Dissident Teacher

We were concerned that the SAT has become a less reliable measure of student preparedness for a rigorous college curriculum. So, we commissioned a study from Johns Hopkins University. What does this study tell us about the state of higher education? The results are shocking. thaq.co/4iLThZ0

In 2023, Marc Andreessen published the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Most people remember the parts about AI, energy, and abundance. But the most important sentence is buried in the section called "The Enemy." He describes the credentialed expert class as people "playing God with everyone else's lives, with total insulation from the consequences." Total insulation from the consequences. Those five words explain almost everything about the West right now. And they explain why the guy from the European Commission genuinely believes immigration isn't a problem. The vast majority of Western elites live in an alternate reality, decoupled from the real world. Not because they're stupid. Not even because they're lying. Because nothing in their incentive structure ever forces them to touch reality. Think about how reality corrects people. An entrepreneur builds a bad product: no customers, no revenue, bankruptcy. Reality corrects him in months. A farmer misjudges the weather: he loses his harvest. A trader makes a bad bet: he loses his money. Every person exposed to reality gets a feedback loop. Brutal, fast, and honest. Now take a senior official in Brussels. He designs a migration policy. It fails. What happens to him? Nothing. Same salary. Same tax-advantaged status. Same job security. Same pension. Probably a promotion, because he "managed a crisis." Andreessen nails the mindset of every institution shielded from discipline: "We don't care, because we don't have to." Now look at who pays for his decisions. He lives in the nice part of Brussels. His kids go to the European School. He has never waited years for social housing. He has never competed with a newcomer for a low-wage job. He has never been the nurse in an overwhelmed ER, the teacher in a classroom where half the kids don't speak the language, the retiree in a neighborhood that changed beyond recognition in ten years. He gets the benefits: cheaper services, cheaper labor, diverse restaurants, and above all, the warm feeling of being on the right side of history. Others get the costs. Taleb calls this the absence of skin in the game. When the person who decides is not the person who pays, his map of the world drifts away from the territory. Slowly at first. Then completely. And then there is the second incentive layer, the one that makes it invisible to them: status. In their world, saying "immigration is a problem" is social and professional suicide. You don't get invited to the right dinners. You don't get the next post. You become radioactive. Rob Henderson has a name for this: luxury beliefs. Beliefs that grant status to the people who hold them, while the cost falls on people who can't afford it. Upton Sinclair said it a century ago: it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. That's the part people miss. The system doesn't need to censor anyone. It selects. The people who saw the problem left, were never promoted, or learned to stop saying it out loud. What remains at the top is a class of sincere believers. Not cynics. Believers. And a believer is far more dangerous than a cynic, because the cynic adjusts to reality, while the believer adjusts reality to the plan. Hayek explained why this can never work. Real information lives at the edges, with the people closest to the ground. The center has reports. The street has information. Poll after poll, Europeans rank immigration among their top concerns. In Brussels, that's not treated as information. It's treated as a communication problem. And here is what is truly insane. They don't even realize they're committing suicide. Everything that feeds them, the institutions, the budgets, the welfare state, the European project itself, rests on things they are actively dismantling. Social trust. Cohesion. The willingness of the middle class to pay taxes for a common project. The basic feeling of the citizen that he belongs to a "we." The day that feeling disappears, the whole edifice loses its legitimacy. The taxes feel like tribute. The institutions feel like occupation. The vote becomes a weapon. That is exactly what we're watching happen, country after country, election after election. They are sawing off the branch they're sitting on. And they're calling it inclusion. Every elite in history that insulated itself from consequences believed the insulation was permanent. The court at Versailles had excellent reports. So did the Politburo. Insulation never lasts forever. Reality always sends the bill. It never arrives at the right address first. But it always ends up there. The guy at the Commission wasn't lying to me. He just hasn't received the bill yet.

While I'm on a hot take streak, I don't think children who are below grade level should be taking electives like art, band or choir at school. They should be taking remedial classes until they're scoring proficient on their standardized tests.

This is your rank-and-file activist. They don't need to understand the underlying theory, much less its esoteric origins. They absorb the movement's slogans, language, moral outlook, and group identity. Shared grievances bind them together; affirmation rewards commitment, and dissent risks shame or exclusion. Their activism becomes both a moral cause and a source of belonging. They learn to see the existing order through the lens of oppression and liberation. The institutions, traditions, and inherited hierarchies of Western civilization come to be fundamentally illegitimate and obstacles to human progress. Defending them becomes morally suspect; challenging them becomes virtuous. Unlike some of the professors teaching them, who imagine themselves guiding the new order, rank-and-file activists need not expect power or privilege. They believe their struggle will bring justice and liberation. The movement gives them belonging, purpose, moral standing, and the conviction that they're on the right side of history.