Everyone Pushing For A Trump Impeachment Can Fuck Off

January 14th, 2021

Sorry my headline language is so salty this week, but some ideas are so stupid they require profanity.

This applies to the idiot Democrats pushing the second impeachment, though baseline Dem idiocy is already baked into their cake. My real ire is reserved for the functionaries of Conservatism Inc. who have signed on to this bullshit.

Donald Trump leaves office in SIX! FUCKING! DAYS! Instead of letting time take its course, the vainglorious fuckwits of our corrupt kleptocracy have decided that the previously rarely employed machinery of constitutional impeachment must be deployed for the ultimate exercise in masturbatory virtual signaling.

Mitch McConnell has stated that he will not agree to an emergency senate hearing, so there is no way Impeachment Farce 2: Virtue Signaling Boogaloo will get Trump out of office one second sooner than his constitutionally defined four years. Plus the idea that a second impeachment trial can be completed after he’s left office to disqualify him from ever holding office again is a constitutional crock.

Keep in mind, I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool Trump acolyte. I was for Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, I don’t think Trump has been a perfect President, I don’t think he’s been sent by God, I don’t think he’s made much measurable progress in draining the swamp, and I didn’t think the January 6th shenanigans was a good idea even before it went south.

But the idea that clown show was an “insurrection” is risible bullshit. Like the Ukraine call, the Democratic Media Complex must assert that some particular bit of Trumpian communication that rubbed them the wrong way counts as a high crime.

And now the conserving conservatism crowd are running around proclaiming how this was the last straw and they must impeach a guy out of office next week because they’re just so mad at how that villain Trump has soiled their sacred honor, and how they can’t wait to return to the former glory of their back-slapping cruise mingles without the worry that some of the peasants in steerage might get tired of their non-stop failure to deliver on their promises of conservative governance. (I may be paraphrasing their arguments a wee tad.)

This is why they can’t allow any examination of evidence of fraud in the 2020 election: Because it would require them actually take a stand. And we can’t have that, can we?

Fuck each and every single Republican pushing for this cubed farce of an impeachment.

PSA: TPPF’s Policy Orientation for the Texas 2021 Legislative Session Starts Today

January 13th, 2021

The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s policy orientation session for the 87th Texas Legislature starts today. Tickets for the live event are sold out, but you can still register to livestream the event here.

The event grid can be found here. Keynote speakers include Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Representative Chip Roy, journalist Kimberley Strassel and Kevin Robert, as well as usual TPPF stalwarts like Chuck Devore, Vance Ginn and James Quintero.

A couple of the more interesting panels I will try to catch: the plenary “Election 2020: What Happened and What Does it Mean for the Future?” at 4:30 PM today, “The Reasons Behind the Homelessness Explosion” at 9:45 AM on Friday (might have to catch a recording of that), and “Closing Keynote Luncheon: A Fresh Take: New Members Look Ahead to Congress 2021” with newly minted Texas representatives August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, and Tony Gonzales (three of whom you may remember from this ad) as well as California Representative Michelle Steel at 12:30 PM on Friday.

I attended TPPF’s orientation back in 2013, and it’s worth participating in if you’re interested in state politics.

Democrats’ Tower Of Self-Reinforcing Bullshit

January 12th, 2021

The left has long had a tendency to push propaganda over truth, but the Trump years have seen a dramatic increase in willfully repeated falsehoods to push the Democratic Media Complex’s favored “narratives” over obvious truths everyone can see with their own two eyes.

First there was the Russian collusion hoax, a self-serving fiction democrats concocted both to jam Trump at the line of scrimmage and give them an excuse for explaining how they managed to lose an election everyone said they had in the bag. There followed more lies to support the initial lie, then the impeachment farce that failed to make a dent.

And all the while, underneath the surface, social justice warriors were spinning out falsehood after falsehood to support their favored narratives. “Hands Up Don’t Shot” was a lie from the git-go. The idea that sex is a social construct was and is a lie, as is the idea that someone can change their sex merely by declaring they have. Not to mention the risible #BlackLivesMatter bullshit that “silence is violence” and the ridiculous idea that everyone who voted for Trump was a “white supremacist.”

Then came to 2020 #BlackLivesMatter/Antifa riots the Democratic Media Complex did their very best to ignore or spin as “mostly peaceful” despite burning down hundreds of businesses and looting thousands.

Then they stole the 2020 Presidential election by massive fraud is six urban counties and got very upset when people tried to point this out.

Finally, the events of January 6 drove them to new heights of hyperbole. Want to call it inadvisable? Absolutely. A mob? Fair enough. A riot? Sure. Criminal? Some of it, by definition.

But what it was not was an “insurrection” or “coup.” Trust me, if a significant fraction of president Trump’s 75+ million supporters wanted to stage an armed coup, you’d know it. Or, more to the point, the likes of Nancy Pelosi, George Soros and Jack Dorsey wouldn’t know it, because they’d hang lifeless from the ends of gibbets.

For a party that failed to flip a single statehouse chamber in November, Democrats are freebasing dangerous levels of their own bullshit in ratcheting up the rhetorical hysteria.

You don’t get high on your own supply because the moment you start deluding yourself, reality has a nasty way of smacking you upside the head.

And if Democrats think that removing Donald “Emmanuel Goldstein” Trump from the White House means they get to immediately return to their old grifts without consequences (and add a bunch of new woke social justice grifts on top of them to boot), they have another think coming. Kurt Schlichter:

Have you noticed that everything is a lie and a scam? Everything.

See, the problem starts when our elite realized that it could break the norms and betray the principles that we all thought we were all abiding by without accountability, at least for a little while. The Establishment realized that it can simply not enforce the norms, and then there will be a lag time while the normals continue on as if the norms were still in effect. It’s inertia – this is why you get these sad sack RINOs lecturing us on how we’re subverting the institutions when what we are really doing is pointing out that the institutions have subverted themselves.

It’s willful blindness to the corruption because the weakhearts don’t want to admit there is corruption because that would then require them to act. It’s easier to live on scraps.

The biggest gap in this country isn’t between enlightened social justice warriors and the backward racist redneck freaks of JesusLand, it’s between those who want to continue sticking their snouts into troughs of taxpayer money, feel their own grifts are sacred birthrights above reproach and have different laws apply to them than the peasants, and those who have been made aware of the scam.

We’re not going back to sleep, no matter how hard you call us deplorables, racists or insurrectionists.

Joe Rogan and Doctor Mark Gordon on California’s Lockdown Madness

January 11th, 2021

At some point I’m going to finish a full-blown Texas Vs. California update. But like every other blog post I’ve got in the works, it’s taking longer than usual to complete. So instead, here’s California-to-Texas refugee Joe Rogan interviewing fellow California-to-Texas refugee Dr. Mark Gordon, who specializes in recovering from traumatic brain injury and has a line of neutracuiticals about the many problems of California and how badly they’ve handled the lockdown.

The Great Purge Begins

January 10th, 2021

Friday big tech monopolies started their purge of conservative voices at the very top, by banning President Donald Trump from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch and others in a coordinated attempt to silence him at the end of his first term as President.

As Ann Althouse noted, there was nothing about President Trump’s speech (or his tweets, for that matter) that incited violence.

But Trump wasn’t the end of it. As Ed Driscoll noted over on Instapundit, “TODAY, SILICON VALLEY SETTLES ALL FAMILY BUSINESS:”

Google suspends right-wing app ‘Parler’ from Google Play Store.

Earlier: Apple Has Threatened To Ban Parler From The App Store.

UPDATE: Steve Bannon’s podcast shuttered by YouTube over false 2020 election claims.

And by “false voting fraud claims” they mean “mostly true voting fraud claims.”

That’s not all:

Among the people who have been booted:

Salem Media’s Kevin McCullough, who posted questions about the votes moving backwards in the Georgia run-offs and posted Trump’s video from his rally.

The Team Trump account was axed too.

Techno Fog who broke court documents on the Russia hoax.

Tracy Beanz who also did yeoman’s work on Russia hoax.

Influencers on the right suddenly over the last couple of days were also finding their Twitter followers dropping off precipitously. Not just a few people but a lot of influencers, even smaller not well-known people.

Lots of people are having followers purged, including myself, though I’ve only lost some 100-odd. Can;t say whether this is a purge of inactive accounts or not.

Facebook also banned the #WalkAway campaign and Brandon Straka:

There are probably a lot more bannings I’ve missed.

Social media has become a clear and present danger to American freedoms:

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the battle over personal data, free speech and the free flow of information between the American people and the tech giants is heating up. As the Googles and Facebooks of the world take an unconstitutional role in deciding what speech and information should be online, it’s becoming clear much more is at stake than first meets the eye.

It’s also becoming apparent that there are some voices on the Right who are either deeply naïve and ignorant about what is at stake or they are in fact paid collaborators of the tech companies.

Also some discussion of the threat of the singularity, which is still more science fiction than actual at this point. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Tucker Carlson summarizes:

Some conservatives are leaving Twitter in protest.

As for myself, I’m just going to keep talking about the things they don’t want to talk about on Twitter (like Biden family corruption and fraud in the 2020 presidential election) until they kick me off.

Alternatives to Twitter

January 9th, 2021

I’ve got a bunch of quarter- or half-formed blog posts about The Recent Unpleasantness I haven’t had time to finish, so let’s use this low-calorie blog post substitute to note that I’m on two separate alternative to Twitter:

  • On Gab I’m @BattleSwarm. Gab was looking moribund for a while, but after this week’s events it seems to be showing some life again.
  • I’m on Parler as @Lawrenceperson.
  • I’ve also added a Social Media section to the sidebar.

    So if you’re on either of those, try to follow me there in addition to my Twitter account, as it seems like only a matter of time until my account gets nuked for #WrongThink. One wonders how profitable Twitter will be once they get around to banning everyone Democrats and Social Justice Warriors think should get banned.

    Also: Open thread.

    LinkSwarm for January 8, 2021

    January 8th, 2021

    Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel like finishing that post on the events of January 6th. In the meantime, enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • Mark Steyn has some pungent commentary:

    The political class (represented by a Speaker who flies home to San Francisco on her own government plane) has been largely insulated from the pathologies they have loosed upon the land. For a few hours yesterday they weren’t.

    In a self-governing republic of citizen-legislators, that ought to be sobering and instructive. But, of course, it wasn’t. Still, I was surprised that even politicians and pundits could utter all that eyewash about “the citadel of democracy” and “a light to the world” with a straight face. It’s a citadel of crap, and the lights went out long ago: ask anyone who needs that $600 “relief”.

    I despise the United States Congress, and not merely for the weeks I had to spend there during the Clinton impeachment trial: My contempt pre-dates that circus. It dates to the moment I first realized, as a recent arrival to this land, that when Dick Durbin or some such is giving some overwrought speech on a burning issue he is speaking to an entirely empty chamber – because there are no debates, because most of these over-entouraged Emirs of Incumbistan are entirely incapable of debate: See, inter alia, Ed Markey.

    But the fact that they might as well be orating in front of the bathroom mirror isn’t why I despise it. It’s that the American media go along with the racket, and there’s only the one pool camera with the fixed tight shot so that you can’t see the joint is deserted and the guy is talking to himself. The wanker press is so protective of its politicians that it’s happy to give the impression that a boob like Markey is Cromwell in the Long Parliament.

    I have never seen such rubbish in the House of Commons at Ottawa or Westminster or their equivalents around the Commonwealth – and it’s a charade in which the media are all-in.

    So it’s a Potemkin parliament.

    That leads easily to the next stage of decay – for why would a Potemkin parliament not degenerate further into a pseudo-legislature? The Covid “relief” bill is 5,593 pages. There is no such thing as a 5,593-page “law” – because no legislator could read it and grasp it. For purposes of comparison, the Government of India Act, which in 1935 was the longest piece of legislation ever drafted in British law and which provided for the government of what are now India, Pakistan and Burma, is 326 pages.

    Oh, I’m sure paragons of republican virtue will object that no Indian or Burmese citizen-representatives were involved in that piece of imperial imposition. Well, no American citizen-representatives were involved in the Covid “relief” bill. The legislation was drafted not by legislators, nor by civil servants, nor even by staffers or interns. Instead, a zillion lobbyists wrote their particular carve-outs, and then it got stitched together by some clerk playing the role of Baron von Frankenstein. The “legislators” voted it into law unread, and indeed even unseen, as the Congressional photocopier proved unable to print it: It was a bill without corporeal form, but the yes-men yessed it into law anyway.

    Whatever that is, it’s not a republic. As beacons to the world go, stick it where the beacon don’t shine. I wish no ill to anyone in the building, but I do support, during the next recess, its complete dismantling and the salting of the earth: it is not a “citadel of democracy”, only a sick perversion thereof. Whatever Sudan and Chad and Waziristan need, it’s not the US Congress.

  • More along those lines from Kurt Schlichter:

    Have you noticed that everything is a lie and a scam? Everything.

    See, the problem starts when our elite realized that it could break the norms and betray the principles that we all thought we were all abiding by without accountability, at least for a little while. The Establishment realized that it can simply not enforce the norms, and then there will be a lag time while the normals continue on as if the norms were still in effect. It’s inertia – this is why you get these sad sack RINOs lecturing us on how we’re subverting the institutions when what we are really doing is pointing out that the institutions have subverted themselves.

    It’s willful blindness to the corruption because the weakhearts don’t want to admit there is corruption because that would then require them to act. It’s easier to live on scraps.

    Snip.

    The structures and institutions of American society have all been in place with little real change for nearing a century. Nothing lasts forever though, particularly when they are run by grifty idiots. The disruption caused by the tech revolution has helped speed up inevitable processes of change – you know, the creative destruction we hear about in unwoke economics courses. The institutions we relied on – our churches, the NFL, the political parties – are now focused entirely upon preventing that inevitable change. The lackluster losers who inherited their sinecures in these institutions (not literally but by being adopted into the establishment by going to the right schools) want to maintain a status quo that is great for them and poison for the rest of us.

    Joe Biden* is the quintessential example of this, a failed retread with zero accomplishments promising business as usual with a veneer of wokeness slathered on top of it all. He wants to hold on to his ruins. He’ll entrench his corporate masters and do everything he can to stifle the potential for reform and dissent. Remember when dissent was patriotic? Now, the media’s whole job is to angrily reaffirm the divine right of our garbage elite to rule us.

  • More:

  • Donald Trump as Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus:

    The most important leader at the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic was Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, He was the guy who noticed that while the Roman Republic had swept all foreign enemies before it, the working class had suffered despite the great riches of empire. Tiberius Gracchus decided to run for public office despite his great family wealth, and to put forth his formidable political skills to benefit the Roman Working Joe. He failed, because the Roman political establishment buried their traditional political differences in the face of Gracchus’ challenge, and in fact had him killed.

    In short, the Roman Deep State closed ranks to block needed reform. It was the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic as long cherished political norms (Mos Maiorum) were cast aside. And so two generations of the Roman political elite were exterminated in a civil war so profound that what was left of the exhausted Republican Elite welcomed the first Imperator with open arms because he ended the civil wars.

    Throughout this whole period in Roman History, the Law was supreme. Of course, the Law bent to the prevailing political winds. As the Roman said, “The Law is harsh, but it is the Law”. Dura Lex, sed Lex.

    Donald Trump is the Tiberius Gracchus of our day. He is the guy who noticed that while the American Republic had swept all foreign enemies before it, the working class had suffered despite the great riches of empire. Donald Trump decided to run for public office despite his great family wealth, and to put forth his formidable political skills to benefit the American Working Joe. He failed, because the American political establishment buried their traditional political differences in the face of Trump’s challenge, and in fact had him [well, we’ll have to see if they let him live free, or jail him, or kill him].

  • “Byron York’s Daily Memo: Now they tell us! Trump was tough on Russia!”

    Democrats and their allies in the press spent the last four years accusing President Trump of being soft on Russia. And worse: Some called the president a Russian asset, a traitor, Putin’s patsy, and much, much more. It was all BS, because behind the rhetoric was the stark reality that Trump, and his administration, have actually been tougher on Russia than many of his predecessors. Now, with the president on the way out, one lone voice in the anti-Trump press — CNN, specifically — has spoken the truth out loud.

    On CNN’s “New Day” on New Year’s morning, the network’s Fareed Zakaria was asked how U.S. Russia policy under the new President Joe Biden might differ from policy under President Trump. “I think in general, there isn’t going to be as much difference as people imagine,” Zakaria said. “The Biden folks are pretty tough on Russia, Iran, North Korea. You know, the dirty little secret about the Trump administration was that while Donald Trump clearly had a kind of soft spot for Putin, the Trump administration was pretty tough on the Russians. They armed Ukraine. They armed the Poles. They extended NATO operations and exercises in ways that even the Obama administration had not done. They maintained the sanctions. So I don’t think it will be that different.”

    The dirty little secret??? It was never a secret at all. All of the actions Zakaria listed were well known public policy during the Trump years. Any of Zakaria’s colleagues, at CNN and in the press as a whole, might have cited them. But many instead chose to contribute to the media’s Russia hysteria that began even before the president was inaugurated and continued through the years of Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

  • Despite declarations to the contrary, Governor Greg Abbott’s decrees are still limiting businesses across Texas. Just because the business environment doesn’t suck as bad as California doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better.
  • China blocks entry to WHO team studying Covid’s origins.” Why it’s almost like they’re trying to hide something…
  • “With no lockdown or mask mandate, Florida has roughly same hospitalization level as 2018 flu season.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Comparing the Wuhan coronavirus to the Spanish Flu is nonsense on stilts:

  • Who is to blame for the capitol police being unprepared?

  • Trump Administration hits goal of 450 miles of border wall construction in 2020.
  • “San Francisco: Soros-Backed Socialist DA Chesa Boudin Under Fire After Parolee He ‘Decarcerated’ Kills Two On New Year’s Eve.”
  • Elon Musk is now the richest man in the world. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • And speaking of rich people moving to Austin, multimillionaire Joe Lonsdale wants to build a new tech city near Austin, complete with its own subway system. You could build your own city from scratch, but I think you need billionaire money to do it; mere multimillionaire money probably won’t cut it… (Hat tip: Cahnman.)
  • Manhattan Office Vacancies Hit Record High.”
  • Another riot the media won’t see:

  • A succinct, profane summary of a particular viewpoint:

  • Heh

    Hampton Yout voices the most recent incarnation of Crow T. Robot on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

  • Arsenic and old books.
  • “Biden Releases Controversial New Memoir ‘If I Rigged It.’
  • “Ignorant Republicans Riot And Don’t Even Get Any Big-Screen TVs.”
  • After this week we need some cute dog therapy:

  • China Calls Uighur Women in Concentration Camps “Emancipated”

    January 7th, 2021

    There’s chutzpah, and then there’s “Communist China tries to spin its putting Uighur women in concentration camps as emancipating” chutzpah:

    Sadly, neither President Trump nor Joe Biden have pressed China on it’s Uigher genocide. Nor has the so-called “international community.”

    Too Much Stupid To Process

    January 6th, 2021

    It’s hard to blog when there’s too much stupid going around to have time to comment on it.

    It takes a special kind of stupid to let Democrats steal two senate seats and a senate majority exactly the same way they stole Georgia’s electoral votes, but Georgia’s GOP establishment seems to have just that kind of stupid.

    Lin Wood’s extra special stupid might have helped as well.

    And it takes a completely different kind of stupid to storm the capitol building hoping to accomplish, well, damned if I know.

    I may or may not have more thoughts tomorrow. But “thoughts” don’t seem to be driving politics right now…

    Charter Schools Work. No Wonder Democrats Want To Kill Them.

    January 5th, 2021

    Jonathan Chait has a New York Magazine piece on charter schools that’s worth looking at:

    In the dozen years since Barack Obama undertook the most dramatic education reform in half a century — prodding local governments to measure how they serve their poorest students and to create alternatives, especially charter schools, for those who lack decent neighborhood options —

    I’m gonna stop you right there. Charter schools were first passed into law in 1991 under Bush41. The number of charter schools doubled under Bush43, who was a far bigger supporter of school choice than Obama was. That school choice continued to expand under Obama is a credit to him not screwing up their existing momentum, but let’s not pretend that Obama did any of the heavy lifting.

    – two unexpected things have happened. The first is that charter schools have produced dramatic learning gains for low-income minority students. In city after city, from New York to New Orleans, charters have found ways to reach the children who have been most consistently failed by traditional schools. The evidence for their success has become overwhelming, with apolitical education researchers pronouncing themselves shocked at the size of the gains. What was ten years ago merely an experiment has become a proven means to develop the potential of children whose minds had been neglected for generations.

    And yet the second outcome of the charter-school breakthrough has been a bitter backlash within the Democratic Party. The political standing of the idea has moved in the opposite direction of the data, as two powerful forces — unions and progressive activists — have come to regard charter schools as a plutocratic assault on public education and an ideological betrayal.
    The shift has made charter schools anathema to the left.

    In fact, neither of these outcomes is remotely unexpected for anyone living outside the liberal reality bubble. As for charter schools succeeding, Democrat-controlled inner city schools have long been failing, government monopolies seldom produce desirable results in the absence of competition, and ordinary Americas escape government control of their lives any chance they get.

    Likewise, teachers unions hate both alternatives to their monopoly and giving up money and control to charter schools. teacher’s unions are one of the most powerful forces inside the Democratic coalition, and their endorsement brings both money and muscle to Democratic politicians. Compared to that, the wishes of inner city black parents for better education for their children don’t count at all. Likewise, social justice warrior cadres think the government monopoly on schools is a dandy way to impose woke ideological conformity on tender young minds. Why teach inner city students to succeed when you can manufacture new SJW cadres by telling them to current system is hopelessly rigged against them and needs to be destroyed?

    “I am not a charter-school fan because it takes away the options available and money for public schools,” Biden told a crowd in South Carolina during the Democratic primary, as the field competed to prove its hostility toward education reform in general and charters in particular. Now, as Biden turns from campaigning to governing, whether he will follow through on his threats to rein them in — or heed the data and permit charter schools to flourish — is perhaps the most unsettled policy mystery of his emerging administration.

    To head the Department of Education, Biden floated the names of fierce critics of charter schools, including the ex-president of the country’s largest teacher union and the former dean of the Howard University School of Education, who has called urban charters “schemes” that are really all about controlling urban land. Then, in a surprise move, Biden formally tapped Miguel Cardona, Connecticut’s education chief — a nonideological pick who offends neither the party’s opponents of reform nor its remaining defenders.

    Cardona has at least given lip service to charter schools in the past, so he’s probably among the least bad picks Biden could have made.

    The achievement gap between poor Black and Latino students in cities and rich white students in suburbs represents a sickening waste of human ability and is a rebuke to the American credo of equal opportunity. Its stubborn persistence has tormented generations of educators and social reformers. The rapid progress in producing dramatic learning gains for poor children, and the discovery of models that have proved reliable in their ability to reproduce them, is one of the most exciting breakthroughs in American social policy. For many education specialists, the left’s near abandonment of charter schools has been a bleak spectacle of unlearning — the equivalent of Lincoln promising to rip out municipal water systems or Eisenhower pledging to ban the polio vaccine. Just as the dream is becoming real, the party that helped bring it to life is on the verge of snuffing it out.

    Once again Chait is pushing the myth that Democratic politicians were big backers of charter schools. They were not. They are not. Save a few laudable exceptions, they never have been.

    In college, I had a brief experience tutoring bright students who’d been taught depressingly little by the public schools of Detroit, which impressed upon me the cruelty of a system that denied so many kids any chance to develop their talent. But it wasn’t until I met my wife that I got interested in charter schools. Robin has devoted her career to education policy: She studied it in graduate school, taught at a low-income school, worked in local and federal education departments, researched for a liberal think tank, did executive-level work for a charter-school network. Her current role is with a nonprofit organization, consulting for and providing technical assistance to schools and state education bodies. Because of Robin, I’ve gained a window into a siloed world of experts who grasp both the state of research on charter schools and its staggering moral implications. Once you have scrutinized a machine that systematically squanders the intellect of an entire caste of citizens before they have reached adulthood, then glimpsed an alternative that reliably does the opposite, it is hard to stop thinking about it.

    Charter schools face a crisis in large part because people don’t understand them.

    No, they’re in crisis because powerful factions in the Democratic Party find them a threat to their business model. To quote Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary:

    A Moral Principle met a Material Interest on a bridge wide enough for but one.

    “Down, you base thing!” thundered the Moral Principle, “and let me pass over you!”

    The Material Interest merely looked in the other’s eyes without saying anything.

    “Ah,” said the Moral Principle, hesitatingly, “let us draw lots to see which shall retire till the other has crossed.”

    The Material Interest maintained an unbroken silence and an unwavering stare.

    “In order to avoid a conflict,” the Moral Principle resumed, somewhat uneasily, “I shall myself lie down and let you walk over me.”

    Then the Material Interest found a tongue, and by a strange coincidence it was its own tongue. “I don’t think you are very good walking,” it said. “I am a little particular about what I have underfoot. Suppose you get off into the water.”

    It occurred that way.

    Back to Chait:

    Today, teachers unions have adopted a militant defense of the tenure prerogatives of their least effective members, equating that stance with a defense of the teaching profession as a whole. They have effectively mobilized progressives (and resurgent socialist activists) to their cause, which they identify as a defense of “public education” — rather than a particular form of public education — against scheming billionaires.

    Imagine the progressive stance on education as a series of expanding concentric circles with the peripheral actors only barely aware of the core dispute: at the core, a tiny number of bad teachers, protectively surrounded by a much larger circle of union members, surrounded in turn by an even larger number of Democrats who have only a vague understanding of the issue as one pitting heroes (unions) against villains (rich privatizers).

    In the recent book Slaying Goliath, Diane Ravitch, a Democrat turned conservative turned populist leader of the education-reform backlash, jubilantly declares the charter-school movement dead. While that declaration is premature, she is correct that her struggle to redefine charters schools as toxic among progressives has succeeded almost totally. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Elizabeth Warren bashed them, and even as clumsy a candidate as Bill de Blasio understood that his hostile relationship with charters was one of his few selling points. “No one should ask for your support or be the Democratic nominee unless they’re able to stand up to Wall Street and the rich people behind the charter school movement once and for all,” he said at one forum. “I know we’re not supposed to be saying ‘hate’ — our teachers taught us not to — I hate the privatizers and I want to stop them.” Perhaps the most instructive candidacy, though, was that of Cory Booker.

    As mayor of Newark between 2006 and 2013, Booker had overseen a major charter effort; his goal, he said at the time, was to make the city the “charter-school capital of the nation.” The project worked. A recent study documenting the gains found that Newark’s students, whose performance on statewide tests had once ranked in the 38th percentile, had vaulted nearly 40 points. Newark’s charter-school students now exceed the state average in math and language, an extraordinarily impressive result given their high poverty rate. And the report found gains among charter students had not come at the expense of students in traditional schools, who were also gaining, albeit not as rapidly as the charter students. This was one of the most impressive executive achievements any candidate in the field could boast. But Booker was unable to tout his success. Instead, the issue played as a liability. News stories assessing his candidacy presented his support for charters as a kind of dark secret in his past, for which he “faced scrutiny” and “could create still more problems.”

    Snip.

    Polls show that the backlash against charters has been mainly confined to white liberals, while Black and Latino Democrats — whose children are disproportionately enrolled in those schools — remain supportive. It’s not that upscale progressives don’t care about minority children. Their passion is quite evidently sincere. Rather, they have convinced themselves that better schools by themselves do little good, because only structural reform to the entire economy and social system is worth pursuing. In 2019, Nick Hanauer wrote a widely circulated Atlantic essay titled “Better Schools Won’t Fix America.” Hanauer, a former charter-school donor, argued that the economy has deeper problems that education alone cannot solve. On its own terms, the point is obviously true: Good schools can’t eliminate inequality. For that matter, eliminating inequality can’t solve climate change, and solving sea-level rise can’t eliminate racism. The world has lots of problems. It is odd to dismiss the value of solving one problem by pointing to the continued existence of other problems.

    Hanauer was echoing a theme that critics of education reform have been developing for years. They dismiss the very possibility of better education outcomes as unimportant or impossible on the grounds that poor children cannot learn at the same level as middle-class ones. “The biggest correlation in education is between poverty and test scores,” Ravitch has said. “If you think the test scores are too low, go to the root causes.” The education-reform critic Richard Rothstein has claimed that we will “never fix education in America until we fix the poverty in our society.” The left-wing social critic Joshua Mound has written in Jacobin that “increases in equality tend to increase educational attainment, not the other way around.” And so on. The message to poor urban parents who want to send their kids to a decent school is that they simply need to wait for the revolution.

    For social justice warriors, reform is the enemy of revolution. Educating poor inner city blacks doesn’t help them destroy capitalism or “whiteness” and so holds no value for them. The only black lives that matter are those that can further the cause by dying at the hands of police.

    Chait has done a good job of mapping out that: A.) Charter schools work, and B.) the Democratic Party is implacably hostile to them, but makes the error of assuming that if Democrats just understood how well they worked, they would be in favor of them. He’s wrong. You can’t convince a man of the error of his thinking if that very error is central to his business model.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)