One could pick apart on its own terms Nicholas Ferroni’s commentary suggesting that most states can’t be trusted to run their own education systems and “education is not an expense; it’s an investment”:

For context, Ferroni is a teacher in New Jersey who calls himself an “activist” (apparently for left-wing social causes) and moonlights as a paid speaker.  He takes it as written that the federal government is a net positive to education, which many of us would dispute.  Indeed, his case that there is already a wide gulf in the success of schools from state to state brings his assumption into question.  His faith in the value of teachers unions amplifies the need to question his assumptions.  In Massachusetts, which he calls out as an exception where the state government can be trusted with education, the success is directly attributable to reforms decades ago that reduced the unions’ power (which have been softened with predictable results).

The problem with insisting that “education is an investment” is that many institutionalized and powerful people believe it should be a unique form of investment whereby the simple fact of adding money increases profit, and wherein demanding accountability from the people who take that funding on the promise of making the investment bear fruit is an affront.

Education needs more accountability and less meddling from activists inside and outside of government.

The great DOGE Authority Panic of 2025 appears to have passed, but in case you’re still interested (and to have it searchable on this site for future reference), lawyer Tom Renz’s review of the legal basis for the Department of Government Efficiency is worth a read.

Here’s the Providence Journal headline:  “Numbers show RI undocumented immigrants a small slice of those getting benefits. What we know.”

Here’s one of the shocking facts that journalist Katherine Gregg did the work to uncover:

Medicaid payments on behalf of those without Social Security numbers totaled $55.4 million last year, including the $16,106,050 paid for those officially determined to be undocumented immigrants.

The article proceeds to dismiss entirely all but the $16 million and then to contextualize that number as a drop in the state’s Medicaid budget.

Now add to the total another $12 million for various welfare benefits from the state, and we get up to $28–67 million total.  In what other type of story would the reporter treat that amount of money as insignificant and the newspaper pass on an eye-catching headline… in an era when it needs all the attention for its work that it can get??

The fabricated nature of this tweet’s content is just one example:

To be sure, that isn’t the most egregious example I’ve come across, but I particularly wanted to capture a statement relegated to the very end of the article, coming from one of only two local sources cited for the article, William Worthy, of Big Bear Hunting & Fishing in Glocester:

“Maybe [Trump’s tariff policy] opens the door for some local people to have local-made bait instead of bait coming from other countries,” Worthy told 12 News. “I’d rather push the locally made stuff if I can’t buy the stuff from China anymore. I think it will create other opportunities.”

At the risk of arriving late to the news cycle of a couple weeks ago on the hierarchies of love, I wanted to offer an adjustment to Matt Walsh’s perspective, with which I mostly agree:

The point is well taken that it’s easier to love “people” in the abstract than to love particular people (particularly when doing so leads one to advocate for things that one wants anyway).  Nonetheless, if the term, “love,” means willing the good of the other, it is certainly available to both distant and aggregated people — the broader humanity.  However, the closer a person is to environments that we can actually influence, this willing the good increasingly requires action.

Progressive policy is characterized by three qualities that bring the reality of their “love” into question:

1. It is only marginally more specific (if at all) than the love that most well-meaning people will have for people they don’t know.
2. It tends to impose obligations on people other than the progressives who claim to care so much.
3. It implicitly imposes progressives’ beliefs about what is “good” on everybody else, including the constituencies they patronize.

Of course, for many progressives, we could add in the fourth characterization that the policies conspicuously benefit them in some way.

This observation points to a useful exercise for all citizens:

A useful exercise is to keep a look out when news stories at the state or even local level mention some organization.  Do a little research into their history and funding.  Rhode Island has about a million people and a long-languishing economy, yet even on relatively niche issues you’ll find multiple advocacy organizations with the funding and compensation of a healthy small business.

This is, let’s just say, a reasonable thing to wonder:

It may have long been the case that federal grants were a major financing scheme for left-wing organizations, but the Obama administration amplified it, flooding the market and giving us much of the confusion and turmoil of the last decade.

Objectively, one can say that Democrats are the party of government and progressives place government centrally in their ideology.  Therefor, the current state of affairs was probably inevitable — that accepting grant-making as a legitimate government function left up to bureaucrats to dole out would lead to a one-sided funding mechanism.

After all, even as far back as Thomas Jefferson’s time in office, the executive created no-show jobs for helpful allies (like newspaper men).  At least back then, however, the feds couldn’t afford to hand out comfortable salaries by means of such corruption.

… I remind myself that Aaron Regunberg was very nearly governor.  A lot has happened since this tweet, so as a reminder, Brian Thompson was the healthcare CEO murdered in cold blood in New York:

Here is Senator Bell’s response, back in November, to the CEO of Box.com, who offered a mild, moderate suggestion for Democrats after the election:

Bell exposes two important things, with this Tweet.  First, a significant portion of Rhode Island’s Democrat power elite are happy to ride the state into utter, Venezuelan devastation for the sake of ideological purity.  Most of us understand the idea of states as testing grounds for different ideas means that states that choose poorly will learn from those that choose well, but for fanatics like Bell, the drive is to control a state simply for the sake of imposing their ideology for the ideology’s sake.

Second, Bell’s ideology is about hurting people he doesn’t like.  He excuses it for himself by insisting the reason he doesn’t like them is they harm others, but that’s a screen.  The ego boost of power over others (probably out of envy) is the fundamental motivation.

We see it in this tweet from Jesse Kelly:

It’s from October, but this argument from Vice President Vance against the view that nobody will build houses except illegals is worth revisiting:

“This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mind-set of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have seven million — just men, not even women, just men — who have completely dropped out of the labor force. People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages. But people will do those jobs, they will just do those jobs at certain wages,” Vance said.

A necessary addition — perhaps a deeper cause — is cultural.  We need to stop giving American workers the impression that it’s good enough to be made a client for government services or to work some menial minimum-wage job that was never meant to support a family.  Instead, we need to reinvigorate the sense of the value of producing things and working hard.  Of course I needed to support my family, but the greatest compensation from my years in construction was the feeling of having worked hard and created something that hadn’t been there when I started.

Beneath it all is a character issue.  Government policy has oversimplified our thinking about employment to treat it is as merely a financial exchange, and always sufficient to support a whole family.

To the contrary, employment policy should mostly stay out of the way, but to the extent it has an effect, it should foster the human drive that moves from miniscule pay for menial tasks through rewarding exertion to success through skill and wisdom.

Mark Steyn’s daily pre-election column is vintage Steyn today.

But in Botswana everyone voted on Wednesday, the last up-country results came in on Thursday, the ruling party conceded and the new guy was sworn in on Friday.

That’s a normal election in a normal country.

Meanwhile, back in the greatest country in the history of countries, in twenty-four hours we shall be embarking on the usual folderol offour-hour lines to vote, malfunctioning machines, burst water pipes, court injunctions to keep polls open or close them down (according to taste), pausing the count before it’s completed, and the GDP-boosting quadrennial spike in plywood sales as storekeepers in DC and elsewhere board up their windows.

And that’s if it’s a “normal” election by American standards.

Read the whole thing, wherein Steyn weaves together multiple stories drawn from our rapid-fire headlines.  The picture he paints is of the mess we’ve allowed our country to become since we elected a community organizer to the Presidency, and no matter who wins on Tuesday (or whenever), we have to take our country back.  As he states in the key point of the essay: “it’s hard to calibrate the precise point at which the soft totalitarianism turns, instantly, into hard, psychotic, murderous totalitarianism … you never know it’s time to break for the border until it’s too late.”

I’ve fallen way behind, so this tweet from Ken Block is a couple months old, but its content is (unfortunately) timeless in Rhode Island:

The picture being painted for me by over ten current and former DOT employees is a toxically managed organization where who you know is far more important than how you do your job and where technical expertise has been systematically eliminated in favor of managers with no industry experience.

Our state government is a scam taking tax dollars for favored members of the Party.  Unfortunately, journalists have been indoctrinated in the Democrats-as-heroes storyline for generations, so they are fundamentally incapable of reporting on the story in a way that communicates what’s really going on.

I realized this when watching Democrats’ repeated proclamations about jobs numbers during the Obama years only to see those numbers quietly revised the following month, almost always with the revision making touted jobs disappear, rather than quiet corrections representing improvements. Now, it seems crime data has the same partisan infection.  All year, we’ve been hearing that violent crime is down under President Joe Biden, but a few weeks ago, the FBI quietly revised its numbers to show a 4.5% increase in 2022, rather than a decrease. Naturally, that makes the 2023 decrease seem even larger, but here’s the key point:

“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

These numbers are non-transparent estimates, and no explanation for revision is being offered.  The most rational conclusion is that bureaucrats are doing their part to “save our democracy” by keeping Democrats in power.

The news cycle flows by so quickly, lately, that political actors and activists are learning it’s sometimes best to just keep your head down and let the controversy of the day join the rest of the noise tomorrow.  Nonetheless, I think there’s something worth noting in the now-passed story about Russia funding some conservative commentators.

First, my caveat is that I no longer trust America’s intelligence services or news media. Even where stories aren’t entirely fabricated, there are simply so many ways to construct a narrative. The agent or journalist can exaggerate claims or leak one-sided information that distorts the context of what’s happening. Imagine, and I’m not saying this is happening, that every commentator across the political spectrum receives some portion of his or her revenue from hostile foreign governments — that it’s simply part of the ecosystem. Releasing that information only as it relates to one group of commentators would make it seem as if they are uniquely bad.

Caveat aside, I can sympathize with some of the commentators’ defenses.  I’ve always said what I have to say, and if somebody’s wants to give me money to say it, that’s great.  That person didn’t change my view or buy my opinion.

What he or she would be doing, though, is making it possible for me to continue saying what I have to say… and to say more of it.  By selectively funding points of view, financiers can adjust the broad field of commentary.  It’s not the writer’s fault for wanting to be heard, and frankly, it’s not even the financiers’ fault for wanting to advance their visions.  We all have to have our own moral compasses and approach information intelligently and with caution.

To be sure, this is a social challenge, but it doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions.  Attempting to force transparency or, worse, ban pernicious funding or statements only amplifies the caveat expressed above.

I find it ominous that one of my children’s dentist just cancelled an appointment for tomorrow due to short staffing. RI’s medical infrastructure feels a bit like we could get the equivalent of an emergency Washington Bridge closure at any time.  Or maybe we’ve been getting them, but the people who run the state are better able to distract from and hide the effects.

Last night, I read a business case about a handful of billionaires who’ve been trying to make lab-grown meat a viable consumer product, and I wondered something tangential.  Imagine if a handful of billionaires decided they needed to have a pliable big-government progressive in the White House.

They might flood her accounts with hundreds of millions of dollars laundered through untraceable donations designed to appear grass roots.

They might use the major media outlets they own to twist reality.

They might pay people to fill up arenas so that the candidate appears to be popular.

Then they might manipulate an insecure election system, including mail ballots, to simply install their preferred candidate, while pointing at the scandals they generated in media about the other candidate and the astroturf popularity of the “winner.”

This might sound conspiratorial and crazy, but these same people are trying to grow frankenburgers — not because they think it will be profitable, but because they want to “save the environment” and trick you into a diet that they believe is healthier.