for everyone in her ideological cohort. And it’s not hard to see why.

 

If the left was wrong when it convinced itself that aggregate educational success is impossible in the absence of a progressive social contract, what does that say about the teachers’ unions? What does that say about their enablers in high office? Indeed, what does it say about the value of that progressive social contract?

 

Who wants the answers to such questions? It’s better not to ask them at all.

Blue States Embrace Fraud to Get Welfare for All

By Hayden Dublois

Wednesday, October 01, 2025

 

What are blue states trying to hide?

 

That’s the question in a little-known yet immensely important federal lawsuit that started arguments recently. The lawsuit was filed by 21 state attorneys general, all of them Democrats, and they’ve sued the Trump administration for asking states to hand over information about their food stamp programs. The federal government — which pays for food stamps — is trying to discover the true extent of waste, fraud, and abuse in welfare.

 

But instead of protecting taxpayers, Democrats are trying to cover up the truth by stopping this policy in its tracks. A liberal federal judge agreed with them on September 18, temporarily blocking the administration from getting state data despite the president’s clear legal authority to police a federal program. It’s clear what Democrats are trying to do. From California to Kansas, from Michigan to Massachusetts, Democrats are defrauding taxpayers to advance their radical agenda of welfare for all.

 

Democrats’ refusal to side with taxpayers — and oppose fraud — speaks volumes about their priorities. The federal government has already found that more than one in ten dollars in the food stamp program — more than $10 billion in total — goes to improper payments. In California, 11 percent of food stamp spending is wasteful; in New York, it’s 14 percent. But the Trump administration strongly suspects that the real number is much higher, and in a recent analysis, it found that taxpayers are likely forking over a further half a billion to people enrolled in multiple states.

 

To right this wrong, the Trump administration asked states in May to help it get to the bottom of this mess. Most states quickly complied, which makes sense. While states technically administer food stamps, the program’s benefits are currently 100 percent funded by the federal government. So, when D.C. asks for data on the program, states have a duty to play ball. But Democrats immediately fell over themselves to refuse.

 

Naturally, Democrats say the Trump administration is pushing a power grab, but that’s false. The Department of Agriculture — which is in charge of food stamps — has always been entitled to this information even though it hasn’t asked for it. The bipartisan 2018 Farm Bill further required states to share enrollment data to crack down on duplicate enrollment. And states also already share much of the data with the federal government through regular audits.

 

Yet instead of complying with a commonsense policy, Democrats are deflecting attention from the foolish and pro-fraud policies they’ve embraced for years — policies that have let millions of ineligible people get on this welfare program.

 

The blue state love affair with welfare fraud runs deep, reflecting the left’s belief that more people should be on the government dole. In particular, blue states have done a terrible job comparing their food stamp rolls to death records, moving records, and other eligibility checks. These are basic measures of good government — and they’re easy, too, since states already sit on a treasure trove of data. But blue states aren’t doing even the easiest due diligence to protect taxpayers. That’s what you’d expect from a party that wants welfare for all.

 

Will Democrats get away with their pathetic attempt to defraud taxpayers in pursuit of even more handouts for even more people? The federal courts should reject their attempt to hide the truth. And in Kansas, Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach is suing his own Democratic governor for her refusal to work with the Trump administration. Along with Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson and House Speaker Dan Hawkins, Kobach has warned that if Kansas doesn’t do what’s right, it risks losing federal funding for truly needy people.

 

That’s what this issue ultimately comes down to: ensuring that taxpayers are supporting only the vulnerable Americans who actually need help. Yet whether it’s Kansas, California, or any other state led by Democrats, the truly needy are being used as political pawns in a leftist game. Democrats aren’t just hiding the waste, fraud, and abuse — they’ve let it run rampant. They’re hiding the fact that they ultimately want welfare for all.

What Does It Even Mean to Be an ‘Independent’?

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 01, 2025

 

Independents are so hot right now—and will be for the foreseeable future.

 

According to a major survey commissioned by CNN, nearly half of all Americans—44 percent—call themselves independents while only 28 percent and 27 percent, respectively, identify as Republicans or Democrats.

 

I have a theory as to why. But I have to throw some fancy terms to explain it.

 

“Independent” is what students of semiotics call an “empty signifier,” a term that has very little, if any, substantive content. If you describe yourself as an independent, I still have to ask you additional questions about what you actually believe. All you’ve told me to that point is that you reject a party label (believe me, I sympathize).

 

It’s hard for young people to believe today, but Republican and Democratic labels used to work much the same way. A little more than a generation ago if you claimed to be on one side or the other, I’d have to ask a follow-up question to figure out if you were conservative or liberal, pro-life or pro-choice, for gun rights or against, etc.

 

Today, the same goes for independents, which used to be code for “swing voters” or “centrists.” Not anymore. According to the survey, some are “Democratic Lookalikes” (24 percent) and others are “Republican Lookalikes” (12 percent). They reject the label but ultimately vote like they don’t. The rest are among “The Checked Out” (27 percent), “The Disappointed Middle” (16 percent), and the “Upbeat Outsiders” (22 percent). The demographics and ideologies of these groups vary widely. In short, calling yourself an independent says something—that you don’t like the party labels—but it isn’t a one-size-fits-all ideological or political signifier.

 

That brings me to an even more pretentious term: “institutional isomorphism.” This one describes the process by which seemingly different organizations become similar to each other.

 

Fast food chains that once had a very specific niche now routinely expand their offerings to capture market share out of their lane. These days you can get espresso with your breakfast wrap from Dunkin’ and get doughnuts from Starbucks. The History Channel, A&E, and MTV once had very specific programming. Now they all peddle reality shows and generic entertainment. 

 

The reason why independent became an empty signifier is that the Republican and Democratic parties—and the broader right and left—succumbed to institutional isomorphism.

 

Consider the vast constellation of institutions associated with the right—Fox News and its cable imitators, as well as most right-wing radio and websites, groups like the NRA, CPAC, Turning Point USA, Club for Growth, the Heritage Foundation, Young America’s Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute et al: Virtually all of them simply became, for want of a fancier term, “Trumpy.” Indeed, it’s easier to list the ones that didn’t. If you love President Trump you wouldn’t have it any other way. But if you don’t, and you lean right, you probably call yourself an independent.

 

The Democrats, meanwhile, are in a cul-de-sac these days because progressive foundations, activist groups, universities, and “mainstream” media outlets converged into an undifferentiated ideological blob.

 

Consider the American Civil Liberties Union. It once kept to a very narrow lane, vigorously defending First Amendment rights regardless of how unpopular it made them. Over the last few decades, it has become largely indistinguishable from other generic progressive lobbying outfits, prioritizing conventional “social justice” goals even at the expense of First Amendment rights.

 

The ideological, financial, and cultural pressure to conform on the right and left is intense. In a competitive marketplace, you’d think that some Ivy League schools would have resisted the “woke” tide, but they pretty much all went with the flow. 

 

The reasons for ideological convergence on the right and left are economically and sociologically complex, but, politically, the main driver is our primary system. Why is it that nearly every major presidential primary candidate sounds almost identical to their competitors, at least on major issues? Why do Republican congressional primary candidates compete over who would be more supportive of Trump?

 

The short answer is that primary voters, party donors, and ideological media enforcers have very narrow and concentrated conformist demands, and absent their support, candidates cannot move on to the general election. The pressure to conform doesn’t end with the nomination. In the GOP, support for Trump is the sole litmus test for being a “good” Republican. For Democrats, it’s a tight bundle of issues, but “resistance” to Trump is the most important.

 

The result is that general election voters are stuck with picking the least objectionable candidate, someone chosen by a process that discourages deviation from the intraparty consensus. I don’t see this dynamic ending anytime soon, which is why I expect a future where nearly everyone calls themselves an independent—regardless of what they mean by that.

‘Open Letters’ from Experts Are Often Fact-Free Propaganda

By John Fund

Tuesday, September 30, 2025

 

The Trump administration made its case in court last week that the president has the right to fire sitting Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook because of ethical misconduct on her mortgage contracts.

 

It shouldn’t be controversial to argue that someone who has committed mortgage fraud should be disqualified from serving on a board that has oversight over mortgage policy. But more than 500 academics have rushed to Cook’s defense by signing a letter stating that she should stay on the job.

 

Really? These academics are so ideologically chained to the left — or hate Trump so passionately — that they don’t see an ethical violation here? They act as though mortgage-application fraud — a major cause of the 2008 housing-market collapse — is akin to having overdue books checked out at the library.

 

In 2021, Casey Mulligan and Tomas Philipson, two economists who were fellows at Unleash Prosperity, detailed the dismal record of fact-free group opinions signed by economists supporting Joe Biden’s economic policies.

 

These experts’ “open letters” predicted that the federal student loan program would make money for the government, that Obamacare would dramatically reduce health care costs, and that redistribution and using more costly energy sources would increase economic growth. Dead wrong on all counts.

 

It seems every day brings another “open letter” from a group of economists or other experts weighing in on some political issue. Last year, 23 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics endorsed Kamala Harris’s tax and spending plans over those of Donald Trump.

 

Such letters are often theatrical versions of political position papers rather than any attempt to educate the public. That’s no surprise, because they often come from highly liberal, tenured professors who, shocker alert, oppose all conservative policies.

 

Many of the experts who sign open leaders have clearly not read the bills they comment on. Their opinions are often outside their area of expertise, which is like having your psychiatrist perform heart surgery. And having largely left-wing professors comment on Trump is like having Coke comment on Pepsi.

 

In the run-up to Britain’s successful 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, Britain’s Justice Secretary Michael Gove touched a populist nerve when he broke with his own Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and backed Brexit. After being told that expert opinion was predicting a collapse of the British economy if Brexit passed, Gove replied, “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”

 

The “experts” were naturally furious at his comments, but Gove spoke for large swaths of the population who had come to distrust experts. They had become skeptical specifically of economists who appeared unable to come up with forecasts that turn out to be even roughly right. After Brexit passed, there was no recession in Britain; indeed, there was not even a slowdown in growth.

 

Richard Portes of the London Business School admits that “the reputation of experts has suffered because they are seen as reinforcing the elite: as the elite has come under attack from populist quarters, so experts have suffered the same fate.”

 

Experts who publish in academic journals insist that their research standards are more rigorous than the general public believes. They say their papers go through peer review, a process by which submissions to academic journals are scrutinized by academic peers of the authors — the “referees.” Only papers deemed suitable by referees are published.

 

But the process is riddled with problems, errors in how referees are selected, and conflicts of interest. Once a paper is published, the chances of its being subjected to further scrutiny are remote. So, all too often, there is no post-publication challenge by anyone affiliated with a university, and no one from outside has the ability to challenge the findings. No wonder many people view the “experts” as a secretive priesthood that plays a rigged game with the facts.

 

There is no easy solution to the problem of so much “expert” opinion being viewed as “junk science.” But a start could be made by those experts who worry that their standing in the broader community has taken a hit. One way to build back some of that lost respect would be for experts to resist the temptation to comment outside their area of direct expertise. Someone who pledged to do just that might start earning a reputation for exercising . . . expert judgment.