How to Test Negative for Stupid

You can’t make good policy unless you talk about it critically. You can’t change bad policy unless you talk about it plainly.

I don’t vote the set menu. I’m more of an à la carte kind of guy. I’m independent-minded and have always believed that the majority sometimes just means that all the fools are on the same side.

“Follow your heart, but take your brain with you.”

A discipline trick I learned from another teacher: If a kid misbehaves, make him sit facing a blank wall. It bores him to death, and he never wants to do it again.

Our public schools need more competition. Competition makes everything better. New York City spends $36,000 per year per public school student. Give that child’s mother $500,000, or half a million bucks, per kid over fourteen years if you count pre-K and kindergarten, and I guarantee she’ll find a school that educates her kids better and still have money left over

In politics, the experts are almost always wrong. And they are almost always the same. Didactic. Tendentious. High-minded. Convinced that they have infallible minds and superior instincts when in fact a penny for their thoughts would be pricey. And they are usually liberal, partial to man purses and organic broccoli. If you showed these people a handgun, you would have to explain to them that the end with the hole in it is the dangerous part

Trump has an untamed mouth. Yes, he exists loudly. Yes, he says things that even I wouldn’t say (and don’t believe). And yes, he’ll reach over with a straw and drink your milkshake if he thinks you are an enemy. But people didn’t want a saint. They wanted a warrior. They wanted someone stronger than bear’s breath. Someone who wouldn’t tiptoe around the press, who wouldn’t kiss the ring of the establishment. Someone who would throw a grenade into the poisonous still waters of the swamp and see what crawled out.

Too much of the system only works for the insiders. That too many people at the top are getting bailouts, too many at the bottom are getting handouts, and the people in the middle get the bill.

what’s good for cable news is often bad for America and humanity

I also sit on the Appropriations Committee, and one day the Biden administration sent over the Honorable David Turk, the deputy secretary of the Department of Energy, to advocate for spending taxpayer dollars to make America carbon-neutral by 2050. I got one of the other witnesses to admit that this would cost around $50 trillion, and then asked Turk the obvious, which he had not anticipated: “How much will that actually lower global temperatures?” He said he didn’t know.

The media doesn’t even try to fake it anymore. Their bias isn’t subtle—it’s a feature, not a bug. Sure, there are exceptions. But not many. Most journalists today are Democrats. They believe that every problem has a solution, and that solution is that government is not spending enough money on it.

“USA Today Network apparently does not like the way I express myself. They think they are the speech police, drunk on certainty and virtue. They think they are our moral teacher. This attitude is why so many Americans have lost confidence in the media. The media is not going to win that trust back until they return to neutrality instead of advocacy.”

In the 1960s, two-thirds of black children lived with their mother and father. Today it’s one-third. And it’s not just a black problem. Half of all American children are born to single mothers. We are the most likely country in the world for a child to grow up in a one-parent household. That’s not about race. That’s about culture, and the collapse of family formation. That’s about what happens when we reward brokenness and punish responsibility.