Happy New Year!

With the new year, we will be experimenting with a new format for the newsletter, with a several items, most often longer than a paragraph but shorter than a full piece, but sometimes shorter. The idea is to be more flexible and more "human." Let us know how you feel!

#StateCapacity — Here's something that's the intersection of two things we love: an important policy issue that doesn't get discussed enough, and AI. Maureen Flatley, President of Stop Child Predators, and Taylor Barkley, Director of Public Policy at the Abundance Institute, have a new op-ed out on the Trump administration's recent EO "Fostering the Future," which we've covered before. The order directs states to deploy AI-driven predictive analytics to strengthen foster-family recruitment and retention, improve matching between children and placements, and target federal child-welfare dollars where they will do the most good.

That matters because the status quo is a high-volume, low-information system: caseworkers routinely carry caseloads in the dozens, supervisors oversee vast portfolios, and children can wait years for permanent placement, leading to awful preventable tragedies. Properly designed tools can sift through the mountains of administrative and case data to flag concrete, time-sensitive risks, such as which youth are most likely to run away in the first 90 days of a placement, or when a case is trending toward residential care so agencies can intervene earlier with intensive community-based services. AI critics worry about "bias", which is another word for "political correctness", which is another reason to support this initiative.

#TheBlob — MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) has become one of the biggest funders of the absolute worst causes imaginable. So bad that, the Washington Free Beacon has learned, she is funding a couple nonprofits that are currently under Federal investigation for links to terrorism.

A few thoughts on this. First: this is how the permanent communist insane ecosystem is bred. MacKenzie Scott doesn't care about who gets her money, because she's interested in virtue signaling or perhaps darker psychological reasons. She just opens the checkbook and the blue-haired activists use it for whatever they want. This is what makes this blob so resilient and "antifragile" in a way that the conservative ecosystem, funded by impact-minded donors, is not.

Second: this is why the Federal government should spend more resources investigating this ecosystem. It's the only thing that will bring accountability.

#Results — Chris Rufo is taking credit, rightly, for Tim Walz's recent announcement that he is dropping out of the race for Governor of Minnesota, in the wake of the revelations on the insane Somali fraud ring. Investigative reporting matters! It gets results.

#GoodGovernment — Speaking of Minnesota, the good folks at the Texas Public Policy Foundation also point out that their election system is broken.

#Sedition — Speaking of accountability: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has announced the next stage of reprisals against Democratic Congressmen who published a seditious video encouraging servicemembers to disobey legal orders. The Department will reduce his retired grade. He will no longer be a Navy Captain. This is good, but there are bigger penalties imaginable for sedition…

#Education — We love Rick Hess's output. Here he is, pushing back hard on the fashionable claim that “AI changes everything” in education, arguing that—whatever AI does to business—schools should not respond by gutting academic content in favor of vague “soft skills” and tool-familiarity. He notes that today’s AI hype is simply the newest wrapper on an old progressive impulse: declare traditional knowledge obsolete (“you can look it up”) and replace it with airy slogans about “learning how to learn,” even though these reforms routinely dodge the basic question of what graduates should actually know.

As he points out, knowledge is not optional in the AI era; it is the prerequisite for using AI well. Students cannot “think critically” about nothing, and they cannot reliably detect AI’s errors, integrate new information, or make sound judgments without a broad base of history, literature, math, science, and civics. He also warns policymakers against chasing workforce forecasts and “hot jobs,” which are politically irresistible but consistently wrong on a 10–20 year horizon; the safer bet is a rigorous, content-rich curriculum that forms autonomous adults and citizens—regardless of what the labor market looks like when today’s fourth graders turn 30. Amen.

#Science — Very cool: the good folks at the Institute of Progress are doing a short course on innovation for "current or recent students who have completed at least one year of a PhD program in economics or related fields." If that's you or someone you know, you should think of applying. Applications due Jan 9th!