This is good, as far as it goes, but we shouldn’t have any illusions about what it actually means:

There’s no achievement in building buildings with taxpayer funds.  It’s only spending money.  With no changes to what’s happening inside the buildings, the benefits will be minimal.

Meanwhile, once such a goal is articulated, the hands start reaching out, as if to say, “You want to be able to say you didn’t fail?  Well, here are the costs and work limitations you’ll have to fund with other people’s money to get there.”

This excellent report from CCN-RI points to exactly the sort of gap Rhode Island’s politics and civic society are leaving open to exploitation:

THE TRANSPARENCY TRAP

When $11M in state settlement money moves to a private foundation, the public loses its seat at the table. Last week’s $7.9M payout to four nonprofits happened behind closed doors—outside the reach of public records laws.

RI Republicans are sounding the… pic.twitter.com/E9T53dqL1B

— CCN – Rhode Island (@ccnrhodeisland) March 25, 2026

The state won $11 million in a legal settlement.  Contrary to law, Democrat Attorney General Peter Neronha decided where to send that money and chose the Rhode Island Foundation. As the video points out, that moves the money outside of the reach of public records law.

Neronha is implicitly taking cover under the fact that the Rhode Island Foundation is a charity with a long reputation for good works, but if it ever was only that, circumstances have become corrupted.  The Foundation is currently run by an ideological and hyper-partisan former Congressman whose father was a mob lawyer, whose brother was convicted of corruption, and two of whose sisters have been in the public eye within the last decade for controversies related to substance abuse… and who makes nearly $1 million on the job.

Meanwhile, the Foundation, itself, has morphed into a progressive shadow government, funding things like ideological racist teacher grants and pro-prostitution grants (explicitly fighting “tired old ethics”).  Meanwhile, it’s also become a funding source for journalists and is enjoying a soft-focus lens one would expect when a moneyed interest is a major source of funding for the media.

This is the sort of thing that should obviously be controversial, but it’s interwoven with the dominant Democrat Party and aligned with progressive politics, so the organization is treated as if its moral standing is beyond question.

The spotlight has moved on from Attorney General Peter Neronha’s latest social media explosion, but one detail from a Rhode Island Current article about the matter is worth highlighting:

Neronha had no regrets about spending part of his weekend firing back on social media.

“My wife was traveling and it was a rainy day anyway,” he said.

It’s not just that he’s cavalier about the distrust he’s sowing among the public for whom he’s supposed to be the top law enforcement officer; he’s being aggressively unserious.  He feels like doing this, he expects not to face any consequences, and so he’s doing it.

On a grand scale, it’s often difficult to know whether left-wing activists are consciously operating under the logic of their Marxism or are just caught up in a mania spun by other people.  Looking at the picture and assessing the circumstances of this example, I think the latter is much more likely for the great majority:

Police were called Monday morning to disperse roughly two dozen protesters who briefly entered the lobby of the downtown Citizens Financial Group branch at One Citizens Plaza. …

The group held a prayer circle and sing-along in the lobby while others picketed outside and handed out flyers, after a March 9 request for a meeting with the bank’s CEO went unanswered.

One can almost get to the point of being angry at the manipulators for riling up these people to advance their malicious goals.

It’s an indoctrination center:

Some students may learn, there, and some professors may do genuine academic work, but if that were its defining reason for being, at least some of those people would be outraged that progressives have swamped their institution with another mission.

Julia Steiny asks an important question:

Demographic trends, demand for school choice are clear as daylight. Why do RI leaders look away?

The answer is more obvious than many people like to admit.  Our government does not primarily represent the people, and the schools do not exist primarily for the students.  Steiny notes this while describing one of the two paths the state can take: “One direction will continue winning the battle to use schools to benefit and protect adults, at kids’ expense.”

Here’s the key part, though:

You would think that districts would ramp up efforts to change how they do business, perhaps looking to charter success. Instead, districts protected by unions wage fierce battles fighting to stay the same. For the second year, they are fighting reforms recommended by the Senate’s 2024 education commission, the subject of a bill by Sen. Sam Zurier, a Providence Democrat, that would end moldy, anti-education 1960s laws. Zurier’s bill eliminates mandated hiring by seniority in the case of enrollment decline, partly to avoid wiping out district efforts to recruit and keep a diverse staff who are often the most recently hired (LIFO, last in, first out).

Look, the president of our state Senate is literally also the president of one of the two teacher unions in the state.  The unions run the state, and the unions run the schools.  Districts and the state government see our children primarily as cash cows to milk for taxpayer dollars, and the self-identified professionals who run both don’t care if your children have their lives stunted to keep their business model going.

COVID killed it off, but my kids’ high school used to host bingo nights in the cafeteria.  Parents volunteered to run it, and the money would go to school programs.  Participants had formed a regular community, and the event got them out into an environment connected with the community and its children.

Let’s stipulate that it was arbitrary and silly to make bingo illegal outside of senior centers and charities.  That doesn’t mean this development, reported by Christopher Shea and Nolan Page in Rhode Island Current would not be a governmental act worth noting:

Lawmakers on Smith Hill are now taking a serious look at expanding the options for bingo in Rhode Island, where state law permits only charitable organizations and senior citizen housing or centers to operate bingo.

A bill sponsored by Sen. John Burke, a West Warwick Democrat and chair of the Senate Labor and Gaming Committee, would make it legal to operate bingo games at the state’s two existing casinos in Lincoln and Tiverton.

The government will allow its casinos to offer higher stakes and more-regular games.  The community of local bingo games will be diluted, and the risk of gambling away needed income will go up.  And what’s the motivation?  Apparently, to “offset any potential losses that might arise when the state’s ban on smoking at both the Lincoln and Tiverton casinos takes effect Jan. 1, 2027.”

There is no profitable enterprise (even profit itself, as we see with the “tax the rich” push) that the special interests who control government will not co-opt when then feel they need it.  This is not a society with a representative government that serves the people, but a ruling elite that allows people to do things independently only until the government decides otherwise.

After a certain number of years (decades?), the observant citizen has to begin concluding that neither activists nor politicians nor journalists really want to understand how the minimum wage interacts with the economy.  All three groups just want to keep running the same play over and over again — for credit from their base or donors for cheaply won votes and for easy stories that don’t rock the boat.

But there are two lessons in stories like (to pick one almost at random) this one by Wheeler Copperthwaite in the Providence Journal.

First, Rhode Island keeps raising the floor for wages, and affordability keeps getting worse in the Ocean State.  These things are not unrelated.

Second, consider this:

For a single parent of one child, the living wage is $45.41 an hour ($94,453 a year), and for two working parents with a child, it’s $25.64 per person ($53,331 per year).

The salary needed to get by for each member of a married couple is much, much lower.  Our society used to treat coupled households as an ideal, and now progressives are treating it as a right for single-adult families to be compensated for their own contrary decisions.  (Interestingly, the bottom really fell out of the encouragement toward marriage after it was redefined to be any couples, without regard to their biology.  Some of us predicted that.)

Yet, one never sees advocates encouraging healthy lifestyles or reforms in business, healthcare, energy, and so on that would genuinely improve affordability without politicians pretending like they have the power to make people give goodies to other people.

This is important when evaluating anything, especially in the social and political realms:  Keep an eye on the assumptions being exposed and what the speaker must believe to be true for the statement to be logical.  Here’s a great example in an article by Wheeler Cowperthwaite in the Providence Journal, about legislation to expand overtime requirements to cover more employees:

In an interview, [Democrat State Representative Brandon] Potter said he wrote and introduced the bill in response to the Texas judge striking down what were to be higher salary thresholds under President Joe Biden’s tenure. He also wanted to make sure the bill would phase in the salary floors to give business owners time to adjust.

“If employers have a problem with it, they should give their employees fair time off, choose to not overwork them, or compensate them fairly,” he said. “No one should be getting free labor.”

What must Potter’s understanding of the employer-employee relationship be for him to make a statement like that?  Well, essentially something like master-slave, with some element of voluntary submission on the slave’s part.  His phrasing describes a situation in which a person assents to be “the labor” for another person (“the management”).  The labor must do what the management instructs, and the management has the authority to set the level of work.  Otherwise, “the government” is justified to step in to defend the employee.

This is an understanding of employment out of an antique children’s book.  The relationship is between one person providing the value of his or her work and another person providing the value of financial payments.  If done well, both participants also enjoy other sources of value, such as a better brand and workplace and improved prospects for future careers.

Viewed this way, the justification for a third person — a politician — to interfere in the relationship of the two free adults.  Indeed, if the politician wants to improve the situation, he or she should promote policies that increase the number of people able to hire others and the number of people available with the skills to do work.

What’s surprising is how cheap it is.

In our ridiculously short-lived news cycle, this story made the rounds in Rhode Island for a day or two:

Newly sworn-in Rhode Island District Court Judge Michael McCaffrey continues to operate a political campaign committee with a political fund with a balance of approximately $230,000, according to state campaign finance records.

The balance of that account is $229,927.95, according to McCaffrey’s most recent filing.

The Rhode Island Code of Judicial Conduct specifically prohibits judges or judicial nominees from engaging in political activities.

The linked GoLocalProv article quotes a section of the Rhode Island Code of Judicial Conduct indicating that this sort of thing is forbidden, but there’s apparently some loophole, because donations are common.  When Judge McConnel was in the news as an anti-Trump activist from the bench, I traced the massive donations to politicians from him and his family.

The loophole might be the phrase “except as permitted by law,” or it might be this:  “These Rules do not prohibit judicial nominees from seeking support or endorsement on their own behalf.”

Whatever the case, of the $105,495 McCaffery handed out to Rhode Island politicians in the five years leading up to his appointment as a judge, most beneficiaries received less than $1,000, and only the Democratic State Committee received more than $1,000 per year.

So, it’s no surprise that our politicians are for sale (at least those in the Democrat Party), but their souls are awfully inexpensive.

At bottom, the problem socialism runs into again and again is that the designers of heavy-handed policy can never have all the information needed to be so heavy handed.  A recent commentary by “Environmental scientist and land use planner” Scott Millar exposes one instance of that problem:

The failure to adequately plan a long-term, safe, steady supply of drinking water for new housing can have catastrophic impacts. Watersheds for public surface water and groundwater drinking water supplies are not appropriate for high-density development. Once drinking water is contaminated or overdrawn, it can’t easily be restored and must be protected for both current and future generations.

For these reasons, I strongly support legislation to amend the Rhode Island Low and Moderate Income (LMI) Housing Act (45-53-4). This legislation would eliminate the existing state mandated housing densities in lands that are used for drinking water supplies. Moreover, the current law only requires developers to cite that public water or sewer systems are available. The legislation adds language that the capacity of public water or sewer be documented to support the proposed increase in residential density before a development proposal can be approved.

These problems become easier to see at the local level and among those who are directly involved in individual decisions.  Even as somebody who is comfortable with change and reluctant to tell people when they can and can’t develop their property, I’ve worried that the multiple housing developments in the works within a mile or two of my house could create problems for water infrastructure.  The water pressure is already terrible.  I know this because I live here.  Such are the reasons for local zoning authority.

But progressive legislators in the state — some from urban areas where density has already been accommodated and some from rural areas where wells are common — have decided it’s simply time to force dense housing from border to border as a blunt tool for “affordability,” and they’re too arrogant to ask themselves what they don’t know they don’t know.

Vincent Marzullo makes good points in a recent Providence Journal commentary, but his lens is off in an important way:

Civil society’s first responsibility is to rebuild the habit of human connection. Division thrives in abstraction. It is easy to demonize “the other side” when the other side is a caricature on a screen. Community organizations can counter this by intentionally creating spaces where people with different views work on shared, tangible goals: mentoring children, ending homelessness, supporting veterans, better care for our older adults, or responding to disasters. Cooperation around practical needs does not require ideological agreement, but it does build trust, which is the foundation of a healthy democracy.

You can tell by the way all of Marzullo’s examples are in the narrower range of “civil society” that covers charity that he has a particular vision in mind.  He’s seeing these as non-governmental organizations that pursue public goods.  But civil society shouldn’t be construed so narrowly; it’s important to include activities that people pursue for other motives, including self-interest.

Given his vision, Marzullo lists five things “civil society must” do to help unite and heal our country:

• Provide space to cooperate toward practical needs.
• Model respectful disagreement.
• Counter economic and social isolation.
• Promulgate accurate information.
• Reclaim moral leadership.

He errs in charging such groups with these tasks.  The appropriate way to understand the mechanism is that civil society does these things naturally, simply as a function of bringing people together to based on common interests that are different from their political leanings.

Tasking civil organizations with socio-political goals and emphasizing a narrow range of their activities will limit their reach to those who are nearly of like mind in the ways most relevant to politics.  Rather, what we need is a society that encourages engagement in a broad range of activities — politics and charity, yes, but also business, sports, religion, hobbies, and more — so that people interact and find commonalities that have nothing to do with politics or the other areas of their lives.

Middletown’s town hall was recently filled with people lining up to beg for mercy from the town’s new automatic speeding ticket scheme:

“It’s a combination of us not having a camera before and the fact that it’s a new system in town, people are not used to it,” Police Chief Jason Ryan said. “They anticipated about 10% of those who haven’t paid to possibly be showing up in court today, so that puts us at somewhere between 150 to 200 people expected to show up today, based on what Blue Line has seen in other communities in the past.”

We can do the math: that’s 1,500 to 2,000 tickets that hadn’t yet paid, so there were many who simply paid it.  And the town’s victims had multiple tickets each:

“I had a pile of tickets for going between 30 and 35 miles an hour down a road I’ve traveled on for 48 years,” Shannon Laiho said.

Why is 30–35 miles per hour too fast?  Because there happens to be a school in that location.  Nevermind that it’s a high school well set back from the road on a large, exclusive campus.  To local government that means “excuse to take money from people.”

The unseen effects may be the worst, though.  Getting burned by these tickets is an unmeasurable disincentive to travel to or around an area, so the entire area will be losing so the town government can gain.

I’m cynical about politics, but it still bothers me to see groups trying to get away with the rank spin and dishonesty of the SEIU, to which Ian Donnis points (without my cynicism) here:

SEIU 1199 NE, the biggest health care union in the region, is seeding with $50,000 a new organizing effort, Affordable RI, to train and support candidates at all levels who embrace a laser-like focus on affordability. Some might call this preaching to the choir in a state where Democrats maintain a super-majority in the General Assembly. At the same time, a lot of Rhode Islanders struggle with the cost of child care – and there’s not much relief in sight.

Look at the group’s agenda.  This isn’t about making things more affordable.  It’s about taking money from some people and giving it to others.  You can be for that or against it, but it’s not what most people think when they hear the term, “affordable.”  It’s dishonest.  It’s lying.

Among the most depressing aspects of the turn our country has taken is that people for whom we naturally want to have tremendous respect and trust — teachers, nurses, social workers, and others — are, through their labor unions, central to the systemic dishonesty corroding our communities.

This, another day when the bored and bought-off take to the streets for their quasi-religious “No Kings” revival, seemed like an appropriate time to highlight this investigation into whether the state of Rhode Island is violating human rights by forcing insurers to include abortion coverage in every plan:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday announced an investigation into 13 states that require health insurance plans to cover abortion care.

In a news release, the agency said the investigation is based on allegations that the states are coercing health care entities to provide coverage of abortion “contrary to conscience” and in violation of a federal law known as the Weldon Amendment.

“OCR launches these investigations to address certain states’ alleged disregard of, or confusion about, compliance with the Weldon Amendment,” said Paula Stannard, director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights in a statement. “Under the Weldon Amendment, health care entities, such as health insurance issuers and health plans, are protected from state discrimination for not paying for, or providing coverage of, abortion contrary to conscience. Period.”

In the right contexts, progressives will try to obfuscate their views, but they do indeed believe that everybody should have to pay for other people’s abortions.  They’d make them free to the women, if they could, and force us all to contribute to the fund.

These are not people who believe in “no kings.”  They just want to be sure the king is forcing their radical beliefs onto everybody else.

This is exactly the sort of story our local media buries, but ought to promote, because it’s informative in a way they don’t want to admit:

“On Wednesday morning, the City was informed of a report that federal officials were on site at Webster Elementary School attempting to enter the building. The school temporarily went into secure status and Providence Police responded to assess and verify the unidentified individuals.

Mayor Smiley joined Providence Public School Department leadership at the scene to support the safety of the students and staff and to ensure all appropriate policies were being upheld. Following the response, PPD was informed that the activity was the State Police.”

Students’ learning was disrupted because the ideology of adults from the classroom up to the [expletive] mayor makes them children unable to respond maturely.  Those putative authorities began to fantasize about plaudits for standing up to phantom tyranny in a way entirely safe to themselves.  Their decisions were performative and self-aggrandizing.

This isn’t just an incident; it’s a lesson.  This is how the people who run Providence, its schools, and the state structure their thinking and their daily lives.  It’s a symptom of the psychological illness that has been dragging our state down for decades, and it’s well past time to begin electing the cure, for the good of our children and our communities.

I know from long experience that it’s easy to read way too much into survey results like this, but there’s definitely much to be explored:

I’d love to see a deeper dive on when people received those diagnoses and how their politics and church behavior has changed.  It would tell us something significant, for example, if many or most of the 8% of conservative weekly church goers who have received a diagnosis of a mental health condition were conservative and/or church goers at the time.

But where my mind really wants to go, looking at the various columns, is the relevant influence of each factor.  Notice that attending church has almost no effect on conservatives until they go weekly.  We might speculate that conservatism, itself, embeds much of what makes church attendance helpful entirely as a frame of mind.  We shouldn’t forget, especially, that the chart does not track belief in God or sense of spirituality, only church attendance and politics.

Meanwhile, moderates gain some advantage by some church attendance, bringing them in line with conservatives, but they don’t gain additional benefit (in terms of mental health) no matter how often they attend.  It is as if (as a group), they won’t fully commit to the psychologically healthiest principles.

Then there are the liberals.  Putting aside the peculiarity of those in the “monthly” group, there’s a direct correspondence between frequency of church attendance and mental health.

Of course, we could think of other explanations.  It may be, for instance, that conservative church goers are simply less likely to ask doctors for diagnoses, no matter how unhealthy their psychologies happen to be.  Given other health, charity, and relationship findings, I find that unlikely to be the explanation, but it’s plausible.

In short, one can read the results as an indication that church-going conservatism is the healthiest perspective by which to live.  That perspective has characteristics that can be defined along political and religious axes, and you can derive benefits along either axis but do better when accepting the entire worldview.

The premise of what I’ve called the “government plantation,” or “company state,” is that — just as large companies once sought to import inexpensive labor for their workforces in “company towns” — governments are looking to attract immigrants to keep their populations up.  There’s a key difference, though.  Companies need labor.  Governments don’t produce anything; what they need is revenue.

One option toward that end is to let the private sector grow and keep government unobtrusive so people benefit when they use their own resources and ingenuity to do profitable things.  The problem, here, for those who prioritize government, is that people using their own resources and doing profitable things are independent and understand the value they bring to the table.

The other option is to find people in need of assistance and services for which the government can charge other people.  Those other people can be local taxpayers or, even better, they can be taxpayers at higher levels of government who have no direct say in the government plantation’s decisions.

So, when you see news like this, don’t react as if you’re observing interacting currents in a tide:

From July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025, Rhode Island had a net domestic migration of -1,551, with 1,551 more people moving out of the state than moving in, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Meanwhile, the state had a net international migration of 5,923, as 5,923 more people moved into Rhode Island from abroad than left.

To whom are the state’s politicians catering?  Do you hear them worrying that Rhode Islanders are leaving their home?  No.  For decades, they’ve been celebrating changing demographics and promoting a sanctuary state.

There’s a reason.  Rhode Islanders may elect them, but that doesn’t mean those who live here are the priority.

This is interesting, although of course several layers of disclaimers belong on comments by industry insiders as reported via social media:

Karp says AI will heavily disrupt college educated, highly trained professionals, the core Democratic voter base in cities and suburbs.​

He argues their economic power will shrink as AI eats white‑collar work.

He also says vocational, working class jobs in the physical world will gain relative power because AI cannot easily replace them.​

Those workers are often male, non‑degreed, and more likely to vote Republican.

Karp calls anyone who thinks this disruption will somehow be politically manageable “in an insane asylum”.​

The Democrat base has spent decades belittling and attempting to demoralize the white, male working class, and now it looks like the balance of economic power will shift in their favor.  Certainly, that may be temporary, until robotics displaces them and power shifts again, this time to helping services, where human-to-human contact is the point.

These shifts are interesting to ponder, and they’ll be very important to watch.  Simply as a matter of incentive and political theory, the narrow class of AI platform owners will surely want to absorb as much of the excess value and released political power as they can.  Politicians who pitch government as the great protector of classes of people and redistributor of wealth will have incentive to go after both the tech giants and the working men, both of whom they’ve vilified.  This is apt to spark backlash on both fronts.

The future nightmare one can imagine in these circumstances doesn’t have to happen, but it’s going to require a good number of Americans’ rejecting what has become the mainstream way of understanding economics, government, and society.

What worries me about post-Obama developments in America’s civic culture is that people may no longer spot the incongruity in this:

On Monday, a letter signed by 11 local “pro-democracy and human rights organizations” sent to Crowne Plaza management took issue with the hotel’s decision to book the event.

“The Crowne Plaza is a respected Rhode Island institution with a long history of hosting sports teams, family gatherings, and community-centered events,” the letter read. “Many Rhode Islanders — including your own employees — will be shocked and dismayed that the hotel is choosing to host a rally featuring individuals whose rhetoric and actions undermine democratic values and threaten the safety and dignity of vulnerable communities.”

These activists were trying to shut-down a rally and silence its speakers.  If anything “undermines democratic values,” that does.  But if Americans don’t see this problem instantly, then we may be at the point that there’s simply no ability to communicate across ideological lines.

Of course, what’s obviously happening is that progressive Democrats have defined their own narrow views and their own power as “democracy,” and free speech that opposes them is not a right at all.

Coverage of the dramatic drop in registrants for insurance through HealthSource RI misrepresent, at least partially, the significance, although it may not be deliberate.  Here’s Nancy Lavin in Rhode Island Current:

About 10,000 people covered through HealthSource RI dropped coverage during the 2026 open enrollment period, representing 20% of the 48,000 enrolled before open enrollment began in November, according to data from HealthSource RI published Monday. A copy of the final open enrollment report was shared with Rhode Island Current in advance.

The stark decline in insurance coverage, with implications not only for former plan participants but the entire state health care system, is concerning for state officials, but not surprising. In fact, HealthSource RI initially projected an even bigger drop of 13,000 people tied largely to expiring federal tax credits.

A decision not to purchase insurance through HealthSource is not the same as “a decline in insurance coverage.”  My family used HealthSource for dental coverage, and the second year, a visit to the dentist wasn’t covered because HealthSource was so slow to pass along our paperwork to the actual insurance.  Thus, we learned that (unlike when I’d looked into it in the past), insurers offer these plans independently, without the unnecessary middle step of the government.  Our plan is now cheaper and has better coverage.

Without a government mandate forbidding competition, HealthSource is nothing but a delivery vehicle for welfare.  With expiration of a temporary boost in welfare lingering from COVID, people have no reason to use the redundant website.

This episode is an excellent lesson in the framing of many stories related to government.  The government creates a program competing with private companies, and the rhetoric equates the government with the service, in general.  Journalists forever after present a reduction in government involvement as a loss of the service.

It’s not.  Indeed, HealthSource should be dismantled as the first step to withdrawing government from healthcare much more broadly.