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Essence Magazine Gets ROASTED for Calling Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘The People’s Champion’ in Cover Story

Essence Magazine is a publication that focuses on black women, but their new cover story about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is getting them absolutely dragged on social media.

The main criticism is that they are trying WAY too hard to turn her into some kind of celebrity, much like the liberal media did with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

It is apparently not enough that she is a judge who sits on the highest court in the land, she has to be treated like a movie star as well.

Just look this, with the headline: ‘The People’s Champion’

Really?

FOX News reported on the fallout:

Brown Jackson’s latest spotlight moment fuels accusations she’s forgetting her day job: ‘Not celebrities’

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared on the cover of the most recent issue of Essence magazine, spurring critics to argue that she is seeking publicity in ways that are inappropriate for a member of the Supreme Court.

“Supreme Court Justices are not celebrities and should not be treated like celebrities,” Andrew Fleischman, a Georgia trial and appeal lawyer, wrote of the cover.

The magazine’s cover features a picture of Jackson wearing a purple coat and smiling directly at the reader. Underneath Jackson’s photo is a caption that reads “the people’s champion.”…

Jackson’s public appearances outside the court have drawn periodic criticism from some conservatives and legal observers, who argue that events such as the Grammy Awards, Broadway appearances and a Vogue photoshoot risk blurring the line between judicial service and celebrity.

“Ketanji Brown Jackson isn’t supposed to be ‘the people’s champion,’” Billy Binion, a reporter for a libertarian magazine, wrote on X. “She’s not a politician. She’s supposed to interpret the law, not make it. This kind of thing is why so many people misunderstand how our government works at a basic level.”

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Trump Cultism Is Just a Modern-Day Operation Trust: Why ‘Trust the Plan’ Is a PSYOP For the Weak-Minded

The Same Old Lie, New Packaging

Over the last 10 years or so, I have watched the “trust the plan” mantra sweep through the MAGA faithful like a religious revival. It is a direct replica of the Soviet Operation Trust, a psychological operation designed to keep people passive and compliant while their enemies consolidate power.

The original Operation Trust, which ran from 1921 to 1926, tricked anti-Bolshevik exiles into believing a fake resistance movement would overthrow the regime — all to prevent real action and to expose anyone who might actually fight back. As I previously reported, this Bolshevik psyop created a phantom organization that promised imminent salvation, but delivered only betrayal and inaction. [1]

Today, QAnon followers and Trump loyalists are fed the exact same story: wait for mass arrests, a golden age, and a savior. Nothing ever materializes, but the excuses keep coming. The pattern is so obvious that even mainstream observers have noted the resemblance. [1] The most disturbing part is how the same psychological manipulation that kept Russians docile in the 1920s now keeps many Americans trapped in a cycle of hope and disappointment. I believe this is not a coincidence — it is a deliberate strategy refined over a century.

Operation Trust: A Soviet Blueprint for Inaction

Let me break down the original Operation Trust so you can see how perfectly it maps onto today’s Trump cult. The Bolsheviks, facing collapse after the Russian Civil War, invented a fake anti-communist organization called the “Monarchist Union of Central Russia” — fronted by a former tsarist official — to pacify opponents. The message was clear: “You don’t have to do anything — just trust the plan.” Any dissidents who demanded real action were labeled traitors or infiltrators. [1] This is exactly what we hear today from influencers pushing the idea that Trump’s every failure is part of a grand strategy we cannot see.

We’re just supposed to trust it. Even when the Trump regime pushes mass glyphosate poisoning, new pesticides, more vaccines and more wars.

The Soviet GPU ran this operation for five years, draining the energy of genuine resistance movements while maintaining the illusion that victory was just around the corner. [1] David Icke documented how the same Sabbatian control system uses leaders as fall-guys to divide and pacify populations. [2] The parallel is unmistakable: the message “trust the plan” is not a promise of deliverance — it is a tool of psychological pacification that keeps believers glued to their screens instead of taking real action.

Trump’s Record: Broken Promises and a Financial Looting

Let’s look at what the plan has actually delivered. Trump promised to end wars, but he started a new war with Iran that has already cost trillions (globally) and destabilized the Middle East. [3] He promised to drain the swamp, but his administration granted immunity to glyphosate poisoners, approved toxic forever chemicals, and made no arrests of election fraudsters or Fauci. [4]

The Saudi Crown Prince lost confidence in Trump after the U.S. failure in Iran, and even Iran’s negotiator mocked his “Operation Trust Me Bro.” [5] [6] Every excuse from believers — “It’s part of the plan” — is just a delay tactic to keep them docile.

Meanwhile, the Epstein files vanished, the J6 prisoners remain in jail, and Trump’s DOJ floated NDAs for federal employees to suppress leaks. [7] [8] The promise of mass arrests and accountability has become a cruel joke. I have documented how Trump’s war with Iran was an unconstitutional act that shattered the republic. [4] The believers refuse to see that “trust the plan” is the oldest con in the book: keep your marks hoping for tomorrow while you loot them today.

Why People Still Believe: The Addiction to Hopium

Years of missed deadlines — the quantum financial system, the Q drops, the mass arrests — should have broken the spell, but followers cling to numerology and new dates. This is a psychological addiction: hoping feels better than facing reality. As Aaron Day exposed in his investigation of quantum deception scams, these con artists maintain suspense by constantly delaying the promised reset or payouts, thereby securing ongoing subscription revenue. [9] The same blueprint is used in fake churches and crypto scams; it is a method of extracting compliance and money from desperate people. [9]

The global elite know that hopium keeps people mentally sick, unable to question the narrative, and they shun anyone who points out the obvious con. Geddes Martin wrote about how the entrenched two-tier justice system and endemic corruption depend on a passive population that believes salvation will come from above. [10] I have seen this cycle destroy families who gave everything to the cause, only to be left bankrupt and betrayed. The addiction to false hope is the most dangerous drug of all.

The Alternative: Act, Don’t Just Trust

Real empowerment comes from taking concrete action. I never tell you to sit back and do nothing — I give you steps that increase your resilience: grow your own food, stack gold and silver, use decentralized tools, and prepare for collapse. [11] [12] In my interview with David Morgan, we discussed how silver and gold are the most honest forms of money in a world of fiat collapse. [11] Building a solar system, a home garden, and a stockpile of clean water and non-perishable food are tangible acts that no government can take from you.

If someone tells you to sit back and trust, that is the biggest red flag. The same pattern appears in fake churches that demand tithes while the pastor lives in luxury, and in crypto scams that promise astronomical returns. [9] I have seen too many people lose everything because they waited for a false savior. Do not be one of them. Place your trust in your own hands, your own knowledge, and your own ability to provide for yourself and your family.

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Democrats Pick Up the Global Digital ID Agenda in Project 2029

A group of operatives gathers every few years to write the document that will supposedly save the party, and this season’s entry comes from Project 2029, a “liberal” outfit built as the mirror image of the conservative Project 2025.

One side wrote a blueprint that ended up staffing part of a presidential administration. The other would like the same result, but opens with the safest subject in American politics, the welfare of children.

What it has actually picked up is a global digital ID agenda, a policy spreading through Australia, Britain, and the European Union, the government-backed age check, increasingly a digital ID, that decides who gets onto a platform.

As first reported by Semafor, Project 2029 wants to make it the opening pitch of the next Democratic campaign, sold under the same banner every other global elite is using, child protection.

The first product off the line is called “Kids Over Clicks.” It would ban social media accounts for anyone under 16, trim the liability shield in Section 230, cap data collection on minors, and outlaw the targeted ads that follow them around the web.

The group’s executive director, Chad Maisel, a former adviser to Joe Biden and Cory Booker, frames the rollout as a contest of nerve. “We’re going to see many people running for president…and we want to set the standard in terms of the type of ambition that we want to see when it comes to solving these problems,” he said.

The pitch arrives wrapped in the language of a public-health crusade. Project 2029 calls this the “tobacco moment” for social media, and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of its boosters, supplies the closing argument. “We are at the ‘tobacco moment’ for social media. The science is in, the lawsuits are succeeding, and public support is overwhelming. This agenda gives policymakers no excuse not to act,” he said.

It’s a clean story, complete with a villain and a rescue. It also runs on something its authors rarely say out loud.

To keep children off a platform, somebody has to check the age of everyone who shows up. At the scale of a national social network, there is no gentle way to do that. You confirm identity. A birth year typed into a box proves nothing, so the check hardens into a government ID, a face scan, or a digital credential tied to a real person.

The under-16 rule, sold as a wall around children, becomes a turnstile that adults have to badge through too. The framework keeps this in the footnotes. Once a platform must verify ages, the anonymous account stops being possible, and the pseudonymous handle that lets someone speak without surrendering a legal name turns into a verified record, logged and stored, waiting for the next breach or subpoena.

Not all of Kids Over Clicks pulls in that direction. Banning surveillance ads and capping data collection on minors would shrink what companies hoard, the rare provisions that take something from the platforms rather than from the user. The age gate sits awkwardly beside them, demanding the one thing the rest of the document is trying to protect, a person’s identity.

The countries already running it offer a preview, and not all of them are democracies. Australia switched on its under-16 ban in December 2025.

Britain’s Online Safety Act now greets users of Reddit and X with a demand for a passport or a face scan before they reach ordinary content, a regime broad enough that the Wikimedia Foundation went to court arguing it could force identity checks onto the people who edit Wikipedia.

The European Union is folding age verification into a continent-wide Digital Identity Wallet. The United Arab Emirates bars under-15s outright and requires digital identity checks to enforce it. Saudi Arabia, which already runs one of the most heavily policed internets on earth, shows where the road ends, in a country where the link between a citizen and every word they post is permanent and state-held.

That is the recurring shape of age verification as a genre. It is sold on its effect on children and judged, eventually, on its effect on everyone else.

The bet is that no candidate will want to be filmed arguing against protecting children, which is almost certainly correct. The price of winning it is a Democratic Party that runs, in 2028, on the same instrument Britain, Brussels, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh are each building for their own reasons, a standing check on who gets to speak without a name. Australia has already shown how the story goes. The kids find the workaround but the ID requirement stays.

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REPORT: Zohran Mamdani is BIG MAD at ‘The View’ After A Host Correctly Called One of His DSA Candidates an Antisemite

Zohran Mamdani is reportedly steaming mad at ‘The View’ because one of the hosts referred to Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA nominee for New York’s 13th congressional district, an antisemite.

Truth hurts, huh?

One of the central pillars of the DSA is their pathological hatred of Israel, and by extension, Jews. Their exclamation of ‘Free Palestine’ is nothing more than a euphemism for the destruction of Israel.

FOX News reports:

Mamdani aide unloaded on ABC executives after ‘The View’ host called socialist candidate an antisemite: report

An aide to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani reportedly lashed out at ABC executives after “The View” co-host Sara Haines called a Mamdani-backed socialist congressional candidate an antisemite.

Mamdani flexed his political influence last month after three candidates that he endorsed in New York congressional primaries — Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier — won over Democratic establishment candidates.

The New York City mayor’s team had pitched the liberal talk show to have the socialist candidates on, but the show had declined, according to Semafor.

During an episode of the show on June 24, co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin and Haines pushed back on the actions and comments of some of the candidates backed by Mamdani. Haines said Chevalier was at an anti-Israel rally on October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’ massive terrorist attack against Israel by Hamas.

“I’m gonna full-blown call her an antisemite. She would proudly call herself that, trust me,” Haines said of Chevalier.

Following the comments, an aide for the socialist mayor reportedly unloaded on ABC executives, and said the remarks by Haines could affect future appearances on the show for the mayor or the candidates running for Congress, according to Semafor, who cited a person familiar with the matter.

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Before Sputnik: The Mystery Lights That Refuse to Die

In the first week of June 2026, a retired NASA software engineer quietly published a paper that removes the last easy escape from one of the strangest claims in modern astronomy.

The claim, advanced over the past six years by the astrophysicist Beatriz Villarroel and her VASCO collaborators, is that photographic plates exposed in the 1950s, before any human object reached orbit, contain brief points of light that behave like reflections from objects that should not have been there. Skeptics have always had a ready answer: old photographic plates are riddled with defects, and a dust speck or chemical stain can counterfeit a star. The new paper, by Ivo Busko (arXiv:2606.08319), shows that a specific class of these transients carries the optical signature of coma, a lawful distortion that a telescope mirror imposes on light entering off-axis. A plate defect knows nothing of the telescope’s optics. Light that passed through them cannot help confessing that it did.

In plain terms: for eleven of these mystery lights, Busko has demonstrated that they are images of light from the sky, not blemishes on the film. That does not prove what the light was. It does demolish the single most durable objection to the whole VASCO program, and it does so with object-level evidence, one image at a time, rather than the population statistics that skeptics have spent the past year contesting. This is why it matters, and why Villarroel’s critics now have a much harder problem than they had in January.

Light Through the Telescope

Busko spent decades at the Space Telescope Science Institute writing data-reduction pipelines for Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, instruments calibrated to fractions of a pixel. In retirement he turned to the VASCO results as an outside examiner, choosing his own data, his own telescope, and his own method, and posting his entire pipeline as open source so that anyone with a laptop can repeat it.

His earlier paper, from March, found the transients in plates from Hamburg Observatory’s 1.2-meter Schmidt camera, and rested on their image profiles being too narrow to be stars. That argument is sound but contestable, because a Schmidt camera produces such clean images that some genuine plate defects are also sharp and round, and the two can be hard to separate. The June paper turns the problem inside out. Instead of a telescope whose images are clean, Busko chose one whose images are informatively flawed: Hamburg’s 0.6-meter Doppel-Reflektor, whose parabolic mirror imposes significant coma on any light entering at an angle to its axis.

Coma smears a point of light into a small comet-like figure with a bright head and two symmetric wings trailing into a tail. The figure is lawful in every respect. It points toward the center of the plate, it grows in proportion to its distance from that center, and its shape and brightness stand in a fixed relationship to the genuine stars around it. For a defect to counterfeit this, it would have to fake the orientation, the scaling with field position, and the wing structure all at once, and a whole population of defects would have to fake all of it coherently across the plate. The odds against that are what the paper is built on.

From the APPLAUSE archive of digitized European plates, Busko assembled 407 usable plate pairs spanning 1934 to 1957, cut off at October 1957 so that no glint can be blamed on Sputnik or anything launched after it. Pairs share field, exposure, and emulsion; an object on one plate of a pair and absent from its twin, taken minutes later, is a candidate. After filtering against standard software, cross-checking the USNO and Gaia catalogs and the later POSS-II survey, and ruling out asteroids through the Minor Planet Center, eleven transients survived, each judged by eye against the coma physics and against neighboring stars of the same brightness.

Their star-equivalent magnitudes run from 11.9 up to 7.1, but those figures assume the source shone for the whole exposure, as a star does. If the events were brief, the true brightness was far greater. Busko’s own arithmetic: a tenth-magnitude transient lasting one second on a fifteen-minute plate was, for that instant, near magnitude 2.6, rivaling the brighter stars of the night sky. Three such events, the brightest in the sample, appear on a single plate from 4 March 1951, and the brightest of those shows saturation and halation, the halo of light scattered within the emulsion. Those are signatures of real light acting on film, and no envelope stain produces them.

One analysis shows the method doing work no profile statistic could. On the plate in question, every cataloged star sits at the apex of its own comatic wing, the point of peak intensity, exactly where the optics place it. When Busko overlays the catalog positions on the brightest transient, the two faint stars nearest it sit off-center, away from that apex. The transient is therefore not a misbehaving image of either star. The aberration becomes a coordinate system internal to the plate, and the transient declines to occupy the seat reserved for any known occupant.

The strangest feature is the clustering, which Busko handles with notable care. All eleven transients fall in just two small regions of sky, and all eleven fall between 1949 and 1953, even though half the plate pairs lie outside that window and show nothing. The tightest sequences are remarkable: on 8 February 1951 a vanishing transient is followed twenty minutes later by an appearing one in the same field; in April 1953 three transients appear within 45 arcseconds of one another, in the same field where a single transient had appeared four years earlier. The 1953 triple is narrower than nearby stars, which a critic could hold against it, but Busko notes that a sub-second flash escapes most of the atmospheric blur that broadens a long stellar exposure and so prints sharper, while still carrying the coma signature, which all three do, in the same orientation as their neighbors. Three independent defects conspiring in that orientation is far less likely than three brief flashes.

The caveats belong here in full, because Busko states them in full, and his candor is the reason to trust the rest. The identifications are visual; a quantitative, automated version is promised in a later paper. The sample of eleven is too small for the clustering to be assigned statistical significance. And the nuclear-test associations in this particular sample are genuinely mixed: three groupings fall close to atmospheric tests, but 1950 saw no tests anywhere on earth and produced two transients, and the lone 1949 transient precedes the first Soviet test by four months. A weaker author would have reported the hits and dropped the misses. The misses are in the paper, which is why the hits are worth weighing.

So the paper’s claim is narrow and, within its limits, very strong. These eleven images were made by light that went through the telescope. Busko says plainly that this does not by itself establish what the light was, and the honest reader holds the line where he draws it. What it secures is the premise on which everything else depends, the one the skeptics denied: that at least some of the transients are real images of the sky. Whether the sky held machines is the next question.

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Treasure Hunters Settle Lawsuit with FBI Over Mysterious Dig for Civil War Gold

A years-long legal battle between a pair of treasure hunters and the FBI over a mysterious dig for an apocryphal horde of Civil War gold has reportedly concluded, but the circumstances surrounding the event remain shrouded in mystery. The contentious dispute began way back in March of 2018 when dozens of federal agents descended upon a spot in a Pennsylvania state forest where Dennis Parada and his son Ken believed a bevy of gold bars had been buried over 150 years ago. When the FBI ended the excavation after a few days and asserted that nothing had been found, the treasure hunters grew suspicious and, after tangling with local authorities about the matter for months, ultimately sued the Justice Department in the hopes of finding some answers.

In the years that followed, the family achieved various legal victories that provided them with an array of compelling records from the 2018 dig that further convinced them that the legendary Civil War gold had been secretly recovered. “The information we’ve got from the FBI files is very damaging,” Dennis Parada explained, “it’s a massive cover-up. It’s sloppy work. I’m surprised they even put it in their files.” After besting the Bureau in court yet again this past April, the treasure hunters reportedly settled with the Department of Justice this week. The terms of the deal saw the treasure hunters receive $52,000 for legal expenses in exchange for them ending their pursuit for answers from the FBI.

While Parada expressed some measure of pride at having taken on and defeated the federal government, he conceded that what exactly unfolded in March of 2018 is still a maddening mystery. To that end, the treasure hunter indicated that their years-long quest will continue, albeit in a different form, as the family now plans to sue the Philadelphia branch of the U.S. Mint. “We’re going to have to drag the Mint into federal court and get pictures and videos of all the gold that would enter that building,” he said, “$1.1 billion in gold disappeared, and nobody’s asking any questions except us. This isn’t right.”

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Ken Paxton Vowed to Crack Down on “Illegal Voting.” He May Have Violated Texas Election Law.

Two weeks before this year’s primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud.

“Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted to my office by the Legislature, we will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity,” Paxton said in a February news release announcing the tip line.

The announcement linked to guidance from his office about election laws in Texas, which included a requirement to be a U.S. citizen, a prohibition on collecting mail ballots on behalf of others and a warning that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records or to establish a residence for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election.”

“You must register to vote using the address where you reside,” the attorney general’s guidance stated.

Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving.

It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.

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Woke activists push for ‘Black English’ to be taught in Democrat state’s preschools to combat ‘harmful language hierarchies’

California activists are calling for the state’s preschools to legitimize the use of Black English in the classroom.

Supporters say teaching the dialect, also known as African American English (AAE) or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), will help ‘combat harmful language hierarchies.’

The Black Californians United for Early Care & Education group is part of a movement advocating for Black English to be recognized as a legitimate, rule-based language in preschool classrooms on par with other languages.

Co-founder Dr Ashley Williams told PBS the movement is personal because she grew up being told by her family that the way she spoke at home wasn’t acceptable at school.

Williams says she felt ashamed and embarrassed by this and is spearheading the movement because she doesn’t want her two-year-old son to grow up with the same experience. 

‘I don’t want my son to walk into any room and feel like his voice is not valued or his perspective can’t be heard because he’s not saying it in one way or the other,’ she told the outlet. 

The advocacy group – known as BlackECE – has trained educators to support Black English speakers in the same way they support dual language learners. 

The group uses resources like the Black English Knowledge Brief and webinar series, which helps educators, caregivers, and school leaders better understand Black English, its roots.

It also offers ways to create classrooms that affirm children’s language and identity.  

It comes after the Golden State introduced a plan in 2020 to expand early dual-language learning and support bilingual children.

BlackECE argues that Black English should also be included as part of the scheme.

‘We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African-American English speakers,’ Xigrid Soto-Boykin, director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University, said.

‘We completely miss this subgroup of children that could also benefit from their language backgrounds to be sustained, but also to be leveraged for their own learning.’

According to 2020 research published by the National Library of Medicine, about 20 percent of US children and 44 percent of California children ages five to 17 are bilingual. 

As of 2023, 96 percent of Black Americans speak English fluently.

Around 88 percent speak only English, with the remaining respondents using another language at home and speaking English very well, according to Pew Research.

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On 250th Anniversary, A Look Back At Gun Ownership In America

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees what may be the most uniquely American of all rights. Those 27 words have inspired millions of words in thousands of debates over the Amendment’s meaning and what, if any, limits may apply.

There is no question that firearms played a pivotal role in the birth and growth of the United States of America.

From the Pilgrims’ matchlock muskets and the six shooters carried by cowboys, to the modern semiautomatic rifles wielded by Korean business owners in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, guns are an integral part of American culture.

The right to keep and bear arms is unique, says Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow with Advancing American Freedom and Second Amendment scholar.

“It’s an incredibly short list [of countries that recognize the right to own guns], and there are none of them have anything in theory or practice that is what I would say [is] a true equivalent of the American right to keep and bear arms,” Swearer told The Epoch Times.

Based on sales data, permit applications, background checks and other factors, there are an estimated 400 million to 500 million firearms in civilian hands in the United States, according to the Sixguns Fraternity. This is an average of two firearms for every person over age 18.

Yet, while America celebrates 250 years as a society that honors the individual right to keep and bear arms, gun ownership remains one of the nation’s most divisive issues.

Gun control groups did not respond to emails seeking comment for this article, but many have posted their concerns online. Gun control advocates say violence intervention strategies, strict gun control – including bans – and tighter regulation of the firearms industry are elements of common-sense gun laws.

They point to high-profile stories of mass shootings, school shootings, and violent crime involving firearms.

“The gun homicide rate in the U.S. is 26 times higher than that of other developed countries, but research shows that common-sense public safety laws can reduce gun violence and save lives,” Everytown for Gun Safety, states on its website.

The group, along with others, say gunshots are the number one cause of death for American children.

The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control reports that the top cause of death for children between 1- and 17-years-old are “unintentional injuries.” Matthew Garnett with the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, defines unintentional injury as, deaths from fatal injuries that were “unintended, unplanned, and did not occur on purpose.”

“Unintentional injury deaths include a wide array of mechanisms, with the four most common being: poisoning, motor vehicle crashes, drowning, and falls,” Garnett wrote.

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College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds

Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.”

According to a new “Survey of Adult Skills” conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — a forum for 38 high-income, predominantly Western countries — a not insignificant number of adult students enrolled in higher education are now reading and doing math at a level which, in a more functional society, would be alarming for a middle schooler.

The survey, first spotted by the Economist, tested around 160,000 people of all ages, across all 38 member states. It found that across all OECD member countries, a full 8 percent of college students are reading at the level of a ten-year-old, if not worse. While countries like Germany and France rang in at under 5 percent, countries like Poland, Israel, and the United States blew the curve at 21, 20, and 14 percent, respectively.

The numbers aren’t much better when it comes to math. Across OECD countries, 9 percent of college students do math at or below a ten-year-old level. In Italy, the US, and Slovakia, that figure jumps to over 15 percent — only outdone by Israel, where roughly 21 percent of college students were underachieving at the same low benchmark.

It seems there are numerous compounding explanations for these test results: pandemic-era learning gaps leading to lower levels of preparation, declining college enrollment forcing schools to lower admissions standards, and lower levels of public funding for education, to name a few.

The results also coincide with the explosion of large language models like ChatGPT, which by many accounts have carved out a new floor for academic failure in both K-12 and college-level education.

While there’s no denying how complicated the issue is, there is evidence that removing technology from classrooms altogether could offer an immediate boost.

In one classroom in Minneapolis, for example, a literature and English teacher banned phones and laptops, requiring all coursework to be done on pencil and paper. As the school-year started in September, just 46 percent of the students involved said they felt confident about their reading skills. A few months later in February, that number stood at 95 percent.

Though it’s just one classroom, something is clearly off the rails in the education systems of the richest countries of the world — and the longer it goes unaddressed, the more students will be pushed into the world with the reading skills of 4th graders.

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