This Is How Bad Public Schools Are

School districts in affluent areas are hotbeds of left-wing activism, but in general, student performance is at least acceptable. Parents ensure that their own children do well enough, and often invest heavily in supplementing public education with specialized tutoring that at least guarantees that their kids do well on standardized tests. 

Kids get a much worse education than they should, and often more than parents assume, but there is a reason many parents are unaware of the parlous state of the public education system as a whole. If you can get your kid into a good school in a prosperous area, it really isn’t that bad, except for the ideological indoctrination. 

I don’t want to oversell even the better public schools. Kids are now entering college without ever having read a book, and often with math skills that require remedial education, even at elite colleges. But parents love the fact that their kids are getting good grades and doing well on standardized tests, and will earn a credential that will likely serve them well. 

Most affluent parents seem indifferent to the left-wing ideological training their kids are being subjected to, although I detect that a backlash is building and will become strong enough to force the lefties to become more subtle in affluent areas. Or not. 

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The ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Sure Looks Like a Giant Cash-Grab for Woke Governing Bodies

Zohran Mamdani ran on a platform of making things more affordable for New Yorkers. That was a lie, and less than two months into his administration, Mamdani is threatening to raise property taxes on everyone while failing to deliver on all the “free” stuff he promised voters. 

But what Mamdani actually plans to do is use New York City taxpayers’ money to fund a plethora of woke government agencies to undoubtedly advance his socialist, DEI agenda. Check out some of the spending in his massive $127 billion budget.

This spending includes $5.6M for the Office of Racial Equity, $4.6M for the Commission on Racial Equity, $835,000 for the Commission on Gender Equity, more than $260,000 for the Department of Education’s Chief Diversity Officer, $300,000 for three FDNY Civilian Chief Diversity Inclusion Officers, and $118,000 for the FDNY Chief Diversity Inclusion Officer.

Just for some perspective, the 2026-27 budget for the entire state of Florida is $117 billion.

Mamdani plans to pay for all this by jacking up property taxes by almost 10 percent if Governor Hochul and Democrats in Albany don’t let him fleece the rich and corporations, and by cutting the budget for the NYPD, including slashing 5,000 new NYPD officer hires.

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The Trump Administration Officially Kills DEI at the FAA

Last year’s deadly midair collision at Reagan National Airport, which killed all 67 people aboard an American Airlines plane and a U.S. Army helicopter, was a wake-up call that many on the left refused to hear.

President Donald Trump, however, understood the problem and sought to fix it. He pointed directly at the Barack Obama and Joe Biden DEI policies that prioritized checkbox diversity over actual competence in air traffic control.

He was absolutely right.

Air traffic control whistleblowers confirmed that the FAA’s obsession with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives has led to a shortage of qualified personnel. These disastrous policies began under Obama, were reversed during Trump’s first term, and then roared back under Biden. The result? A staffing crisis filled with underqualified controllers who couldn’t handle the job.

The whistleblowers revealed that meeting diversity quotas became more important than actual ability. I’m sorry, but when you’re juggling planes full of passengers through the skies, “good enough for diversity” doesn’t cut it. The problems were so severe that near misses occurred multiple times a week. Reagan National wasn’t a random tragedy; it was an inevitable disaster created by DEI.

But those days are over. Last week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the FAA issued a mandatory “Operations Specification” that forces every commercial airline to commit to merit-based hiring for pilots.

No more woke hiring practices and no more prioritizing race and sex over skill. If airlines don’t comply, they face federal investigation.

“When families board their aircraft, they should fly with confidence knowing the pilot behind the controls is the best of the best,” Duffy said. “The American people don’t care what their pilot looks like or their gender—they just care that they are most qualified man or woman for the job.”

This shouldn’t be controversial. It’s just common sense. But under the Biden-Buttigieg regime, common sense got tossed out the window. The FAA spent years focused on renaming cockpits to “flight decks” and investigating racist roads and bridges while actual safety standards crumbled.

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We Have Now Reached “Gunperson”-Level Absurdity

By now you’ve surely heard about Tuesday’s horrific school shooting in Tumbler Ridge—a tiny, remote Canadian town where the biggest excitement is probably a moose spotting on Nextdoor—that left nine people dead and more than two dozen injured. Monstrous would be an insult to monsters everywhere.

It’s the deadliest mass shooting Canada has seen in more than thirty years. The details are unimaginable, the community is destroyed, survivors are traumatized for life, and none of it is even remotely funny. The news coverage, however, could easily be nominated for a Primetime Emmy in the Outstanding Comedy Writing category.

Within minutes of the rampage, alerts went out describing the suspect as a “female in a dress.”

The minute I saw that, I knew.

I mean, have you ever—even once—seen an alleged perpetrator described as a “male in pants” or a “female wearing shoes?” Of course not! It’s “armed female” or “adult male” or, if the subject is still on the loose, maybe “a white male in a neon green hoodie and purple parachute pants.” But never-not-ever is it “a human in human clothing.” They only threw the dress part in there to avoid stating a politically inconvenient fact, upsetting advertisers, or toppling their own carefully constructed narrative.

By the time officials reached the podium to deliver a press briefing, the description had morphed into “a gunperson.” gunperson. As if the word “shooter” was insufficiently inclusive or somehow accidentally implied gender? The press spent more time agonizing over culturally sanitized euphemisms than reporting the actual details of the crime.

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CONFIRMED: Canada School Shooter who Killed 9, Injured 25 Identified as Transgender Ex-Student Despite Officials’ Attempts to Hide Biological Gender

The suspect who opened fire on a school in British Columbia on Tuesday afternoon has been identified as biological male 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, a transgender ex-student at the school who began transitioning at approximately 12 years old. 

Notably, this comes just months after a transgender shooter opened fire, shooting through the windows of the church at Annunciation Catholic School as students attended mass during the first week of the school year late last Summer. Robin Westman, who was born Robert Westman, glorified past shooters and hated God and religious conservatives, according to his manifesto, which was uploaded to YouTube videos prior to the shooting.

Now, it’s been confirmed that the shooter not only identified as transgender, but he had also been taken into custody for a mental health assessment and had firearms removed from his home previously, according to Royal Canadian Mounted Police Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald.

The New York Post reports that Van Rootselaar dropped out of the high school approximately four years ago.

More from the New York Post:

The horrifying attack, one of the deadliest shootings in Canada’s history, began Tuesday at a residence in the sleepy rural community of Tumbler Ridge, in the western province, and concluded at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School — where authorities say Van Rootselaar died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Van Rootselaar was identified Wednesday as the shooter by Royal Canadian Mounted Police Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald, who said he was “born a biological male … who approximately six years ago began to transition to female, and identified as female.”

Asked by a reporter whether he believes there was any correlation between Van Rootselaar identifying as transgender and the shooting, McDonald said it’s “too early to say.”

McDonald said police had visited the family home on multiple occasions over the last several years due to concerns over Van Rootselaar’s mental health.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald only admitted that the 18-year-old was born a male when he was pressed on why police were “hiding” the biological gender of the shooter.

“We identify the suspect as they chose to be identified in public and in social media,” he told reporters during a press conference earlier. “I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male, who approximately– the information that I have– approximately six years ago began to transition to female and identified as female both socially and publicly.

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Affirmative Action Quotas in Question as Female, Minority Pilots Caused Half of Pilot-Error Crashes

Daniel Huff, a former White House lawyer, noted in a recent analysis that the drive toward diversity and inclusion in the airline industry has put passengers at risk.

In an article for the New York Post, Huff wrote that President Donald Trump was right to rescind diversity efforts at the Federal Aviation Administration.

That’s because female and minority pilots — many of whom entered the industry amid a drive toward diversity among pilots — were responsible for half of pilot-error crashes.

Despite making up 10 percent of pilots, they were responsible for four out of eight such crashes since 2000.

“The sample size is small,” Huff wrote. “But precisely because crashes are so rare, the few times they occur it’s important to scrutinize who is at the controls; under DEI’s guiding principle of relying on statistical disparities, it’s certainly enough to raise questions.”

“It’s not that women and minorities are inherently unable to fly planes, but in practice, pressure for affirmative action too often leads airlines to lower their standards to meet quotas,” Huff added.

The attorney referenced the 2019 Atlas Air Crash as an example.

Conrad Aska, a black pilot, “panicked after accidentally initiating a go-around procedure and flew the plane into the ground,” Huff wrote.

There were signs that such behaviors were a risk even as he was training.

In simulator exercises, he would “get extremely flustered and could not respond appropriately.”

Even worse, not all diversity-driven safety incidents even reach the public eye.

“Most diversity disasters leave far-from-complete paper trails. Training failures happen behind closed doors. Near-misses can go unreported,” Huff wrote.

“Crashes can be blamed on mechanical failure, understaffing or other politically acceptable causes.”

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A Viral Video Shows How The Left Coerces Fake Agreement

You’ve probably seen the video making the rounds today of the “Peak AWFL” meltdown in a Minneapolis yoga studio.

You can see a bunch of obvious themes in this mega-cringe showdown, starting with the feminization thesis advanced by Helen Andrews and the problem of Cluster B politics that Christopher Rufo has described. But the moment couldn’t be any more thoroughly on the nose, because note what the controversy is: A private company took down an anti-ICE sign. The meltdown is about the display of a political slogan.

What’s happening here is the absolute dead center of a problem the dissident writer Václav Havel discussed in his famous long essay on “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel argued that an insistence on speaking truth is political dynamite against a system or regime that demands compliance.

In the third section of that essay — it starts on page 5, if you click on the link — he discusses a greengrocer who hangs a sign in the window of his shop. Havel writes that the grocer “does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses.” What he means by hanging up the sign, Havel says, is please leave me alone. He puts the sign in the window “because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. … He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life ‘in harmony with society,’ as they say.”

But all of that please-leave-me-alone compliance, Havel says, is a trick. It leads us to the accident of seeing agreement everywhere. Everyone has that sign, so everyone must believe what it says. The act of going along to get along is a legitimizing act, a political surrender that hides disagreement. It’s a lie, and it has a cost.

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Queer Lobby Reports 65% Drop In Fortune 500s Celebrating Corporate DEI

The number of Fortune 500 companies willing to publicly disclose their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices has dropped 65 percent in the last year, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

The HRC, likely the most powerful gay and “transgender” lobby in the country, typically keeps track of which companies are doing its political bidding. According to a 2026 report, only 131 Fortune 500 companies in 2026 are participating in HRC’s Corporate Equality Index — the primary measure of corporate ideological compliance for HRC.

That is down from 377 Fortune 500 companies in 2025. Part of the decrease, HRC says, is so companies can maintain federal contracts as the Trump administration has cracked down on DEI and awarding taxpayer dollars to companies that advance the ideology.

The mere fact that these corporations drew back from their public display of DEI initiatives should not elicit conservatives’ praise. After all, the index is not measuring whether these companies are still participating in DEI, but rather whether they are willing to publicly brag about their efforts.

“Year‑over‑year analysis of 2025 and 2026 submissions show that implementation of policies and practices measured by the CEI was sustained or increased, with no declines across any criterion,” the report states. At best, the organizations that are no longer participating publicly are ones that blow with the political wind, and can be expected to return to their left-wing propagandizing the moment Democrats return to power.

This reality points to the potential reason for HRC choosing to publish this data. At first glance, it may seem that the radical gender ideology movement is losing steam, but in reality, HRC’s data is a shot across the bow reminding companies that their disloyalty will not be forgotten.

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State Department Defunds Foreign Groups That Promote DEI, Transgenderism

The U.S. Department of State announced on January 23 that it is expanding the Mexico City Policy, which prohibits foreign aid to groups that promote abortion, to also include groups that promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and transgenderism.

The department released three rules that will implement this expansion. The rules, titled “Combating Gender Ideology in Foreign Assistance,” “Combating Discriminatory Equity Ideology in Foreign Assistance Rules,” and “Protecting Life in Foreign Assistance,” were published in the Federal Register on January 27.

Vice President J.D. Vance celebrated the policy change during his address at this year’s March for Life, stating that “with these additions, the rule will now cover [all] non-military foreign assistance that America sends. All in all, we have expanded the Mexico City Policy about three times as big as it was before.”

The policy, first implemented in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan, has been rescinded and reimplemented repeatedly by succeeding Democratic and Republican administrations. President Donald Trump had already expanded the rule in 2017 by having the policy apply to all foreign aid, rather than just aid intended for “family planning.”

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Watchdog alleges Netflix coordinated with FBI to promote left-wing narratives

A new report alleges that the streaming giant Netflix has worked closely with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies in ways that amount to government-assisted propaganda.

The report released Tuesday by the Oversight Project, a government watchdog group, contends that the FBI, the CIA, and the Defense Department (now the War Department) exercised influence over film and television productions—particularly those distributed by Netflix.

“Based on all publicly available evidence and analysis, Netflix appears to have an outsized role in socially engineering millions of Americans into a predisposition to accept preferred left-wing ideological dogma,” the Oversight Project report states.

“Netflix did so with the help of the federal government, especially the FBI, and intelligence community. In fact, the FBI plays an outsized active role in content moderation for projects it is involved in.”

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