My perspective on January 6, 2021, is a bit different from the mainstream norm because of the freedom and nature of my job at the time.

Within days of the event, I watched hours of raw video, and the “complicated” reality Chip J. described in this article was absolutely evident.  You don’t have to be a trained police officer to wonder why in the world police would shoot tear gas canisters deep into a crowd — over the heads of the people in the thickest part whom authorities presumably wanted to disperse.  It didn’t take deep investigation to come across videos of police opening entrances and waving protesters into the building.

You could trace individuals as they moved through the building… like the guy who appeared from behind Capitol police and proceeded to instigate a riotous lunge forward when just moments before the protesters at the front of a crowd had negotiated a peaceful walk through an area of the capitol.  Then the same person smashed the window through which Ashley Babbit climbed only to be shot.

Almost immediately, you could find other videos, too, if you looked.  In one I remember, activists were changing surreptitiously out of their Trump gear in the bushes.  The person filming that one could tell something strange was going on.  (I haven’t explored this, but I’ve heard one of them was the same radical whom a terrorist threw a bomb over in NYC.)

Because of this early inoculation with reality, I never took the reporting quite seriously.  I may have underestimated how well the Democrats’ reframing worked.

To be sure, readers of Chip J.’s article should keep in mind he’s a family friend and neighbor of one of the convicted-and-pardoned participants, Todd Henderson.  Chip watched those same hours of videos to help his friend and also to convince himself that it really was true that the FBI and news media were distorting reality in order to persecute him and others.

He reached the same conclusion I did, and it’s one about which Americans have a civic obligation to be curious.

Nicole Solas highlights one out of Westerly:

At this point, kids, young adults, and maybe not-so-young adults think dark and cynical is just the way art is supposed to be.  It can be otherwise.  We once had a canon with a wide variety of content — from child-appropriate to mature, from beloved to relatively obscure — that students could perform without requiring age restrictions for the audience or amplifying psychological dysfunction.

We’ve been deconstructing our culture for so long multiple generations may not even know what it means to be constructive.  That’s suicidal at the cultural level.

Specifically, Rhode Island has the 13th highest property taxes in the country, according to WalletHub:

Rhode Island residents have the 13th-highest property tax burden in the nation, according to WalletHub.

The personal finance website compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia by using U.S. Census Bureau data to determine which states had the highest and lowest property and car taxes. Rhode Island is among 25 states in the nation that doesn’t have a car tax, according to the study.

I should note that I’m a bit of a contrarian on this issue.  I apply two principles to the question of taxation:

1. The tax should be as closely aligned with the definition of the government collecting it.
2. As much as possible, taxes should be collected locally and flow upwards, not the other way around.

Governments are not defined by industry or marketplace, but by geography, and local taxes tend to be mostly property taxes.  This suggests that the best system would rely more on property taxes, not less.

The problem in Rhode Island is that every tax is high.  New Hampshire, for instance, has the 4th highest property taxes, but the state’s other taxes are low or nonexistent.  That’s a recipe Rhode Island should emulate.

I’ve found people get emotional, seeing property taxes as a statement that people are only really renting their homes, but I find the alternatives even worse.  By the same reasoning, the income tax means we’re all ultimately slaves, and I’d rather be a renter than a slave.

Rules governing auxiliary dwelling units (ADUs) have been too strict in many RI communities for a long time.  When I looked into the possibility of making a portion of my prior house an apartment for my father, for example, Tiverton would have required the floorplan design to incorporate a foyer so the house would still appear to have a single entrance.  In a tiny ranch, a foyer would have been ridiculously wasteful of limited space.

That does not mean, however, that this outcome after the state forcibly loosened the rules is surprising:

Just 82 COs were issued statewide in all of 2025.

The report revealed that the number of COs for ADUs decreased in Providence in 2025 compared to 2024.

In 2024, Providence issued 10 COs for ADUs, but that number fell to just 5 in 2025.

Across the state, the total number of COs increased only marginally— from 73 in 2024 to 82 in 2025.

ADUs still have to make sense for the property owners.  Nowadays, we’ve been pondering the possibility of an ADU for our children as they become adults.  But a lack of sewers and regulations related to our septic system mean a big chunk of our property is a leach field.  Meanwhile, any additional building will require modifications of the whole septic system.  Financially, the project might present some savings versus simply helping the kids to find and buy houses, but our family’s resources might be find better returns spread across separate properties.

This is a small example why carefully tailored, top-down plans to affect things like housing affordability are unlikely to succeed.  At some point, the on-paper plan has to interact with lived reality, and as most business managers know, lived reality is difficult to predict because it’s so individual.  The best public policy can do is create an environment of freedom and opportunity and allow people to figure out what makes sense for them.

Of course, that might not often be what makes sense for politicians and insiders, wherein lies the dysfunction of Rhode Island’s approach to solving problems..

I’m tempted to post this every day.  Even as our local news media continues to behave as if the biggest possible story is a decades’ old scandal in the Catholic Church, which even the hostile attorney general’s report says was resolved, at least as a matter of reporting, in 2016, they’re ignoring the fact that this unconstitutional policy of deception is still official policy in our state.

I’m beginning to wonder how much of the continuing support for Democrats relies on the fact that their supporters literally cannot believe their politicians stand for the things they stand for.

Yes, I know the rhyme in the title mispronounces his name, but I’m saving “say ‘goodbye’ to Xay” for later.

It’s a couple weeks old, but I watched his online announcement video again, and I’m still struck by how slimy it is:

ICYMI: I’m running for LG because I believe in the promise of R.I. but that promise is fading away because government has failed to adapt to change and people like Trump are pitting us against one another.

It’s time for a new generation of leadership with bold ideas. Join us. pic.twitter.com/4OBQycdRfV

— Xay Khamsyvoravong (@XayForRI) March 2, 2026

By “slimy,” I mean he raises things that are worthy of discussion and makes them slippery and staining.  Most egregiously, he mentions his parents’ having fled communism and warns that we’re losing the America we love, but the only villain he names is… Donald Trump:

My father came here as a refugee, escaping war and communism, and through hard work, my family achieved the American Dream.  But today that promise is slipping away.  Government has failed to adapt to change, and now Donald Trump is pitting us against one another.

Maybe it’s just the way my ear is tuned, but the sentiment that “government failed to adapt to change” sounds communistic to me.

And what’s Donald Trump got to do with it?  First of all, Xay is running for lieutenant governor of Rhode Island.  More importantly, no politician in my lifetime has done more specifically to loosen the corrosion that locks in fiefdoms and prevents government from adapting than Donald Trump.  Rhode Island’s unique challenge is that we’re likely to be the last bastion of the forces he’s fighting.

The text of his post makes matters worse.  As if he realizes writing things down requires more nuance than speaking them, Xay adds “people like” Trump.  Whom does he mean?  Name names, Xay.

He doesn’t name names, though, because like a divisive communist, he wants to benefit from people’s eagerness to fill in their own gaps for the evil Other.

Tom Ianniti has this right, about Helena Foulkes’s “tax the rich to build housing” plan:

The point requires an important addendum, however.  In an environment of complete one-party dominance, the incentives lock in such that the worse the government makes things for residents, the more insiders benefit.  Politics ceases to be a competition forcing performance and, instead, becomes an exercise in finding excuses to take more money and power.  That is the essence of what Tom calls a “downward spiral.”

The things that ought to be congratulated too often aren’t in mainstream public talk, so I want to take a moment to spotlight something that would have been made more of a couple weeks ago if Rhode Island valued education.  Sandy Hall reports for NRI Now:

While many districts in Rhode Island cancelled classes through the end of the week following a storm that dumped more than two feet of snow on the region, Burrillville schools were up and running Thursday morning, with students finally returning from an extended winter break.

On Thursday morning, a listing of school closings published by RI Broadcasters showed 40 districts in Rhode Island that had either cancelled classes or moved to distance learning for the day. Many districts had also made the decision for Friday, Feb. 27, putting hundreds of Rhode Island students on track for a two week winter break.

Teacher unions prioritize their members.  School districts prioritize their employees.  Parents prioritize their convenience.  None of this is good enough.

Education is so important, we ought to be hand-shoveling paths from our homes to our children’s schools if need be.  This may seem unrelated, but I’ve been seeing academic papers on the adverse effects of AI use on creativity and personality, and they all miss the point.

It’s not that AI is a brain-damaging drug; it’s that using it correctly requires a particular approach, and that approach must be deliberate.  The slogan I’ve been promoting on this topic is that, in every way, people must intentionally use AI to enhance themselves, not to replace themselves.  Doing so takes education, intellectual self-confidence, and organized habits of thought.

Maybe this is somewhat exaggerated, but we could see use of AI as dividing a line between sliding back down the evolutionary curve or shooting straight up it.  Prioritizing education will be a prerequisite to being in the latter group — not least because whether you prioritize education will, itself, influence how you use technology.

At this point, it’s just another log on the fire burning down media credibility that public opinion is only ever treated as if it matters when it reinforces mainstream journalists’ progressive Democrat positions.  The meaning and use of poll data is still worth being aware of.

Naturally, when large majorities support something journalists oppose, like voter ID, the public opinion doesn’t matter and polls showing it are not cited.  But then flip the weight of public opinion in Democrats’ direct and…

I don’t doubt that this is accurate, and in any event, I’d put this matter in the category of “sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.”  Nonetheless, it’s worth remembering what the words in Politico’s post actually mean.

Americans are not going about their daily lives contemplating the nuances of international relations and war.  Rather, what the poll found, specifically, was that when you call people out of nowhere — and they consent to answering random questions from you — and then you ask them whether they support or oppose “military action in Iran,” half will say, “support,” less than a third will say, “oppose,” and 20% will say they don’t know.

Of course, another way to phrase “just half” is “a plurality” (maybe even “a majority”), but that’s merely another marker of Politico’s biased framing.  War is horrible.  I would hope at least a large portion of people called randomly and asked about an international situation about which they’re almost certainly poorly informed (and often deliberately misled) will oppose military action.  But that’s not a comment on any particular military action so much as it’s an indictment of the media for its manipulation of the public.

John DePetro is reporting that a Scituate parent was brushed aside when she complained that a science teacher hostile to Christianity has been making “dirty looks” at her son and told him “God does not exist.”  The administration allegedly responded that the teacher is “entitled to his beliefs.”

I used to be sympathetic to that position, and I’d still like to be, but the past decade has exposed just how one-sided our nation’s supposedly liberal principles are.  The guiding rule is not “tolerance.”  It’s simply hostility to the traditional values of the United States of America.  It’s really not more complicated than that.

Yes, progressives will insist that questioning traditions and challenging others’ beliefs with free speech are traditional American values, and there I agree with them.  Their trick is that they then exclude questioning and challenging anything but those that used to be held by the large majority of Americans.

We know as certainly as is possible for a hypothetical that administrative tolerance of this teacher would end if he ever targeted Muslim students or began espousing Christianity to his students.  Tolerance is preferable to intolerance, but it can’t exclude tolerance for the beliefs that factually constitute the heritage of our country.

In recent years, dozens (maybe hundreds) of Christian churches have burned down in Canada.  Right now, my social media feed is full of images of “feminists” attacking and burning down churches for “International Women’s Day.”  These acts are not expressions of tolerance, they’re targeted destruction that will lead only to misery that should not have localized echoes in government-run schools.

The point is only made stronger when we notice that Scituate High School (for example) is only managing to make 36.5% of its students proficient in science and even fewer in math (falling in both cases).  Success might be some protection for claims that the values of the school are drifting.  Under the current circumstances, parents should wonder what the schools’ values actually are.

In typical fashion, Providence Journal reporter Katherine Gregg returns more than once to the question of how a proposal to reduce Rhode Island’s income tax would compensate for the “loss” in state revenue.  Paragraph four from the article:

[Republican Senate Minority Leader Jessica de la Cruz (North Smithfield, Burrillville, Glocester)] has not yet responded to questions about which government services she would favor cutting, if necessary, to make up for an anticipated $231 million in foregone state revenue by the end of the five-year run.

This isn’t hard.  The state budget is nearing about $15 billion.  The cited $231 million for modest tax relief, is less than 2% of that amount.  The governor’s proposed increase of the budget is 3.6%.  In fairness, spending from the General Fund was “only” about $6 billion, and the governor is “only” proposing to increase it by 2.5%, but de la Cruz’s proposal is to phase in the income tax reduction over five years.

In other words, if the state just relaxed its increases slightly each year, the income tax could be reduced.  Rhode Island could have a little more incentive for people to work here and to create jobs here.

The fact that it should be easy, however, shows that de la Cruz and the bill’s supporters in the Chamber of Commerce should have done the work to find something in the governor’s budget to offer as an examples.  Reducing state revenue is always a long shot, so such proposals shouldn’t miss the opportunity to put a spotlight on out-of-control spending.  Indeed, when the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity proposed reducing the sales tax in 2014, our associated report was titled “Spotlight on Spending.”

That’s where the focus has to be so the question isn’t “how will you pay for that,” but “why do we need that money in the first place.”

Maybe it’s a small thing — a minor oversight because his mind was elsewhere — but something has nagged at me about the opening item of Ted Nesi’s weekly roundup on February 28:

If there’s one thing I think we can all agree on right now, it’s this: Rhode Island has had a brutal winter. More snow has fallen in Greater Providence than in Anchorage, Alaska, capped off by a storm that topped the Blizzard of ’78 for all-time accumulation. It’s been unusually cold, too, with average temperatures below 30 for the last two months. But the weather isn’t the only reason this winter has felt so brutal. Rhode Islanders have been shaken by not one but two horrific public shootings, first at Brown and then at Lynch Arena — very different in their particulars, but each one all-consuming in the moment and traumatic for a state consistently ranked among the safest in the country.

Nesi goes on to show that he’s thinking more in terms of political malaise, and on that score, I’m inclined to say I’m actually feeling somewhat upbeat and optimistic.  But the thing that really jumped out at me in the above quotation is something that’s missing.

Between the two shootings Nesi mentions, on January 18, four children (literally children) beat a man to death with their feet and fists in Providence.  How would that not make the cut for inclusion on the “violence” list for a local journalist describing how bleak the winter has been?

It’s a strange omission worthy of contemplation.  Was that example so horrific Nesi doesn’t even want to think about it, or is the problem that it raises uncomfortable political topics rather than the easy crowd-pleaser of gun control?

Making the most emotionally appealing case you can for your preferred policy is just part of politics, but we in the public have to bear the responsibility of thinking the claims through.  Here’s Democrat Speaker of the House Joseph Shekarchi making an argument for his latest package of housing-development legislation:

While Rhode Island is “relatively affordable” for people moving here from other states, “Our own residents are too often priced out of the neighborhoods they grew up in,” he said.

For my own context, I’m not reactive in either direction on this issue.  I was a builder, and I’m also an advocate for letting people do what they want with their own property.  Of course, there’s a line at which what you do with your property affects the value and enjoyability of mine, and I believe people should have right to self-governance at the local level so they can draw that line differently.  In short, I view housing as a layered issue, and trite appeals to emotion tend to benefit corrupt interests when it comes to layered issues.

A basic reality we can expect is that young adults may very well be “priced out” of their childhood neighborhoods.  They’re just starting out!  It isn’t possible or desirable for every neighborhood to accommodate the entire human lifecycle.

Moreover, a neighborhood can change by different means.  Just because a house is within the same geographic area as a childhood home doesn’t mean it’s the same “neighborhood.”  Put up a dozen skyscraper apartments in a quiet suburban neighborhood, and all its adult children will be able to afford to live there, but it won’t be the neighborhood they grew up in any more than any other neighborhood with high-rise apartments.

In fact, by forcing neighborhoods to adjust to his nostalgia, Speaker Shekarchi is ensuring that nobody can live in the neighborhood that residents grew up in; it won’t exist anymore.  Personally, I’m a fan of change when it adjusts to reality in a framework of individual rights, but I wouldn’t insist that everybody in the state conform to my preferences.

P.S. — I don’t want to miss the opportunity to chuckle, here, that I’m the “conservative” in the local contexts because I want to conserve your right to change your community!

Boston Globe columnist Dan McGowan picked a fight with Democrat Congressman Seth Magaziner because the congressman could have been a decisive vote passing legislation McGowan liked but skipped the opportunity:

As willing as I’d be to pile on Magaziner, I’ve paused on this one because I haven’t reviewed the referenced legislation (which had to do with preventing airline crashes), and there may, indeed, have been reasons not to support it.  Of course, that doesn’t excuse Magaziner for failing to be present and taking a stand one way or another.  Instead, he made videos of himself helping neighbors dig out of the blizzard in the district in which he lives, not the one he pretends to represent in Congress.

The interesting part, however, is McGowan’s success making Magaziner’s failure a story and thereby making it a problem for the Democrat.  That’s interesting because it’s so rare.

Imagine if Rhode Island journalists habitually called out our elected officials and held them accountable for their actions, their decisions, and their rhetoric.  They don’t do that because they’re generally in agreement with the Democrats who run the state, and it’s more important to the journalists to keep the party in power than to generate news about its effectiveness.

Rather, they should make us seethe with anger at what government officials did to our children in response to COVID.  The first line of RI News Today‘s summary of RIPEC’s report on the state absenteeism program captured the general tone:

Attendance Matters RI appears to have helped drive a sharp improvement in student attendance, reducing chronic absenteeism from its post-pandemic peak and producing one of the largest declines nationwide.

Yes, chronic absenteeism has gone down, and yes, the drop was one of the steepest in the country, but Rhode Island still hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels and Rhode Island slipped well below the national average in 2021-22.  This doesn’t look like successful government action to me.  It looks like failure.

As proven by the urge to cheat students out of education because we had heavier snow than expected, Rhode Island does not prioritize education.  Children pick up on such statements of value, and if we don’t care about cutting the school year, why should they care about showing up?

If that’s how Rhode Islanders feel about education, I guess it is what it is, but we should at least muster some scorn for politicians and government satellites that try to make their failure sound like success.

Here’s one lesson:

In ways large and small, progressive policies undermine and hobble our society, all while their believers think they’re helping people and saving the world.  It’s a tragedy that avoids calamity only to the extent genuine progress outpaces progressives.

Arguments over the percentage splits of appointments to judgeships has the feeling of an unserious aristocracy burdening our progress with small-minded debates.  So, of course Providence Journal reporter Katie Mulvaney will amplify them:

The former dean of Roger Williams University School of Law is raising concerns about Gov. Dan McKee’s picks for Superior and District courts leaning heavily male, although the openings were created by the retirements of female judges.

In Michael Yelnosky’s view, McKee is disproportionately naming men to lifetime seats on the bench.

“It’s a troubling pattern to see the court go in that direction when the profession is increasingly female,” Yelnosky said.

According to the American Bar Association, women became a majority of law firm associates in 2023 and represent more than 56% of law school students.

How is the percentage of students relevant to the percentage of people being appointed as judges?  That datapoint tells us nothing, but it does insert a reminder of how these trends go and what we can definitely predict from the likes of Mulvaney and Yelnosky.

Fast-forward a few years or a decade.  Based on current trends, women will make up a disproportionate majority of law students and lawyers.  Soon after that, they’ll be a disproportionate majority of judges.  Will Mulvaney and Yelnosky get back together to warn us about the disparity?  No.  We can confidently predict they’ll do the opposite and talk about how wonderfully “diverse” our first all-female state supreme court is.

There are many, many reasons to complain about corruption and inside dealings in Rhode Island, but balkanizing people into demographic categories is an ugly immaturity to which our society should never have regressed and beyond which we should strive to move.

Providence Journal: “RI Speaker Shekarchi has hopes, fears for family in Iran as war rages”

WPRI: “Rhode Islanders with family in Iran concerned about conflict overseas”

Considering that the readership of headlines tends to be much higher than of articles, the phrasing is important.  WPRI conveys “Trump’s bad idea,” while the Providence Journal conveys positive possibilities.  This comes early in Patrick Anderson’s Projo article:

[Shekarchi’s] feelings about the three-day-old war that began with the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are equal parts fear and optimism.

You’d be crazy not to have some fears about war and about what might follow a 50-year-old totalitarian regime.  But that note of optimism is important.

Leftist media tend to be all or nothing on these matters, and it usually depends who’s in the White House and which party stands to gain from success or failure.  Right now, it’s Republican Donald Trump as President, so WPRI went with “concern.”

A couple weeks ago (which is like an election cycle, the way news cycles go, these days), the local Democrats and media were applauding Democrat Congressman Seth Magaziner as an example for all when he “paid an unannounced visit to Rhode Island’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility this week,” as journalist Phil Eil put it.  Of course, ICE Boston set the record straight that Magaziner had actually planned the visit well in advance, but let’s put that aside.

Something that went without remark, probably because few journalists or workaday Rhode Islanders know about it, was that the groups whom Eil and Magaziner are heeding for this activity are radical, indeed.  As I noted at the beginning of the month (which is like two election cycles ago), those activists call themselves “abolitionists” and want to do away with prisons entirely.  Their inside source for the treatment of immigrants at Wyatt goes by the codename, Lenin.  Like the communist despot.

But we shouldn’t expect Magaziner to have to go out on any political limbs to differentiate himself from the radicals.  That’s not how the propaganda press works.  Part of Democrat privilege is to be insulated from the crazy people with whom you associate so the normies don’t get scared off and do something crazy like vote for a Republican.

The WPRI headline actually spins the news in a favorable direction when it presents rent control as essentially a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to renters:  “New estimates: Providence rent-control plan could save renters millions, cost taxpayers millions.”

Apparently, the City Council hired left-wing activist Tom Sgouros to analyze the effects of rent control, and the city auditor offered his own analysis.  By either evaluation, the upshot is that rent control will:

• Theoretically save renters money (although it will probably ensure rent goes up every year, even when not needed, so landlords don’t get penalized for having been nice when costs go up more than the limit)
• Cost the city tax revenue as property values drop and landlords start challenging their valuations more
• Cost the city money for oversight
• Cost other homeowners money as valuations shift the tax burden to their property

Not mentioned is the likelihood that landlords will reduce maintenance activities, which will create lower-quality housing and less work for local service providers.  Also not mentioned is the likelihood that potential landlords will never bother to build, renovate, or repurpose other properties to create rental properties, reducing the available housing and driving up the costs for any non-controlled units.  (The progressives attempt to evade this by exempting new units for 15 years, but that’s essentially a minimum timeframe for large investments, and the landlords will know they’re entering a city that could change the rules out from under them at any time.)

Oh, and don’t forget the tenants who squat on their properties, even though they could afford more, because the differential between rent-controlled units and non-rent-controlled units becomes so big.

Rent control is among the most obvious of progressives’ delusions in its likelihood to cause huge problems.  The fact that they persist in chasing it shows they really don’t care if their policies will work, which means they really don’t care about people.  They care about power and about stroking their own vanity.

Of course, one suspects reporter Matthew McNulty didn’t mean to do so in his article about a recent “workforce development summit.”  The panelists were:

• Matthew Weldon, director of the state Department of Labor and Training
• Karl Wadensten, CEO and president of VIBCO Inc.
• Farouk Rajab, CEO and president of the Rhode Island Hospitality Association

And here’s the key sentence I mentioned in the title of this post:

The discussion underscored a broader message from the summit: Talent availability is not just about headcount, but engagement with state programs and strategic workforce development.

That’s wrong.  Talent availability is about the underlying incentives and opportunities of the local economy.  State programs can, at best, be a minor lubricant of workforce development and recruitment, but it can’t make up for flawed incentives and missing opportunity.

This is crucial to understand, because believing that state programs and top-down “strategies” can fix, or at least compensate for, more-fundamental shortcomings has been leading Rhode Islanders to ignore the fundaments.