CONTROLLING THE POLITICAL PIPELINE.

It's Friday, and a reinforcement of a frequent Cold Spring Shops theme, "Perhaps, instead of asking 'who is John Galt?,' dear reader, ask 'who is running for school board or mayor' and 'what is she proposing?'" is in order.

Town Hall's Ashley Evdokimo suggests that the Donk establishment enabled the Democratic Socialists (who might not really be socialists, but I digress) to position a lot of candidates through their Ahab-like obsession with the Golden Golem of Greatness rather than, to use the Sunday show locution, paying attention to the issues the American people care about.

While Republicans and Democrats have poured enormous amounts of energy into presidential politics, media cycles, and national messaging, the DSA has invested in something much less glamorous—but arguably much more important.

The political pipeline.

School boards become city councils. City councils become state legislatures. State legislators become members of Congress. Members of Congress become committee chairs, governors, Cabinet officials, and eventually party leaders. Politics has always been a farm system, and the DSA understands that.

Ironically, while much of the Democratic establishment spent years defining itself in opposition to Donald Trump, the DSA spent those same years defining the future of the Democratic Party. And unless Democrats outright say they’re against it, we can’t “trust” their alliances.

The emergence of Michael Harrington's disciples is also giving Never Trump conservatives heartburn, as they are personae non grata among Republicans and the irritated rump flexing among the Donks will have no truck with them.

OUR JUNETEENTH FLAG HOIST.

Yes, there is some sort of special flag for the day, but the Flag Code does not prohibit the display of older versions of the Flag.  Thus one from the Emancipation Proclamation era flies at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

The history lesson accompanies that photograph.

Unfortunately, former president Barack Obama used the dedication of his flak tower, er, blast furnace, er, coaling dock, er, presidential center to engage in a ridiculous perfomance of presentism.  "Obama said the founders 'fell terribly short' of the Declaration's promise by leaving slavery intact and limiting the vote to white male property owners."  Well, a guy who is slagging on a memorandum of understanding that some Iranians are asserting turns Old Persia into a colony (with a Trump casino on the Caspian Sea?) is not somebody who we should respect for his intellectual chops.

MAYBE EVERYBODY LOST.

I was being flippant earlier this week, but I'm having trouble finding anyone who likes the "memorandum of understanding," which is nowhere near a treaty, let alone as well defined as Barack Obama thought his never-ratified accord was.  Then, only a few minutes ago, Red State's RC Maxwell dropped "Iranian Hardliners Denounce US Deal as ‘Surrender’ and ‘Path to Colony’."  That was quick: unbundling the opening of the Strait of Hormuz to navigation prior to discussing everything else isn't opening the Strait under Iranian regulation after everything else is signed off upon and the True Believers object.

The strongest backlash has come from the Paydari Front, also known as the Endurance or Steadfastness Front, which is a small but vocal faction of ideological purists. The group positions itself as the guardian of the revolution’s anti-Western principles.

Prominent hardline lawmaker Mahmoud Nabavian, a Paydari-aligned figure and former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiation team, has emerged as the deal’s most outspoken critic. Nabavian warned that the agreement would transform Iran into a “U.S. colony.” He slammed the deal’s requirement that Tehran seek permission from the “Great Satan” for even limited uranium enrichment. “This is surrender,” Nabavian declared, according to reports.

What, did somebody leak the Trump Organization's plans for a hotel and casino on the Caspian Sea?

A BOTCHED DECAPITATION REFUTES A FILING CABINET FULL OF POSITION PAPERS.

John Feffer's "Pete Hegseth’s D-Day Remarks Prove the US Is No Longer an Ally to European Democracy" is a predictably silly appeal to Foreign Policy in Focus types, you know, the sort of conscience-cowboy for whom "rules-based international order" is a Holy Incantation and blaming America first is as instinctive as splitting tens.

LESS PROMOTION THAN BANISHMENT?

Scott Scheall's "Why the Worst Get on Top in Academia" notes the nasty circle by which the proliferation of unfunded mandates provides career opportunities for failed scholars.

The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually generate educational value. As a result, the American university is disproportionately governed by relative academic failures.

An effective scholar enjoys benefits impossible to find elsewhere in today’s workforce: freedom to follow ideas wherever they might lead and a considerable amount of free time to do it. Those who succeed aren’t inclined to leave the laboratory or library for administration.

Though administrative salaries tend to be higher, the rest of an administrator’s work-life is poorer in every other respect, involving endless committee meetings, paperwork, budgetary knife fights, student and parent grievance adjudication, and the difficult business of cultivating donors. Intellectual freedom and scholarly prestige are nowhere in evidence. 

I concur in part and dissent in part.  First, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a tradition of servant leadership in higher education in which each highly respected faculty member would take a turn as department head, or dean, or provost, or president.  That was undone by two things, that proliferation of unfunded mandates, which at least until recently, implemented the aesthetic preferences of the faculty, which put defenders of faculty governance in a bad place where some hack could accuse him of Unenlightened Attitudes; as well as the problem that rotating the servant leadership works better in a department with multiple strong faculty members.  That's less common outside the Ivies and the like, and the plot of more than a few academic novels suggest it's not common even there.  Second, as a consequence, endless committee meetings, wordsmithing of documents, and knife fights over penurious budgets are the modus operandi of faculty, sometimes faculty with multiple Minimal Publishable Units on their curricula vitae: often ideas they followed that, judging from the lack of citations to their work, nobody bothered to follow further.  That research time: it's anything but free, and keeping current with what used to be circulated as working papers and what now is being uploaded somewhere has only become more challenging with online working paper repositories and journals.  Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini doesn't even get a look.

EKPYROSIS, UNDER WAY?

Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball sees the fires.  "Labour’s Rout, MAGA’s Surge, and Iran’s Slow Surrender."  James "Long Emergency" Kunstler also sees them.  "The Earth Moves Just a Bit."  Buckle in, he suggests.  Let's see what his Friday analysis of Our President's state visit to China looks like.

Most importantly, the Credentialed Elite's worship-words no longer have purchase.  "Republicans have finally figured out how to use [power]. We’re not going to be constrained by alleged norms and alleged principles and alleged guardrails anymore. You can call us racist all you want, and we don’t care. You might as well call us hamsters. It doesn’t matter to us because it’s all baloney. It’s all a scam. This is a bare-knuckle political fight, and we’re finally throwing fists."

YOU SAY YOU WANT SOME DEVOLUTION?

Reason's J. D. Tuccille gets to the heart of the matter.  "Government Shouldn't Be Important Enough To Fight Over."  Often it is, and his elaboration reinforces our stance on emphasizing the school board rather than the presidency.  He opens with a claim that might run counter to the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence about the Right of the People to alter destructive governments.

Government shouldn't be important enough to motivate people to kill others to gain control. Moreover, people willing to engage in violence to seize the means of governance have no business exercising political power. These are points we should be drumming home after the latest in a series of assassination attempts against President Donald Trump and other administration officials at a time of surging political violence in the United States.

You have to read through several paragraphs before it becomes clear his gripe is with Government from Washington.

The usual call, at this point, is for people to turn down the rhetoric. But that's pointless when Americans perceive that they're at risk from opponents who wield the vast power of government and plan to use it against them. That's not an irrational fear, and words aren't the danger here—the danger is government that reaches into all areas of life and which really is perilous in the hands of those motivated by malice.

"If in this country law has always been king, its empire has never been so expansive. More than ever, we turn to the law to address any problem we perceive. More than ever, we are inclined to use national authorities to dictate a single answer for the whole country," Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch and co-author Jane Nitze warned in a 2024 essay.

The "empire" that is "too expansive" is Government from Washington, and the discontents he invokes in getting to that assertion involve the national political parties treating slim governing majorities as an excuse to implement their most expansive policy wish-list, rather than as acting as a slightly more effective check on the implementations of the outgoing governing majority.  That, Mr Tuccille concludes, cannot end well.

At a time when Americans agree on so little—other than that they dislike each other—there are no "right" people to hold office and control the instruments of power. We've turned elections into existential threats to those who lose. We emphasized the "all" in "winner takes all," and we're paying the price.

Understandably fearful of government in the hands of enemies, Americans are literally fighting over political power. The violence won't stop, and will probably escalate, until there's no political danger worth fighting over.

Unfortunately, his essay ends there, rather than with a full-throated endorsement of enumerated, separated, and limited federal powers and an expansion of those policy decisions devolved to the several States and to the people.

WILL GOING THROUGH BE THE ONLY WAY OUT?

Over the years, Kurt Schlichter has maintained that leftists, and their willing accomplices in the liberal establishment, want those annoying Normals dead.  In the wake of a Democrat loyalist attempting to go kinetic at the weekend's nerd prom, he's repeating that message.

We are getting uncomfortably close to how the Spanish Civil War was started. That war was started because the communists started losing their power. We need to realize what time it is and the threats that we face. The only reason why the Left calls Trump "Hitler" and Republicans fascists is to give others permission to take him and us out. The fight against evil will continue, and I'm not sure it will end well.

His colleague Ward Clark is thinking along similar lines, although he might be thinking about a general strike of some sort, repeating "They need us. We don't need them."  That's interesting, as May Day is coming up, and the communists are organizing their own version of a general strike for that day, although it will probably be mostly kids in the schools that produce the next generation of welfare recipients reinterpreting truancy as some sort of political action participating.  He also echoes John Galt in suggesting that perhaps scorning the productive give their detractors what they want, by going away.  But rather than holing up in Galt's Gulch, he might have something more kinetic in mind.  "If the left wants to normalize political violence, and if they succeed, they aren't going to like how that works out. In any conflict sparked by such a move, the left will lose, suddenly and catastrophically, within a matter of days — maybe hours. Why? Because when it comes to a scrap, as with almost anything else, we are just simply better at it than they are."

A former Bernie Sanders booster called Batya Ungar-Sargon, suggests that the chap who disrupted nerd prom was simply acting on what his Intellectual Betters were saying.

Democrats have blamed gun violence for the rise in political violence, which is of course ridiculous, given that conservatives are much more likely to own guns, yet much less likely to engage in and justify political violence.

It’s time for the Left to take responsibility for the violence it is fomenting, justifying, and carrying out. Cole Allen’s manifesto justifying his attempted murder of the President doesn’t read like the ravings of a lunatic. It sounds like the kind of rhetoric you hear every single day from Democrats and their media. They are radicalizing their side every single day, and refusing to take down the temperature.

There are similar assertions circulating elsewhere in the right-populist internet environment these days.  She concludes, "You can’t unite around a lie."  The lie, though, might be that the usual forms of government are working as they should.  Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, who knows a few things about conflict, develops that argument.

We have increasingly cast our politics as existential. Every presidential election in my lifetime has been “the most important presidential election in our lifetimes.” And, as the parties have polarized and sorted, the stakes have certainly increased: every election is a referendum on the future of race relations, gay rights, trans rights, abortion rights, gun rights, etc.

At the same time, the safety valve that deligitimates violence in a democracy—elections—have become increasingly meaningless. Gerrymandered House seats mean few of the 435 districts are truly in play; the winner of the dominant party’s primary is all but assured of election. This is true for the Senate and Electoral College in all but a handful of states. So, for all practical purposes, most Americans have no real say come Election Day.

And that’s to say nothing of the counter-democratic, if not outright undemocratic, features that have been bolted onto the system. Voter suppression efforts by state legislatures to further skew outcomes. The routine use of the filibuster has made it almost impossible to pass legislation. A Supreme Court with an extreme partisan skew that tends to strike down policies enacted by Democrats at a much higher rate than those enacted by Republicans.

Violence is a tool of the powerless. And more and more people feel powerless.

Pay attention, though, to where the power is accreting.  Presidential elections.  Federal policies.  National legislation.  Perhaps, in place of widespread defiance of Our Political Masters, or gunplay replacing wordplay, a restoration of those enumerated, separated, and limited powers matters.  Perhaps, instead of asking "who is John Galt?," dear reader, ask "who is running for school board or mayor" and "what is she proposing?"

ROBERT REICH IS RIPE FOR THE MAD-HOUSE.

Not because he's engaging in the expected riling up of Common Dreams readers with "Trump Is Stark-Raving Mad—Impeach Him Now."  That's more or less expected, and it has been so for over ten years, complete with academicians who rely on their Liberal Bonas Fides to diagnose Our President's mental health on the basis of social media posts or out-takes from the news.

Rather, it's deeper in his essay, where the Argument from Authority gets weird.  "But some voices on the right — people who have long been supporters of Trump — have had enough."

Dear reader, who might those people be?  Marjorie "Madge" Greene.  Candace Owens.  Alex Jones.  Until about two minutes ago, those are people Commn Dreams types would refer to, if they bothered to at all, as avatars of that fascism that somehow still has not descended on Common Dreams, let alone these United States.  Judge for yourself whether his including two former staffers in supporting roles sufficiently moderates his polemic.

I've never considered the representative to be the quintessence of a philosopher queen, and "podcasting" might be a way to get paid to spout off without going to the trouble of auditioning at a local radio station and working your way up, the way Charlie Sykes got from writing Prof Scam to slagging on the "half-fast train" to becoming an occasional guest on whatever MSNBC call themselves these days.  If any of those people said things I agreed with, I did not treat that as endorsement of my position, nor did that alignment constitute my endorsement of anything they said.

But the self-styled progressives are almost as eager to embrace people who offer concurrence with them than they are to excommunicate people who violate a purity test.  Years ago, there was Ariana Huffington, whose pronouncements as some sort of conservative were on occasion cringe-worthy, and who instantly became a hero to many of the people who eagerly slagged on her as an "idiot" once she switched allegiance and put her money into what became the Huffington Post.

Robert Reich?  Predictably hysterical.

MENTAL ILLNESS AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE.

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler went to Saturday's so-called "No Kings" gatherings in two upstate New York towns.

Old folks, too, as far as the eye could see, predominately of the female persuasion: the devouring grandmothers. The Democratic Party has marshalled mental illness as its premier campaign strategy, and lately it is winning bigly around the country as mental illness becomes the go-to cope option for the ragged remnants of Boomerdom.

To his east, Common Dreams contributor Phil Wilson saw the same thing in Lesbianville, where he put a braver spin on it.

Indeed, these people, the majority for sure, sport grey hair, wrinkles, wearied gaits and maybe the strange understanding that, in a seeming eyeblink, we all have been transformed from young, zealous radicals who once chanted “two, four, six, eight, organize and smash the state,” to becoming part of a last stand against the fascist nightmare that would have blown our minds in 1968. I see young people too, but not enough. Mostly white people make up the throngs, but Northampton is just a small piece of something vastly larger.

The Fourth Estate captured the same demographic in Oregon, Illinois.

Earleen Hinton photograph retrieved from Shaw Media.

It gets tiresome, the same stuffed animals costumes, the same references to actually existing fascist states where such assemblies would be met with gunfire (I'm looking at you, Iran), and it's amusing how the more information that comes out about the corrupt establishment's fixer, the more Democrat participation comes to light.

Mr Wilson might have said the quiet part out loud. "At some point there will hopefully be mutual clarity, plans, resistance, strikes, boycotts, blocked traffic, but we need sheer numbers, and a pause in ideological oneupmanship."

GOVERNMENT FAILURE.

Passover and Easter Week approach, and some school districts and institutions claiming to offer higher education have yet to dismiss for spring break, and it might be that Congress will take their Easter or Passover or Rent Seeker recess without properly funding airport security.

It matters not for purposes of this post which Washington politicians are at fault for it, or why.  What does matter is that unreliable employers have trouble attracting and retaining staff, and that's the position acting transport security administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill finds herself in.  "We fear we will continue to lose talented and experienced employees to other jobs that can provide a steady paycheck."  I could crack wise, dear reader, about how under actually existing socialism the nomenklatura can pretend to pay people who pretend to work, whilst under actually existing labor markets, the employer who offers to pay on some future Tuesday for hamburgers flipped passengers screened today is in trouble.  "[M]ore than 1,500 of her agency's officers have quit amid recent government shutdowns — including around 480 during the current 40-day standoff."

STOP ENABLING DYSFUNCTION, GET LESS OF IT.

That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme.

Here's University Diaries, commenting on the latest spring break atrocity out of Panama City. "Allow certain ingredients to be put together in a concentrated way in a specific location, and you can actually destroy civilized life."  Quite.  The extension to the Experimental Prefigurative Communities of Tomorrow masquerading as the multiculturalist university is left to the reader as an exercise.

Today's ingredients, concentrated in a specific location, are Moslems in Dearborn.  The editors of National Review identify the resulting destruction.  "We have a significant problem with radical Islam in this country, and unlike the September 11 hijackers, all of the perpetrators in these attacks were U.S. citizens — Ghazali, Jalloh, and Diagne were naturalized citizens, while the Gracie Mansion duo were children of naturalized citizens."

Point such things out, and brace yourself for the cancel mob.

"DO YOUR OWN THING" WAS NEVER LIBERATING.

Reason's Brian Doherty went to Tuesday night's "State of the Swamp" rally in the Federal Capital, where the antics of a performer calling himself Robby Roadsteamer led him to that understanding.

Roadsteamer used various references that limned the depressing extent to which America's cultural battles have been consistent for at least 60 years now as he called on memories of the cultural and political rebellion of the '60s antiwar and civil rights and general counterculture movements. The same questions of race and ethnicity, war and peace, decorum vs. vulgarity (though the political valences of that particular division have nearly reversed from 1966 to 2026), the social status of anyone who's not a straight white man, and whose values should dominate media and education, are still haunting America now.

Roadsteamer used images from America's still-remembered boomer counterculture past for the energy he's hoping to recreate for the anti-MAGA movement. "We don't have to be angry or violent," he said. "We just need to create the new Grateful Dead parking lot." Later, he said the progressive resistance needs "less V for Vendetta masks and blowing up Teslas and more of a Grateful Dead, Haight Ashbury scene."

Well, why not?  The New Left of the era adopted countercultural stylings, but their politics were derivative.  Second wave feminism: we can vote, but a credit card in our own names?  Maybe that can be fixed.  Corporate jobs in proportion to our share of the population?  Aspirational, but better at riling people up than at getting anything done.  The lavender lobby: we can't engage in public displays of affection, won't the authorities leave our pick-up bars alone?  Maybe that can be fixed.  Genderfluidity?  So much for any sort of intersectional coalition.  Disagree, and face guilt-tripping, or cancellation, or perhaps fists.

LET THE NIT-PICKING BEGIN.

The Speech from the Throne delivered the longitude as expected, and the platitude unburdened by Trumpian vamping.  Then came the nit-picking.  "CBS News fact checked President Trump's 2026 State of the Union address Tuesday night, in which he highlighted his record on the economy, immigration and tariffs, and also assessed a claim made by Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger during her Democratic response."  Read it if you would like, if it's not nit-picking, it might be ankle-biting, or it might be rivet-counting.

The speech featured two centenarians, two Congressional Medals of Honor awarded, two Purple Hearts conferred, one posthumously, a Legion of Merit, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom by unanimous consent of the Olympians present.  Air Force aviator Royce Williams was one of the centenarians and earned a Medal of Honor for making ace against a fleet of Soviet MIG jets during the Korean War.  Nobody wanted to call attention to his exploit at the time as those jets had Soviet pilots and the United States officially were involved in a United Nations police action on behalf of the Republic of Korea.

OUR PROFOUNDLY UNSERIOUS POLITICIANS.

Our President will deliver another Speech from the Throne tonight.  A year ago, it wasn't officially a "State of the Union Address," because reasons, but in longitude and platitude it was right up there with the official ones.  Plus Trump-deranged Democrats acting like jackasses.  "This year, the San Francisco Democrats are still in the saddle, but the country has not had a serious president in this century."

This year, the Trump-deranged Democrats are as deranged at ever, but some of them are opting not to bray in the Federal Capitol, preferring to hang out with their herd and nurse their grievances out of the public eye.  Some things are unlikely to change.  "It's investing in politically connected rent-seekers and consultants and hoping for the benefits to trickle down."  That was Dementia Joe yelling at us two years ago, motivating all the fluffers to assure us that he was just fine and ready to govern for another four years.

MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG.

Victory Girl Toni Williams deploys the double negative positively.  "It Is NOT Patriotic To Root Against Anti-American Olympians."  Olympians, like any other citizens, have the right to hold opinions, and provocative reporters of a certain stripe like to deploy athletes as endorsers of political positions, and sometimes they sound off in colorful ways.  Predictably, in the Age of Trump, there will be Trump-critical sports reporters looking for like-minded athletes to sound off, and, predictably, the culture warriors will sound off about the athletes sounding off.

Better, she urges, to consider the source and bestow obscurity on the athlete.

Whine. It’s so hard. Whine more. Spoiled athletes. Angry because someone didn’t give them enough love. Or, enough ice time.

I am an old-fashioned girl. Even when I think my country and its leaders are wrong, I still love it. Every year I buy the White House Historical Society ornaments, even when I intensely dislike the President, like Biden and Obama. I still root for my country to win when I don’t like or despise athletes. I don’t cheer on the creeptacular athletes, just my country.

Don’t drag your country when you are outside of its borders AND find someone from your country you can cheer for. We have soldiers competing in the Olympics. Cheer for them. Don’t cheer for pay-for-play Eileen Gu either.

Yes, it's a strange sort of socialism that pays one Stanford student more to ski than all the tea farmers in Guangxi earn.  But then I remember Lieutenant Vladislav Tretyak of the Red Army hockey club.  But the ones who express their opinions on national affairs, which are as valid as Toni Williams's, or mine, or, dear reader, yours, but different: let them earn obscurity by their politics.

Don’t root against Olympic athletes from the USA, just ignore them. It is not patriotic to root against them. That diminishes you. Don’t do that. Don’t root for them and, for pity sakes, don’t buy any products they endorse. Go USA!

Indeed, particularly with the Border Battle coming up Thursday.  Canada will play Team USA, meaning divided squads from the University of Wisconsin and Ohio State will seek Olympic Gold in women's hockey.

MEANINGFUL POLITICS IS OFTEN LOCAL.

So I've argued, mostly futilely.  "Thus we focus on the presidency, er, the gerontocrats seeking the office, and neglect the dog-catcher and the school board and the city council."  I think that focus is bothering retired political scientist Steven Taylor of Troy well outside the beltway.

G. Elliot Morris provides an empirical example of what it means for our politics to be presidentialized: The less voters knew, the more they liked Trump in 2024. Not Anymore. Specifically, he notes how “low-knowledge voters” have shifted their views on Trump. His definition of “low-knowledge voter” is not being able to correctly identify which party controls the House and Senate.

What such a data point tells us is that a lot of voters don’t pay much attention to the news or to very basic issues of governance. They don’t really have a strong understanding of partisan politics, and they are not making voting decisions based on messaging in congressional campaigns, i.e., what “The Democrats” or “The Republicans” are saying. What they do know is who the president is and what their general feelings are about politics, society, and the economy.

Such voters are basically reacting to how they feel about the incumbent president and vote accordingly. So, for example, if they are unhappy with inflation and have lingering frustrations over COVID, and Biden is the incumbent president, they are likely to vote for the challenger.

A lot of those voters who were unhappy with Biden in 2024 are now unhappy with Trump.

He's using "low-knowledge" rather than "low-information," and there's probably a great deal of "whip up unhappiness with the current president" unleashed by the out party in each presidential cycle.

SENDING IN THE VARSITY.

Yesterday's compare-and-contrast post featuring protest culture in the government schools of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin noted an after-school event at Genoa-Kingston High School organized by the school's chapter of Turning Point U.S.A. that was a voluntary event too far for the professional protesters.  As we published yesterday, we did not know who the outside speakers were.  Later last night, the fourth estate saw fit to let us know.  "Erika Kirk, Linda McMahon speak at Genoa-Kingston High School ‘History Rocks!’ event."  That's right, the current chief executive officer of Turning Point and the Secretary of Education whose mission is to roll back that department.

“I was able to lead a portion of the presentation and introduce Mrs. Erika Kirk onto the stage,” said Oliver Piotrowski, Genoa-Kingston High School Club America Chapter President. “The overall vibe was very patriotic. People were cheering. People were very happy to be there. They were happy to have the opportunity to see Erika Kirk and Secretary McMahon.”

Around 2 p.m. Thursday, a group of protesters gathered near the high school. Some demonstrators held signs protesting against Trump administration policies, while others showed up to voice their opinion over the decision to hold the event at the school.

That's right, one paragraph describing what happened at the event, and the balance of that story devoted to the same protest-centric coverage we noted yesterday.  The print coverage in DeKalb's Daily Chronicle also mostly rehashed the protesters' positions.  "Turning Point USA, history event draws protests in Genoa."  There was reporting from inside the event, students posting their videos on social media.  And people wonder why Washington's Post downsized itself and the other traditional newspapers are as if skin suits.  Outside the event, the cold civil war continued.

Numerous cars passing by on Route 72 honked in apparent approval of the protesters.

The driver of a car with two American flags flying in the back and “Trump” written on a side window passed by the protesters multiple times while revving the engine.

The education secretary came to Genoa from another school event, at Chicago's Hope Academy, which Chicago's Tribune describes as a "private Christian school."  That event was also part of the "History Rocks!" tour, which is your tax dollars at work with a little help from non-governmental organizations of a traditional patriotic persuasion.

IS THE CHILDREN LEARING?

Instead of Senior Skip-Out day, high schoolers of all grade levels organize, with the concurrence of their teachers, protests against immigration enforcement.

The protests began before the first protester had a fatal encounter with law enforcement in Minneapolis.

Protests against the Trump Administration's immigration enforcement tactics were held across the country [January 20] — with dozens of those protests happening in Southeastern Wisconsin.

The demonstrations were organized by The Women's March in what they called the "Free America Walkout," encouraging the public to walk out of school or work in protest of ICE.

In Milwaukee, hundreds of Rufus King High School students walked out of class [January 20] morning and could be seen walking through the Rufus King neighborhood.

"It's really important for all these students to be out here because ICE's policies are not only affecting politics, they're students like us, students around the nation, and it's causing a lot of fear, which becomes an issue in our communities because everybody deserves to be safe and feel safe in their own communities." Kali Maafree, a Rufus King student, said.

Rufus King is notionally a magnet school, although its academic performance is on a par with many urban schools.  There might be forces at work other than active immigration patrols making people feel less than safe in their own communities.  "That's not an urban design problem, that's what happens when you celebrate transgressivity and call bad behavior authenticity.  The same community members who would like to stop the bad driving are also now at work to reduce the gang gunplay.  There is still hope for a hurting world."  You only have to walk two blocks south or three blocks west of the King campus to find the bad driving.

MOSTLY REGULAR ORDER.

Dial down my usual cynicism, at least for two weeks.  "It's as if nobody in Washington wants to be bothered with regular order appropriations."

As of this afternoon, everything but Homeland Security is squared away until October.

What this means is that the government is funded (via regular order) through FY 2026 (September 30), with the exception of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS is now funded for 10 days via continuing resolution while Democrats and Republicans attempt to reach an agreement on it — a feat that has become more challenging n the wake of partisan tussling over immigration enforcement.

There are intra-party squabbles in both parties, and I suspect there are more than a few Republicans willing to put the Democrats on the wrong side of requiring voter identification and that legislation might get attached to whatever patch to homeland security gets worked out in the next week or so.  The  wrangling that ensues will slow down whatever work is in progress on getting the next set of regular order appropriations ready to go in September, which, note, is followed shortly by the Congressional elections.

Power Line's Bill Glahn keeps the cynicism dialed to "simmer."  "So, this shutdown didn’t happen because Democrats didn’t want to make a big deal about it. We’ll see what happens next week."