Podcastpalooza Saturday
And some weekend headlines to get you to Monday
I’m back to my usual double-podcast Saturday, with new episodes of both the Ricochet podcast, and the Three Whisky Happy Hour—both with some format and personnel changes special for this week only. On the Ricochet podcast, James Lileks was away for the week, so I sat in the host chair as the elusive Rob Long joined me to field Ricochet reader questions and ponder what is involved with the imminent papal succession. Download it at the link above, or listen right here if you like:
As for the 3WHH, we really mixed up the normal format this week. Friday was cap and gown day for me at Pepperdine’s commencement for the School of Public Policy class of 2025, while John Yoo is on the road somewhere at an undisclosed location, so Lucretia and I kick around a couple of seemingly unrelated stories about the Amish (the ultimate opt-out community) and the latest Supreme Court argument involving human nature and the right of parents to opt-out from public school nihilism. And even though John was absent, instead of beating him up—as he usually deserves—we praised his New York Post article on how and why Trump should prevail at the Supreme Court over what might be called the onslaught of of Lawfare 2.0.
And then as a change of pace we offer my recent conversation with energy journalist extraordinaire Robert Bryce (whose Substack is very much worth following). Bryce always has a way of explaining the often eyes-glazed-over numbers of the energy world, but in this interview he extends himself into a one-man DOGE, revealing who is the number-one leftist green energy advocacy group fattening at the federal funding trough (which gives a whole new meaning to “green energy” indeed).
So download the episode at the link above or listen here:
And finally, some headlines to keep you amused (dare I call this TWiH, or is that too MEH?). This first one explains a lot of big law firms I think:
Stop me if you’ve heard these before:
I enjoyed mixing in the traditional interview with a 3WHH - perhaps you could call these "Old Fashion" segments. I've follow Robert Bryce for years.
The only bummer is you interviewed him in ADVANCE of the large grid implosion in Spain and other parts of Europe. I just saw a stat that at the moment the grid collapsed, Spain was sourcing 78% of its power (see I was listening carefully) from solar and wind and only 3% from dispatch able nat gas plants.
I assume late April temps are moderate in Spain, unlike in the middle of a major freeze that triggered Texas grid implosion several years ago.
Robert has extensively reported on the grad stability/reliability issue -- perhaps when he picks this up you might convince him to cross-post at the Political Questions substack. On a related note, Starmer and the Labor party recently re-upped their commitment to Net Zero for the UK.
I'm reviewing SOCTUS transcript for the Montgomery County case (Mahmoud) and out of the mouth of idiots (Lucretia's favorite justice Ketanji) comes this charmer as she tried to dismiss counsel's claim of burden (p. 63):
“JUSTICE JACKSON: No, I understand. But, usually, we set aside and we say: But you still have the right to get an attorney in a civil case even if you can't afford it, right? So we don't focus on whether or not they can actually do it. They have an option. And what I guess I'm worried about is a world in which, when there is an option to send your kid somewhere else, it seems to me that these parents would be dictating what this school does in the way that you say our cases say they can't do, right? “
This is the same doctrine that was promoted by the Left during the 2021 Loudoun County school protests; it's not coercion to force your kids to be forced to learn CRT or have your daughters to share bathrooms with trans-identifying boys who will r**e them (true story) because you can withdraw your kid to send them to a private school. Jackson's is simply repeating that old sneer.
I should also add that prior in the hearing Sotomayor feigns surprise that any parent would dare question what their kids were being taught.
This is a problem with the way our political culture have evolved in terms of away from a foundation in natural rights toward positive law and treating such social questions as matter of law and not politics.
Draw back from the given case to the larger issue involved, parental control over their child's education in an environment where people like Ketanji wants them to either 1) pay for the same education twice, as both a taxpayer and through private school tuition 2) or totally surrender your kid's mind, soul, and now body to green-haired government bureaucrats. This is not an optimal state of affairs and as the Founders might say, this is not what we fought the Revolution for.
There are three solutions to this:
1) The judicial one, which is what is being argued here and deals with whether parents are being burdened enough to surrender control over what their children are being taught. The transcript is illuminated by the fire of strawmen being set alight by Sotomayor. Kagan, and Jackson who want to make LGBT+ issues taught by authority figures (which is what school teachers are) yo your kid a greater right than you as a parent.
From the transcript the case looks good for parents but it simply reinforces the fallacy that we as citizens of a Republic founded on natural rights and virtue should be dependent on the whims of nine people. I get enough of clerical dogma at morning Mass.
The other two solutions are political
2) Parents can politically organize and replace the Montgomery County school board members at the next election. As a practical matter this is ineffectual. The school district is a massive, It covers an entire county of 80,000 students and more than 800,000 people. It is also a deep-blue county and the board is heavily controlled by the teacher union. One of the 3WHH co-hosts may say too bad, so sad that's the way democracy works but that would miss the point since this is a game theory problem, on one side you have an enduring institution the teacher unions while on the other you have a transitory phenomena (parents of school children) whose interests will eventually age out of the system.
3) Radically reform the school system. The problem with reform through elections is the mismatch of capability. The problem with Ketanji's concept of coercion is that in fact there is nowhere for a Montgomery County parent to go without private schools. Given the fact that all public schools districts in Maryland VA are county-based and all the counties around the DC area are heavily blue and school systems are just as crazy as Montgomery, the only public school solution for a parent would be to move to the red counties – Carroll, those on the Eastern Shore – which would mean adding an hour to a commute each way. Hardly practical,
I will also add that being an Arizonan I find the system of public education in Maryland (and also VA) to be both tyrannical and barbaric. Few charter schools and parents locked in to massive county-wide school districts and tied to their local neighborhood school.
Sure Kentanji, parents don't have to have their pre-K kid be taught from “Uncle Billy's Wedding” so they can be taught their parents are bunch of Christian nationalist bigots, but I thought we dealt with tis back in the 1950s when we decided that black Americans didn't have to leave he South in order to exercise their natural rights.
So my third solution is to treat this as a civil rights case and get the Trump OCR in this. Make Maryland (not just Montgomery County) institute a statewide school choice system:
1) Deregulating charter schools and allow lawsuits based on disparate impact if Maryland fails to achieve a number of such school commensurate with schools of similar population, say Arizona which has 600
2) Institute a statewide voucher system (similar to AZ) which allows parents to use the state per-student funding formula for private, parochial, or home schooling.
3) Break up county wide school systems into ones based on a high school/middle school/elementary school clusters. Montgomery County has 29 high schools – that means 29 school districts, each with their policies regarding opt-out. As a practical matter, a family would be no more than a 15-minute drive from another district
4) Allow open enrollment across district boundaries (just like AZ, amazing how that state keeps coming up) so that parents can enroll their kids and hold school districts liable in terms of state aid for enrollment drops – thus creating an open market for K-12
Let's stop depending on the court system and lawyers (sorry John) to defend our rights.
Do it Trump. Give me a call.