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August 1974

“What’s your IQ?” Linda hit me with her classic eye roll, standing there with her hands on her hips. Those same hips I’d grabbed and pulled into me more times than I could count since we were 15. That part of our story was over, though. Linda knew it, and so did I. Still, we stayed close. She was better than anyone at supporting me when I needed it, and she was the first person I trusted enough to share even a few of my darker secrets.

“Higher than yours.” Linda always brought out my inner smartass, and her comeback made me smirk.

“Your IQ’s higher than everyone’s, genius. That was rhetorical.” She shook her head. “But clearly, all those brain cells aren’t doing you any good, because sometimes you’re still an idiot.” Linda was one of the only people I’d let talk to me like that. Not because of all the sex, but because she was sharp. I’ve always been drawn to smart women, and we both had that sarcastic, smartass sense of humor.

Since we were 15, right from the first week of sophomore year, Linda and I were what people now call “friends with benefits.” Over time, it turned into real trust and a friendship that stuck. By the time I was 19, I had shared some of my tragic upbringing with Linda. But I still hadn’t let anyone else into my inner circle—at least not until I met the woman who’d become my wife.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I whispered, barely loud enough to hear myself. “I’m not sure I can be who she needs me to be, or even who I want to be for her.” The question, the one I couldn’t say out loud, just hung there: Can I actually do this? Can I stay with one woman?

What I was really asking was whether I could trust myself—or anyone else—enough to build something real. Feeling unsettled, I turned to Linda. She sat beside me on the edge of that old daybed in her parents’ basement, the same one where our unique relationship began.

Linda was the one who finally helped me see the light, at least a little. She didn’t fix me—my therapist would have a thing or two to say about that—but she did help me notice what I’d been missing. She explained that some women held onto hurt and resentment long after their encounters with me ended. Not because I lied to them, but because the closeness I offered felt like more than I meant it to be. Just listening, trying to help, actually caring—those things weren’t just kindness. They were promises, even if I didn’t mean them that way. I thought I was being clear about my limits, but my actions told a different story. For some women, intimacy wasn’t just something you did; it was a doorway to something bigger, something that made them hope for more.

I can still see Linda’s piercing emerald-green eyes locked with mine that night, my hands cradled in hers as she spoke words that would change the course of my life. “Look, seriously… inside of you is a kind, gentle soul as worthy of love as anyone I’ve ever known. Do you even have a clue how many times I’ve wanted to tell you that I’m in love with you? I finally realized we would never work, and I know that because I came to know you so well. But that’s exactly why I’m sure you’ve found the right woman for you, someone who won’t just offer you love but might also tame and soothe that wild, hurt little boy inside you. I’ve listened to how you talk about her and seen the light in your eyes when her name is mentioned. True love can heal many things. Please, don’t walk away from this one.”

After she shared that bit of wisdom—which finally made me stop trying to fix every broken woman who crossed my path—she kissed my cheek, hugged me, and left. I never saw her again. Years later, when I tried to find her to thank her for helping me see my own mess and for pointing me toward the woman who’d become my wife, I learned that Linda had died in a tragic accident.

That news hit hard.

Linda saw something in me when I couldn’t see it myself, and she nudged me toward healing, even if it took a lifetime. She knew I was both wounded and capable of love, and she understood that sometimes real love means letting someone go so they can find their own way. I know now that Linda loved me and saw something in me I couldn’t see. Her gift pushed me toward a life where I could be loved and learn to love back. 51 years with my wife is proof enough of that.

Thank you, Linda. In the truest sense of the words, I love you, too.

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under US copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated or AI-assisted may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

Before I was 17, I was making $2,000-$3,000 a month—at a time when the average American family didn’t make $10,000 a year. I owned two cars and two motorcycles, traveled to Mexico, New York, and other places, and invested the money I didn’t spend in stocks. I wasn’t living anything resembling an ordinary adolescence.

One of the most common questions I get when people learn I spent my last two years of high school living alone is, “How did you support yourself?”

I left home just shy of 16 with savings from years of odd jobs—money earmarked for emergencies, not for the daily grind of feeding myself. I was stubborn about not burning through it, which meant I needed a new plan. Summer was coming, so I wondered if I could reclaim my old framing job with the residential developer who’d tolerated me the previous year. I’d gotten decent at swinging a hammer and even earned a raise, so I figured if he needed a warm body, I was a shoo-in. That would keep me in groceries and gas until football camp rolled around.

Getting a roof over my head was trickier than getting a paycheck. Enter John, my best friend and soon-to-be savior, who caught me on the day I was supposed to collect what was mine and disappear. We got to talking, and the next thing I knew, he was offering his basement as a crash pad. His mother, who’d once packed up and left her own abusive husband, was the sort who’d fight a bear for her kid. Unlike my own mother, she didn’t hesitate. The moment John told her my story, she opened her door and told me to stay as long as I needed. I ended up there all summer, until a better—I thought it was better at the time—offer came along.

That summer, I managed to squirrel away a little cash and still hand some over to John’s mother for groceries and the privilege of not sleeping under a bridge. She was kind in a way that made me uneasy, mostly because she actually understood the kind of childhood I’d had. One night, after a few weeks of pretending I was fine, I broke down at her kitchen table and let it all spill out. I sobbed uncontrollably, the kind of crying you don’t admit to, especially if you’re a guy. I don’t think I’d ever let myself cry about any of it before. She just held me and told me to let it happen. After that, we had a bond that was equal parts comfort and the kind of reassurance I wouldn’t realize I needed until much later.

As school crept closer, I started worrying about how I’d keep the lights on without my summer gig. I didn’t want to quit football, but I was ready to if it came to that. Football was my last thread of normalcy, and I was hanging on for dear life. Plus, it kept me near the cheerleaders, and by then I was already well-versed in female attention.

I kicked off junior year with a healthy dose of anxiety and just enough savings to limp through the first month, maybe two, if I lived on the kindness of girlfriends’ mothers and hope. I’d laid out three hundred bucks—a king’s ransom at the time—for a 1962 Volkswagen Beetle with a 40-horsepower engine. I still think Di’s blender could outrun it. No heater, but I figured I wouldn’t freeze to death until at least November.

A few days into the new school year, Ashley practically pinned me against my locker and asked if I wanted to give dating another shot. Ashley was my fallback girl, the one I circled back to whenever I wrestled my sex addiction into temporary submission. When monogamy started to feel like a straitjacket, we’d break up—only to find ourselves back together a few weeks later. It was a relationship best described as recurring déjà vu.

Her father—who, for the record, was murdered a few years after I got out of Tech—absolutely adored me, and he became a father to me. Let’s call him Sam Fishman. They were Jewish; I was a very white Presbyterian kid, and this was Georgia in 1970, but religion never came up. Not once. Why Sam liked me so much, I’ll never know. He had a young son he barely acknowledged, but he seemed to think Ashley and I were destined for the altar, which, for a Jewish father in 1970, was no small leap. Her mother was all in, too. Bless her heart, Ashley was about as sharp as a sack of hair, and I suspect Sam figured she’d have a fighting chance with someone like me. Why the hell he thought that, your guess is as good as mine.

A longtime friend who’s Jewish asked me about this not long ago—why a little Presbyterian boy was dating a Jewish girl in 1970, and why her parents wanted him around. I didn’t have an answer. Stuff like that—race, religion, whatever—never mattered to me, then or now. Three years earlier, I’d had a Black girlfriend, Olivia.

Sam owned a small empire of two-bedroom ranches scattered around Decatur, all built in the ‘50s and all with the same tired, “your parents” charm. He’d just picked up another one near Towers High—not my school—and made me an offer I simply couldn’t refuse. If I handled the renovations and kept the yard from turning into a jungle, the place was mine until college.

At 16, the idea of your own house with no adults in sight is pure, uncut freedom. Also, in hindsight, a disaster waiting to happen. If you’re a parent reading this, let me ask: would you let your 16-year-old loose in Atlanta, or anywhere else, for that matter? Didn’t think so. My parents were glad to see me go. So was I.

Once the deal was sealed, it hit me: I had a house and not a stick of furniture. Luckily, Sam’s basement was a treasure trove of woodworking tools, so I cobbled together a bed and a small bedside table, cut some foam—to exactly my size—for a mattress, and called it luxury. Ashley’s mother, handy with a needle, whipped up two sets of sheets. I scavenged a thrift store for a chair, a dresser, a kitchen table, and a couple of chairs. By the time my scavenger hunt was over, my wallet was gasping for air, which only made me more desperate to refill it.

Rewind a week to the first day of school, when my history teacher, Karen, decided to make me her extracurricular project. I spent the first few nights of the year at her place, which was confusing enough to leave me sleep-deprived. On the second night, lying next to her and staring at the ceiling, my mind circled back to the big question: how was I going to make money? Two ideas popped into my head, both ridiculous enough to make me grin. I decided to dig into them as soon as possible.

Columbia High, perched on its namesake’s Drive in Decatur, was a behemoth—over 3,600 students, many of them flush with cash thanks to their well-heeled parents. All I had to do was figure out how to separate fools from their money.

I needed an “office” for my budding empire, and it had to be on school grounds, where the action was. The A/V room was perfect—nobody ever ventured to the back, where a cavernous closet and a battered old desk waited. The entry had a Dutch door with a shelf across the bottom half, which meant I could work it like a ticket booth. I found a key that locked the filing drawer and the little one beneath it, perfect for stashing the tools of my trade. The money, though, never left my side. After a good haul, I’d slip out to the parking lot and tuck my tattered gym bag into the Beetle’s front trunk.

What I didn’t have was a way to print. Both of my schemes ran on paper—hundreds of sheets a week—and in 1970, that meant I needed the machine room’s holy trinity: a mimeograph, a paper cutter, and a cabinet overflowing with paper. If I wanted free rein, I realized I needed keys to the kingdom. One of the guidance counselors had been relegated to this room with an old desk and I began to think.

I’m not exactly proud of how I got those keys. The guidance counselor—let’s call her Maggie Rogers—was young and easy on the eyes. I’d overheard her tell another teacher she was single and still looking. Riding high on the fact that I was already sleeping with one teacher—years would pass before I understood what that sentence actually meant—I figured a little harmless flirting might open a few doors. Literally.

For the first few days, it was “Miss Rogers” this and “Miss Rogers” that, with compliments about her hair and how vital her job was. She laughed at my jokes—bad as they were—and I think she liked the whiff of trouble my bad-boy self gave off, and I’m certain she peeked at my file. After a while, I dropped the formality and tried out ‘Maggie.’ I was already on a first-name basis with half the staff, so why not? She blushed, looked away, then flashed a smile that told me I was on the right track. A few more days of ‘Maggie, those colors are perfect on you,’ or ‘Did you get a haircut? It suits you,’ and I finally worked up the nerve to ask about the mimeograph. She said yes, as long as I didn’t ‘abuse’ it—whatever that meant. The keys came a few days later. That was the real prize.

Maggie didn’t have cafeteria duty—lucky her—so I asked if she wanted to eat outside on the low wall by the gym. She said she hadn’t brought lunch, but I told her not to worry; I’d stashed a lunch for two in the home ec fridge that morning, just in case. We sat outside, talking and laughing in the almost-fall air, neither hot nor cold, just right. After a while, she told me how much fun she was having and how nice I’d been. What started as a hustle turned into something else—I actually liked her, very much. Getting past my regret for doing this has been on a long list of things I still need to forgive myself for.

We went out once. It never went anywhere—by then Karen was literally and figuratively consuming me, in ways I’ll get to another time. But I got the keys, and, admittedly, I’m ashamed of how I did it.

Georgia breathes football—high school, college, pro, you name it. My school played in a stadium that could swallow 25,000 people, bigger than some small colleges. With that kind of football fever, it was easy to start selling sheets for $1, listing twenty college games. All you had to do was pick the winners—no spreads, no frills. Fifty bucks to the top guesser, with ties broken by guessing how many points were scored in a select game. By my math, I’d clear at least $200 a week. In reality, it ballooned to over $600 most weeks as kids from neighboring schools caught on.

Columbia had another claim to fame: more drug and alcohol ‘incidents’ than any other school in Georgia—maybe anywhere east of the Mississippi. And it wasn’t just a handful of burnouts in the parking lot. Kids were drinking on the tennis courts before first bell, smoking pot in the bathrooms between classes, and some were dabbling in things that would make a pharmacist nervous. The low point came my senior year, when sixty-plus kids left in ambulances after an overdose on a misidentified drug; that’s a story for another time. I did my share of questionable substances, but I never took anything I didn’t know inside and out, or from someone I didn’t trust.

That’s the Columbia I want you to picture, because my second money-making scheme only worked in a place like that.

So…a raffle. First prize was either a bottle of Bacardi 151 or an ounce of pot—winner’s choice. A bottle of 151 could flatten half a football team, and an ounce of pot, which cost twenty or thirty bucks back then, would keep a crowd high for days. Tickets were a dollar, just like the football pool—six to a sheet, all neatly sliced on Maggie’s paper cutter. The first drawing brought in about a hundred bucks. Soon, very soon, it was many times that.

I knew the football pool had a shelf life—by late November, maybe early December, I’d run out of games. This was before college football became a year-round circus. And Atlanta wasn’t a basketball town. But the appetite for pot and booze wasn’t going anywhere, so I hustled to stash as much cash as I could.

By the end of November, I was pulling in two to three thousand dollars a month. A month. Here’s the number that puts it in perspective: the median American family lived on $9,870 that year. The whole family. All twelve months. Call it a shade over eight-to-one if you want it in today’s dollars. I was 16 and clearing a quarter of that every thirty days, running at thirty thousand a year, with a suspect moral compass and no adult in my life questioning a single thing.

Eventually, the fear of getting caught started to gnaw at me. There was no way to keep a lid on things when I was selling hundreds of chances in a sports pool and just as many raffle tickets, with at least one illegal substance up for grabs. I bailed before the hammer dropped, with over $11,000 stashed away—more than a year’s income for most families in America. The income from my business ventures bought me two cars, a couple of motorcycles (okay, three), and trips to New York and California. I even made it to Mexico, where I stumbled into my next quasi-legal (nothing a slick lawyer couldn’t overcome) business just south of the crossing at Laredo. That one let me start dabbling in stocks with a cousin who was a broker in Greenville. But that’s yet another story.

I can still picture myself crossing the parking lot at lunch—sixteen, lugging a cloth gym bag stuffed with cash, mostly ones, with enough fives and tens to make it interesting, since some folks bought tickets by the handful. I’d stash the bag in the front trunk of a car with no heater, then head back in for fourth period like my life was perfectly normal.

I knew exactly what was broken at that school, and I built my business right on top of it. That one I’m still ashamed of. I did it. It happened. I’ll regret it as long as I’m breathing.

People ask how I supported myself, and now you know: a betting pool, a raffle, facilitated by a set of keys I got by making a lonely woman feel seen.

I was good at all of it. The question that still haunts me—and that no adult ever bothered to ask—isn’t how a 16-year-old got so good at this.

It’s why he had to.

Upcoming: my solo trips to Mexico for my next income venture and getting past customs.

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under US copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated or AI-assisted may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

If you want to know why AI detection is disabled for this piece, read this expose´ of how Substack deceitfully and erroneously displays Pangram’s actual assessment results.

I’m heading to New York, which I love as much as anything else I haven’t managed to ruin for myself yet.

New York has always been my favorite escape hatch. Usually, I start plotting out which artery-clogging meals I’ll eat, which streets I’ll wander, and what I haven’t managed to check off the list since last time. Half the fun is in the anticipation, or at least it used to be.

This time, though, I feel like a lukewarm cup of coffee: not hot, not cold, just there. No dread, no travel jitters, not even the sometimes urge to barricade myself at home. Just a bland, room-temperature nothing.

I’ve noticed the same thing creeping into other corners of my life. The stuff I used to look forward to hasn’t turned sour, but the fizz is gone. My anticipation has migrated to the meh stage.

I have also heard similar accounts from other people. They say that they feel exhausted, drained, discouraged, or numb. A few have stopped reading the news since they can’t bear it any longer. Others remain involved because they’re frightened about what could occur when they’re not looking. Those who used to debate politics vigorously now state that they no longer have the energy. In other cases, people remain highly engaged yet appear constantly angry, anxious, or worn out.

It’s like something’s shifting underfoot, and nobody wants to admit it.

There is a psychological term that applies to some of the points I’m making: anhedonia. This refers to a diminished capacity to feel pleasure or become interested. In general psychological theory, anhedonia is usually considered within the context of reward processing. It is believed that disruptions in the brain’s reward system—which normally enables us to anticipate and react to positive experiences—play a central role. The concept is also related to the body’s stress response: ongoing stress can reduce our sensitivity to rewards, making it more difficult to look forward to or enjoy the things we once found pleasurable. Although anhedonia is closely associated with depression, the fact that a person experiences a certain level of it does not automatically mean that they have major depressive disorder. The National Institute of Mental Health states that a lack of interest or pleasure in hobbies and activities is a key symptom of depression. Yet depression involves a wider range of symptoms and therefore requires a clinical evaluation.

It is now known that pleasure is not a single straightforward experience; rather, there is the pleasure derived from experiencing something and the pleasure coming from anticipating it. Clinicians refer to these as consummatory and anticipatory pleasure—that is, liking and wanting—and the two can occur independently. In 2006, David Gard and his colleagues created a scale to measure these two components, comprising 10 items related to anticipatory pleasure and 8 related to consummatory pleasure. Their study found that some individuals report feeling less excited when looking forward to events, even though their enjoyment during the event remains unchanged. This distinction is important since the scale is now commonly used in research looking at how mental health disorders, chronic stress, or other factors might interfere with either the ability to anticipate pleasure or to enjoy it at the time. It allows researchers and clinicians to more accurately identify the type of pleasure, or the lack of it, that people are experiencing (Journal of Research in Personality, 2006).

I never bothered with that distinction until I caught myself staring at a ticket to New York and wondering where the hell my excitement had wandered off to.

I have no clue how I’ll feel once I land. Maybe I’ll step out of the hotel, get hit by the usual wall of noise and humanity, and remember why I love this place. Maybe the problem isn’t enjoying things—maybe it’s just that the part of me that used to look forward to them has gone on strike.

Something Is Happening Beyond Me

To treat my experience as if it were a diagnosis of the United States would be irresponsible.

There are many reasons a person might cease to enjoy the things they once enjoyed. As I’ve already said, depression could be one of them. As we get older, our interests and energy levels can change. Our physical health is a factor, as are medications, our relationships, feelings of grief, sleep, and ordinary life situations. And at times we simply change.

I cannot say that America’s political environment is leading to anhedonia any more than the scientific literature can.

What the evidence shows is that a very large number of Americans are suffering from ongoing stress due to the political and social conditions in the country, and that psychologists are now becoming more aware that politics itself can act as a chronic source of stress. For instance, the American Psychological Association’s annual “Stress in America” surveys have, on several occasions, found that the majority of Americans consider political and social issues to be major sources of ongoing stress (American Psychological Association, 2023; 2024). Moreover, a study from 2023 led by Brett Ford and his colleagues found that being exposed every day to political events is linked to negative emotions and lower well-being, thus confirming the notion that politics functions as a long-lasting stressor for many people (Ford et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023). Given these two points, I began to think that my own case of meh might be part of a much bigger pattern.

The American Psychological Association has been tracking stress in the United States since 2007, and the language it has used to describe the country in recent years forms its own chronology. In 2020: a national mental health crisis. In 2022: Americans stuck in COVID-19 survival mode. In 2023: a nation recovering from collective trauma. In 2024: a nation in political turmoil. In 2025: a crisis of connection.

That isn’t a diagnosis for the whole country, but the numbers tell a story of a nation that’s been clenching its jaw for years. The fine print is even uglier.

The 2024 Stress in America survey carried out by the APA found that 77% of adults believed that the future of the nation was a major source of stress, 73% thought the economy was, 69% cited the presidential election, 62% named US politics, 60% referred to social divisiveness, and 51% mentioned global conflict. Almost two-thirds (64%) of the respondents said they felt their rights were being attacked.

The election came and went.

The stress, of course, stuck around like a bad smell.

The 2025 survey carried out by the APA found that 76% still regarded the future of the nation as a major source of stress and 62% said that societal division was one as well. More than half of the respondents said they sometimes or often felt isolated from others, half stated that they felt left out or lacked companionship, and of those who were considerably stressed by societal division, 61% reported feeling isolated, whereas 43% of those who did not see societal division as a major source of stress said the same.

More interesting still, those stressed by societal division were more likely to report canceling plans and having difficulty planning for the future.

Read that last bit again: trouble making plans fWe usually think of political stress as just being angry all the time, but maybe it’s also poisoning how we think about tomorrow.ip with the future.

Politics Has Moved Into the House

In the past, politics had a way of switching off. There was the morning newspaper and then network news in the evening. Elections took place from time to time. Political arguments did indeed exist, and at times they were quite fierce, but there was no mechanism to feed political conflict into our awareness every single hour we were awake.

Now we carry it around in our pockets, like a pet snake that bites every time we check the news.

A Supreme Court decision shows up on the phone, after which comes a war, then a presidential statement, then another mass shooting, then an economic report, then a video of something outrageous, then someone reacting to that outrageous thing, then someone else being outraged at the first person’s reaction. There is no natural stopping point.

Brett Ford, a psychologist, and her team chose to investigate the effects of this on people rather than simply suppose that it was harmful. In two diary studies, they followed Americans through their daily lives—first 198 people over a two-week period and then 811 people over three weeks—asking them about political events, their emotions, their psychological and physical well-being, and their level of political activity. The findings were unpleasant. Daily political events consistently triggered negative emotions, which in turn were linked to lower psychological and physical well-being. Further experimental research reached the same conclusion: politics can function as a constant source of stress in everyday life (Ford, Feinberg, Lassetter, Thai & Gatchpazian, “The Political Is Personal: The Costs of Daily Politics,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023).

The researchers also discovered something that makes the problem considerably more complicated. Those same negative emotions increased people’s motivation to do something politically—to volunteer, to protest, to act. And when people successfully used strategies such as distraction or reframing to reduce negative emotions, they felt better and became less motivated to act. Ford described it as a trade-off between feeling good and doing good.

This trade-off resonates with classic theories of motivation, such as the concept of approach-avoidance conflict, in which people are drawn to engage with impactful yet distressing events but are also pushed to protect themselves from emotional exhaustion. In the context of collective action, social psychologists have long noted that shared negative emotions can energize group efforts and mobilize participation. Still, sustained exposure to such emotions can also lead to burnout or disengagement. The tension between emotional well-being and political action reveals a core dilemma: the very feelings that drive us to join with others and work for change can also erode our psychological resources if left unchecked.

That’s the catch, isn’t it? If you care, tuning out feels like cowardice. If you stay plugged in, you start to fray at the edges.

It’s worth saying clearly that this isn’t a story about one political party. It would be easy for someone on the left to write this as an essay about Donald Trump, and equally easy for someone on the right to blame Joe Biden, immigration, cultural change, universities, the media, or whatever else represents national decline in that person’s political imagination. Psychologically, that misses the point. The nervous system doesn’t ask how you voted before responding to a perceived threat. People across the political spectrum can believe that something fundamental is being taken from them. Yet, they profoundly disagree about what the threat is, who’s responsible for it, and what should be done. But fear of losing one’s country is still fear, and Ford’s experimental work found that the basic emotional effects were consistent across political affiliations.

That doesn’t mean all political claims are equally true. They aren’t. It means the psychological consequences of believing your country is in danger don’t depend entirely upon whether your diagnosis of the danger is correct. It’s about the consequence.

The Problem of Powerlessness

And here’s another splinter under the skin.

People can put up with all kinds of misery if they think it matters. What’s harder is getting hit with wave after wave of bad news and knowing you can’t do a damn thing about it.

You vote. You donate. You write letters. You protest. You argue. You volunteer. You call your representative. You read. You watch.

Then your phone buzzes again—something else, always something else.

If you actually care about the world, the cycle is brutal. The stakes are sky-high; your control is microscopic. Helplessness isn’t just bad things happening—it’s bad things happening while you stand there, hands in your pockets, knowing you can’t change a thing.

Eventually, ‘What can I do?‘ turns into ‘Why bother?‘

When Tomorrow Stops Producing Pleasure

This is where anhedonia belongs in the conversation, and I want to qualify that statement.

I’m not suggesting that America has developed a psychiatric disorder called collective anhedonia. There’s no such diagnosis, and I’ve found no research showing that political stress is producing population-wide anhedonia. I’m suggesting something narrower and, I think, more interesting.

What happens when millions of people spend years perceiving the future primarily as a source of threat?

Usually, the future is a grab bag of good stuff: a vacation, a grandkid’s birthday, baseball season, dinner with friends, a concert, retirement, Christmas, a new project.

A trip to New York.

Anticipation is how we live in the future before it gets here. We don’t just enjoy things when they happen—we get a little taste ahead of time. We look forward to them, or at least we used to.

But imagine what happens when the future itself becomes associated primarily with uncertainty and threat. What will happen after the next election? Will there be violence? Will I still have Social Security? Will my children be able to afford a home? Will my grandchildren inherit a functioning democracy? Will artificial intelligence eliminate my job? Will there be another war? Will the country ever feel normal again?

The future starts to feel less like a place where good things might show up and more like a dark alley where the next mugger is waiting.

Have some of us begun paying for that transformation with our capacity for anticipation? If the clinical research is right that wanting and liking can come apart, then it’s at least possible to lose the first while keeping the second—still to enjoy the dinner, the concert, the trip, while the machinery that used to look forward to them has gone quiet.

There Is Another Side to the Evidence

But the story isn’t all doom and gloom. Americans haven’t just rolled over and played dead.

The same 2025 APA survey that found extraordinary levels of stress also found that 84% of adults believed they could still create a good life. 65% felt personally responsible for helping shape the country’s future, and 73% expressed confidence that they could help shape it for the better.

That doesn’t sound like learned helplessness to me. That’s agency, or at least a decent impression of it.

And Ford’s study offers something more practical than encouragement. Alongside distraction and reframing, the researchers measured emotional acceptance—letting yourself feel what you feel without trying to talk yourself out of it. People who managed that reported better daily well-being with no measurable loss of political engagement. It was the one approach that didn’t force the tradeoff.

Emotional acceptance can sound abstract, but it can be put into practice in concrete ways. For example, taking a moment to name what you are feeling—anxiety, frustration, sadness—rather than immediately trying to change it, can foster acceptance. Practicing mindfulness, such as focusing on your breath or bodily sensations without judgment, has been shown to help people sit with difficult emotions rather than push them away. Some people use journaling to write freely about their reactions to the political climate, which can help make space for those feelings without letting them dictate every action. Even pausing during a stressful news cycle to notice your reaction and reminding yourself that discomfort is a normal part of caring about important things can be a small but effective intervention. For communities or organizations, incorporating emotional check-ins at the start of meetings or offering workshops on acceptance and resilience can equip people with tools to manage collective stress more effectively.

That’s worth chewing on, because the usual advice is to just unplug. But telling someone who thinks democracy or their grandkids’ future is on the line to turn off the news is neat on paper and useless in real life. Some things need our attention. Some things need our anger. Some things need us to actually do something.

The problem is allowing the emergency to consume everything else. Political engagement and psychological health don’t have to be enemies, but the research suggests that maintaining both requires conscious effort. Politics can motivate us precisely because it produces powerful emotions. The challenge is preserving motivation without allowing the emotional machinery that produces it to operate every hour of every day.

The goal isn’t to check out. Maybe it’s just to get some perspective before we all lose our minds.

I’m Still Going to New York

I don’t know whether the way I’ve been feeling is anhedonia in any clinical sense, and I’m not particularly interested in diagnosing myself. I’m more interested in what the experience has made me notice.

Something I used to love is coming up, and the part of my brain that should be throwing confetti is just sitting there, arms crossed.

Maybe I’ll get to New York, and the switch will flip. I hope so.

But I also know now that I’m not the only person describing some version of this. We’re living in a country where three-quarters of adults say its future is a significant source of stress. Large numbers feel isolated. Many describe themselves as emotionally exhausted by politics. Researchers can measure deterioration in well-being associated with ordinary exposure to political life.

What we’re experiencing isn’t collective anhedonia. Science certainly isn’t ready to say that. But anhedonia gives us useful language for one small part of a larger collective condition: a population that has spent so long preparing psychologically for what might go wrong that some of us are having difficulty imagining what might go right.

If that’s true, then hanging on to our ability to enjoy things isn’t a luxury. Going out to dinner isn’t giving up. Taking a vacation isn’t sticking your head in the sand. Watching a ballgame doesn’t mean you don’t care. Laughing with people you love doesn’t mean you’ve stopped caring about the rest. And looking forward to tomorrow doesn’t mean you think tomorrow will be perfect.

There’s plenty going on in this country that deserves our attention. There are fights worth having, institutions worth saving, and people who need us to care. But if we let this anxious age steal our joy, we’ve lost something no election can ever give back.

I’m going to New York again soon.

And whether I feel it yet or not, I’m going to try to look forward to it anyway.

Sources

- National Institute of Mental Health, “Depression”

- American Psychological Association, Stress in America 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025

- Brett Q. Ford, Matthew Feinberg, Bethany Lassetter, Sabrina Thai & Arasteh Gatchpazian, “The Political Is Personal: The Costs of Daily Politics,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023

- David E. Gard, Marja Germans Gard, Ann M. Kring & Oliver P. John, “Anticipatory and consummatory components of the experience of pleasure: A scale development study,” Journal of Research in Personality, 40 (2006), 1086–1102

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under US copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated or AI-assisted may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

If you want to know why AI detection is disabled for this piece, read this expose´ of how Substack deceitfully and erroneously displays Pangram’s actual assessment results.

My thanks to for recommending this book to me and for giving me the chance to review it, albeit belatedly. Risky business, Alexis, trusting my opinions. Thanks also to my wife, whose economics degree proved useful during the denser parts. I should also note that Acemoglu has published another book since this one, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity (Dutton, 2026). It’s my next read.

I’ve spent my career as a systems engineer and a CEO, among other roles, and I sometimes write about democracy and technology, including AI. From my perspective, Power and Progress is one of the most important books published in the last decade and one of the most misunderstood. Readers often pick it up expecting a discussion of technology but find one about power instead.

Acemoglu and Johnson argue that technology has never, on its own, determined a society’s future. Political and economic institutions determine whether an innovation benefits everyone or amplifies the advantages of those who already hold power. This may seem obvious until you realize what it challenges—the core belief of Silicon Valley that technological progress naturally leads to social progress. Their concise summary is: technology creates opportunities, but power decides who gains from them. The authors then spend about a thousand years demonstrating this point.

Instead of viewing history as a steady march of progress, they focus on moments when revolutionary technologies left ordinary people worse off. The medieval water wheel increased production and enriched feudal elites. The Industrial Revolution dramatically expanded Britain’s economy, while real wages remained stagnant for decades—the so-called Engels’ Pause—during which output grew but wages stayed flat. Mechanization repeatedly boosted output while eroding skilled artisans’ bargaining power. The benefits spread only after labor movements, democratic reforms, public education, regulation, and sustained political pressure shifted power toward workers. In every case, the political struggle came first, and broad prosperity followed.

That framework serves as the lens through which they examine artificial intelligence, and it’s what makes the book compelling. Most AI books either promise salvation or warn of extinction. Acemoglu and Johnson ask a more modest and difficult question: “What kind of AI are we choosing to build?” They describe two paths. One develops systems that replace workers. The other creates systems that make workers significantly more productive—what they call “machine usefulness.” One concentrates wealth, and the other distributes it. The decision between them reflects who the technology is designed to serve. The authors argue that today’s tech companies have every reason to favor replacement, as cutting labor costs offers immediate benefits, whereas enhancing labor requires reorganization and sharing gains. That section was strong when the book was published, and it remains highly relevant today.

The book is at its best when it demolishes technological determinism. Too much of the AI conversation runs on a script—AI is coming, jobs will disappear, we’ll have to adapt—and the authors reject the whole frame. AI doesn’t decide anything. Executives decide, boards decide, investors decide, governments decide, consumers decide. What Acemoglu and Johnson show is how elites keep that decision out of view, using their status and what the book calls “vision” to persuade everyone else that the path they’ve chosen is the only one available. The inevitability is manufactured.

The book is also unusually interdisciplinary. Two economists wrote it, but it draws on history, political science, sociology, labor economics, innovation theory, and institutional development into a single framework. Anyone who has read Why Nations Fail will recognize the same emphasis on institutions rather than markets alone.

Where it’s weaker, in my humble opinion, is in the scope of the argument. There are parts where nearly every technological outcome seems linked to political power, but reality is more complex than that. Consumer preferences, competition, entrepreneurship, and scientific discovery all matter and often drive progress independently. Markets can sometimes generate broad prosperity without government intervention. Critics argue that the authors rely too heavily on institutional explanations and underestimate other factors. The same applies to their policy suggestions: more regulation, stronger labor institutions, and increased public influence over technological development. Some readers will see these as reasonable, while others may view them as overly optimistic about what government can control. Both perspectives are valid, and neither undermines the core historical argument.

The evidence impressed me more than the politics did. The historical chapters are exceptionally well-researched, and even a reader who dismisses every conclusion will still learn a great deal about how innovation and economic development truly connect.

Bottom line, the historical scholarship is nearly flawless and reason enough to read the book on its own. The main argument is original and convincing, and the prose covers a thousand years of economic history smoothly without faltering. The policy recommendations are where the book might face disagreement—they are reasonable and debatable, and different readers will have varying opinions. But none of this shakes the core. History stands as evidence, and that evidence remains strong.

This is the argument I keep revisiting in my writing on AI governance, concentrated corporate power, democratic institutions, and the intersection where technology meets public policy. The question about AI has never been whether it becomes more capable. It’s who controls it, whose interests influence it, and how the benefits and burdens are ultimately shared. Acemoglu and Johnson didn’t introduce me to that question; they provided it with a thousand years of evidence.

The book has held up well over time. Since its publication in 2023, both authors—especially Acemoglu—have continued to argue that AI’s future remains uncertain and that it can be directed to support human labor rather than replace it. Their work gained broader attention after the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson for their research on institutions and prosperity.

A parting thought, and here’s where I push back a bit. I don’t doubt that institutions can redirect technology; the book proves they have done so, over and over. My doubt is about speed. Every redirection the authors document took decades. Labor movements, regulation, public education—those feedback loops worked during the Industrial Revolution because it gave them time to work. AI won’t. It moves faster than the institutional machinery built to steer it, and the book underweights that mismatch.

The question isn’t whether better institutions could point AI in the right direction. It’s whether they can do it before the direction is already set.

If you liked Power and Progress, you may like some of these.

Acemoglu and Johnson Together

Acemoglu, Daron, and Simon Johnson. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. PublicAffairs, 2023.

Daron Acemoglu — Individually and With Other Coauthors

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Acemoglu, Daron. Introduction to Modern Economic Growth. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Crown Business, 2012.

Acemoglu, Daron, David Laibson, and John A. List. Economics. Pearson, 2015.

Acemoglu, Daron, David Laibson, and John A. List. Microeconomics. Pearson, 2015.

Acemoglu, Daron, David Laibson, and John A. List. Macroeconomics. Pearson, 2015.

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. Penguin Press, 2019.

Acemoglu, Daron. What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. Dutton, 2026.

Edited Volume

Acemoglu, Daron, ed. Redesigning AI: Work, Democracy, and Justice in the Age of Automation. MIT Press, 2021.

Simon Johnson — With Other Coauthors

Johnson, Simon, and James Kwak. 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. Pantheon Books, 2010.

Johnson, Simon, and James Kwak. White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You. Pantheon Books, 2012.

Gruber, Jonathan, and Simon Johnson. Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream. PublicAffairs, 2019.

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under US copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated or AI-assisted may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

If you want to know why AI detection is disabled for this piece, read this expose´ of how Substack deceitfully and erroneously displays Pangram’s actual assessment results.

For a long time, I misread Citizens United. I was right about its effects—I still think the decision helped build a political system where large sums of money count for more than ordinary people do—but I was wrong about what the Court actually held. Like many people, I believed the Court had ruled that corporations are people. That isn’t what happened.

Corporations had legal personhood long before 2010. Courts have treated them as persons for some constitutional purposes since at least Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), though the famous language there came from the court reporter’s headnote, not the holding. A firmer foundation is First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978), where the Court struck down limits on corporate spending in ballot-measure campaigns and held that the First Amendment protects political speech regardless of whether the speaker is a corporation or an individual. Citizens United didn’t originate this line of reasoning. And the Court never said corporations are identical to people or hold all the rights humans hold. What it held was narrower and, once you see it clearly, more interesting: political speech retains its First Amendment protection even when a corporation is doing the speaking. That argument deserves a hearing before it gets criticized.

Citizens United, a nonprofit, produced a film attacking Hillary Clinton during her 2008 Democratic presidential campaign. Federal law had long barred corporations and unions from spending general treasury funds on direct political advocacy, and Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act tightened that ban by prohibiting certain communications naming a candidate close to an election. Citizens United challenged the rule. On January 21, 2010, the Court held 5-4 that the government couldn’t bar corporations from making independent political expenditures. The ruling overturned Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and part of McConnell v. FEC.

The Court didn’t allow unlimited corporate money to go directly to candidates—those contributions remain banned. It also upheld the disclosure and disclaimer requirements 8 to 1, with Justice Thomas the lone dissenter. Hold onto that number. It matters later.

These details matter because much of the criticism of Citizens United has hardened into myth. Behind the myths lies a harder question, one the Court took up but never answered clearly.

If a corporation has a right to political speech, who’s doing the speaking?

The Argument for Citizens United

Start with the strongest version of the decision. Suppose Congress passed a law banning corporations from spending money to criticize candidates for federal office. The New York Times Company is a corporation. So are television networks, book publishers, advocacy groups, nonprofits, incorporated churches, and most other structures people use to speak collectively. A government that can restrict political speech because the speaker is a corporation has an obvious First Amendment problem.

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion relied on exactly that. The First Amendment protects political speech, and the government generally can’t suppress it based on who’s speaking. The majority treated corporations as vehicles through which citizens speak and refused to tie First Amendment protection to a speaker’s wealth or to whether a corporation’s money happens to track public support for its views.

The idea isn’t absurd. It matters. If the Sierra Club wants to oppose a presidential candidate on environmental policy, I don’t want the government to stop it just because the club is incorporated. And a newspaper’s corporate status shouldn’t make it unconstitutional to publish an editorial calling for a president’s defeat.

So the problem with Citizens United isn’t that corporations have constitutional rights. Some organizations need them because people exercise their freedoms in groups. The problem is elsewhere.

Where Does a Corporation Get an Opinion?

I have political opinions. You have political opinions. A corporation doesn’t. It has no consciousness, no ideology, no morality, no civic convictions of its own. General Motors never wakes up worried about marginal tax rates. Walmart never lies awake thinking about immigration policy. ExxonMobil has never had a single kitchen-table conversation about environmental regulation. People make those decisions for it.

That raises the question buried in the doctrine. Take a public corporation with 50,000 employees, hundreds of thousands of shareholders, and millions of customers, sitting on billions of dollars it earned selling things. Management decides to spend $25 million supporting a presidential candidate.

Who just spoke? The employees didn’t vote on it. Neither did the customers. The shareholders almost certainly didn’t. Some may love the candidate, while others despise him, and most bought in because they thought the company could build cars or run hotels at a profit, not because they wanted to join a political movement. But once a handful of executives decide, $25 million generated by all those people takes a single political position, and the law calls it the corporation’s speech.

The majority saw the problem. The government argued that limits could protect shareholders from underwriting political messages they opposed, and the Court examined whether such spending amounted to compelled speech or forced association, since the First Amendment generally bars making people fund views they reject. It concluded that corporate governance and existing disclosure rules were protection enough. The law was underinclusive, the Court said, leaving corporate political speech untouched outside the 30- and 60-day windows and exempting some media, and overinclusive, reaching corporations with a single shareholder. There was little evidence that shareholders couldn’t settle these disputes through ordinary corporate democracy. So the restriction couldn’t be squared with the rights of speech and association.

Justice John Paul Stevens didn’t buy it. In dissent, he doubted that corporate democracy protected anyone and argued that shareholder voting and derivative suits gave objecting investors nothing they could actually use. Sixteen years later, that disagreement remains at the center of the case.

One objection deserves an answer: a shareholder who dislikes a company’s politics can sell. That was a stronger argument in 1985 than it is now. An investor holding hundreds of companies through an index fund can’t drop one of them over its political spending without leaving the fund or changing her whole approach, since diversification was the point of holding it.

That structure adds something the compelled-speech objection alone doesn’t capture. She doesn’t control the treasury or the spending, and in most cases her asset manager votes her shares, though pass-through voting is starting to appear in some products. The Court’s remedy assumes a voting shareholder, and a growing share of American equity sits with institutions where the real investor never votes.

The Union Problem

The argument proves more than I’d like for it to. Citizens United covers unions as well as corporations, and the question doesn’t go away just because a group represents workers rather than shareholders. Union leaders make political decisions some members oppose, and they don’t poll the membership before endorsing anything, any more than management polls shareholders before spending.

The comparison isn’t clean, and I’d rather say so now than have it said to me. Under Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, public employees who didn’t join a union could be charged for bargaining and grievance work but not for political activity; Communications Workers v. Beck reached a similar result for private-sector unions under the National Labor Relations Act rather than the Constitution. Janus v. AFSCMEwent further in 2018, ending those fees in the public sector without a worker’s clear consent. Objectors had to speak up, but they’ve had legal protection against funding union campaigns for decades.

Shareholders have nothing like it. No statutory opt-out, no constitutional shield against having their capital spent on politics they oppose. The law treats union dues as a matter of individual expressive association, which brings First Amendment protection against compelled political support. Shareholder money falls under corporate law and corporate governance instead. The analogy is useful, but it only goes so far.

What survives is narrower yet real. A full dues-paying member whose union works against her politics stands roughly where a shareholder stands, and her only exit costs her a voice in the union’s internal affairs. The scale differs: unions represent about 10% of American wage and salary earners, and their combined treasuries don’t approach the retained earnings of the S&P 500. If the shareholder argument persuades you, some version of it reaches union members too.

Economic Power Becomes Political Power

Before Citizens United, the Court had recognized a second reason to regulate corporate election spending: the government’s interest in preventing great aggregations of wealth—built on advantages the corporate form provides—from distorting politics when that wealth has little to do with public support for the corporation’s views.

Overruling Austin, the majority said something significant. For First Amendment purposes, it doesn’t matter that the money a corporation has accumulated bears almost no relationship to how many people agree with its politics. People and organizations fund speech with resources they earned in the marketplace, and the government can’t level the field by weighing a speaker’s wealth or identity.

That’s faithful to First Amendment principle. It’s also where free-speech theory collides with democratic theory.

Picture two speakers. Jane teaches fourth grade, cares about environmental policy, and gives $100 to groups backing candidates who share her view. MegaCorp spends $50 million on candidates who oppose her.

The First Amendment answer is that the government doesn’t get to decide that MegaCorp has too much money to speak, and free expression never promised everyone the same size microphone. Fair enough. The democratic answer is that MegaCorp’s $50 million doesn’t tell us that 500,000 people hold its view as strongly as Jane holds hers. It may say nothing about public support at all. It tells us that a few people have legal control over $50 million belonging to an economic organization. The Court took that economic power, treated it as political expressive power, and found no constitutional difference between them.

That critique cuts deeper than pointing out that a corporation isn’t a person. The question was never whether organizations can speak. Of course they can. The question is whether the First Amendment requires us to protect accumulated economic resources as political expression, even when those resources barely connect to public support for the message. Citizens United answered yes.

Then Comes Corruption

There’s another part of the decision that may matter more, depending on what you mean by corruption.

Most people use the word broadly. A company spends tens of millions to help elect a senator. The senator knows who spent it. His door opens to the company’s executives, and he pays much closer attention to legislation the company cares about. Most Americans would call that corrupt, even without an envelope passed across a restaurant table.

The Court reads the word far more narrowly. In Citizens United, the majority held that independent expenditures, corporate ones included, don’t give rise to corruption or its appearance in the constitutional sense. Because independent spending isn’t legally coordinated with a candidate, the Court treats it as categorically different from money handed to the candidate. Influence isn’t enough. Neither is access or gratitude. Kennedy wrote that “ingratiation and access” aren’t corruption, and that line deserves far more attention than anything about corporate personhood.

This is the quid pro quo theory: corruption means an explicit trade, money for official action. Many constitutional scholars work with broader definitions—systemic or institutional corruption—that point to structural risks, like a political process that runs on large private money, or patterns of access and responsiveness that bend representative government over time without anyone striking a bargain. What they describe is the slow shaping of public policy by those with the most economic resources, absent any explicit arrangement. Citizens United took the narrow view and left the broader ones outside the Constitution.

The Court has a legitimate reason for drawing the line there, and it should be stated before it’s challenged. People vote for candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and politicians respond to those who supported them. That’s how representative government is supposed to work, and if every instance of gratitude or access counted as corruption, political association would be strangled. The Court has said so repeatedly, most recently in 2026.

That narrows the disagreement. No reasonable person thinks it’s inherently corrupt for a politician to be responsive to supporters. The question is whether the ordinary relationship still holds when the supporter can spend $30 million.

Say an organization puts $30 million into attacking Senator Smith’s opponents. Smith knows. The organization knows Smith knows. So do the other senators, the lobbyists, and anyone weighing a primary challenge. Without placing a single ad through the campaign or striking any agreement, the organization makes clear it expects to spend at similar levels in coming cycles. There will never be a provable transaction in which $30 million is traded for Smith’s support on a bill.

Under the Court’s doctrine, the absence of a direct exchange settles it. In ordinary political life, it settles nothing. Money moves a legislator without buying a vote—it buys attention, opens doors, creates gratitude or fear, and changes how he weighs a question when he knows that much money could come his way next time.

Influence isn’t corruption, the Court says. Given the doctrine it built, that’s legally correct. Whether the doctrine matches American political life is another question.

Testing the Court’s Confidence

I have to be careful with the 8-1 disclosure vote because the strongest version of this argument isn’t the loudest. The Court didn’t make disclosure a condition of its holding, and it rejected the shareholder-protection argument for the reasons already described, not on transparency alone. But the majority did lean on transparency to explain why corporate political spending shouldn’t worry us. Kennedy wrote that in the internet age, disclosure could give shareholders and citizens what they need to hold corporations and elected officials accountable and let shareholders judge whether a corporation’s political speech serves the corporation’s own interests. Sixteen years later, that can be measured against the record.

Corporate disclosure has improved. The 2025 CPA-Zicklin Index put 205 S&P 500 companies in its top tier, scoring 80% to 100% on political-spending disclosure and accountability, with 112 above 90%—up from 28 a decade earlier. Saying transparency never arrived overstates the case.

But look at what the index measures. It scores the policies companies publish about corporate treasury spending, based on what’s posted on their websites. It doesn’t audit actual expenditures and leaves out lobbying and corporate PACs entirely. It covers the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000, the companies most exposed to proxy season, institutional investors, and press attention. It says nothing about privately held firms, LLCs, or the nonprofits and shells through which the largest undisclosed sums actually move.

The numbers are staggering. The Brennan Center found that more than $1.9 billion in the 2024 cycle came from groups that don’t disclose their donors, breaking the previous record of roughly $1 billion in 2020. More than $1.3 billion of that passed through super PACs, which do report who gave to them, though those donors can themselves be organizations that reveal nothing about their own sources. The Brennan Center calls 2024 the most secretive federal election since Citizens United and says its estimate is conservative because some categories of undisclosed spending can’t be traced at all. Dark money groups have spent at least $4.3 billion on federal elections since 2010.

Two problems lie within those numbers. The first belongs to citizens. A voter who wants to know who paid for the ad telling her how to vote can’t find out. That goes straight to the accountability Kennedy described.

The second belongs to shareholders, and the dark-money figure alone doesn’t settle it, since that $1.9 billion moved through nonprofits and shell entities whose original funders might be individuals rather than corporations. For that, look at what shareholders have been asking for. In the 2025 proxy season, the Center for Political Accountability counted 28 political-disclosure resolutions. Thirteen went to a vote, five won majority support, and the average support among those voted on was 41.6%, up from 26.2% a year earlier. Seven were withdrawn after companies reached agreements with the proponents, and an eighth after the company adopted the proposal itself. The resolutions still ask for disclosure of payments to trade associations and 501(c)(4) organizations—money that can end up in elections and is reported nowhere else.

Shareholders are saying plainly that the governance mechanism the Court called adequate can’t see the spending it’s supposed to police. The mechanism is also working better than it was: support keeps climbing and companies keep settling. But most of these resolutions still fail, and the ones that pass aren’t binding. Stevens thought corporate democracy was a weak remedy. The record says he was right.

One more piece of the myth needs correcting. Citizens United didn’t create super PACs by itself. It supplied the constitutional premise, and the next step came two months later.

In March 2010, the DC Circuit decided SpeechNow.org v. FEC, reasoning from Citizens United: if independent expenditures can’t corrupt candidates, then contributions to organizations that make only independent expenditures can’t produce constitutionally recognizable corruption either. The court struck down contribution limits as applied to those groups, and the FEC then acknowledged that independent-expenditure-only committees could accept unlimited money from individuals, corporations, labor organizations, and political committees. The super PAC emerged from that combination.

So the claim that Citizens United let corporations give unlimited money to candidates is simply false. Corporate treasury contributions to federal candidates are still prohibited, and super PACs can’t contribute to candidates at all—their spending has to stay independent.

The practical effect remained enormous. A donor barred from giving unlimited money to a candidate could instead give it to an organization legally separate from that candidate and watch it spend without limit for the candidate or against the candidate’s opponent. The FEC’s final report for the 2023-24 cycle showed $4.4 billion in independent expenditures: $2.7 billion from independent-expenditure-only committees and another $1.4 billion from hybrid committees with non-contribution accounts, a structure that emerged from Carey v. FEC in 2011. Almost all independent spending now flows through arrangements that didn’t exist before 2010.

Independent Is Doing a Lot of Work

The whole structure rests on one word. Federal law separates independent expenditures from coordinated ones. An independent expenditure advocates a candidate’s election or defeat without cooperation or consultation with the candidate, the campaign, or the party. The FEC has detailed rules for when outside communications cross into coordination. Within the system it operates in, the distinction makes sense. It’s still worth being clear about what independence means.

It means the candidate can’t legally take part in certain spending decisions. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t know who’s spending the money, or that the spender doesn’t know what he wants, or that he can’t figure out that the same spender could write similar checks in two years.

This is where legal abstraction meets ordinary human behavior. A senator doesn’t need an illegal transaction to understand his incentives, and neither does a corporation, a billionaire, or a political operative. A system can shape behavior even when everyone involved is careful to leave no evidence of a bargain. That may not meet the Court’s definition of corruption, but it doesn’t make the influence imaginary.

The Court Has Kept Going

All of this would be history if Citizens United had been the last word.

On June 30, 2026, the Court decided National Republican Senate Committee v. FEC, holding 6-3 that federal limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with their own candidates violate the First Amendment. It overruled FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee—Colorado II—which upheld those limits in 2001.

It wasn’t a rerun of Citizens United. It involved political parties rather than corporate independent expenditures, and it may pull some spending power back toward party committees and away from super PACs, which some reformers would welcome. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion shows how settled the underlying theory has become. Drawing on McCutcheon v. FEC, the majority held that only corruption or its appearance counts as a legitimate campaign-finance interest, that Congress can reach only quid pro quo corruption, and that limiting influence, ingratiation, gratitude, or access “and so on” isn’t a permissible constitutional goal.

The principle didn’t arrive in 2026. Kennedy laid it out in 2010, the Court restated it in McCutcheon in 2014, and NRSC rested on a doctrine sixteen years in the making. Citizens United isn’t one contested ruling we’ve been arguing about ever since. It’s a marker in a line, and the line runs two ways at once: more political spending gets constitutional protection, and fewer of that spending’s effects count as harms the government may address.

The Question We Should Have Been Asking

For years, the case against Citizens United has been that corporations aren’t people. I understand the appeal—I made the argument myself—but it misses what’s actually wrong. A corporation doesn’t have to be human for the First Amendment to protect its speech, and newspapers, advocacy groups, churches, and nonprofits are obvious examples of institutional speech that deserve constitutional protection.

The harder questions are these. When corporate managers spend company money, whose political judgment is being expressed? Should the political power that money buys bear any relationship to how many people support the message? Does protecting free speech really require that economic power translate into political influence, regardless of where it came from? And why should corruption be defined so narrowly that access, dependence, gratitude, intimidation, and enormous political influence all become constitutionally irrelevant unless someone can prove money changed hands for an official act?

None of that asks us to oppose free speech. It asks what free speech means in a democracy where economic power is distributed as unevenly as ours.

A billionaire can speak. So can a corporation, a labor union, a newspaper, and a schoolteacher. The government should be very reluctant to decide whose politics get heard, and I hold that position. But I’m not satisfied with stopping there. When one person has $100, and another controls $100 million built up through an organization created for economic purposes, saying both are legally free to speak tells us almost nothing about whether their political power is close to equal.

The First Amendment doesn’t let Congress equalize voices because one is louder. Citizens United went further, saying that the reason one voice grew so loud is largely irrelevant to the constitutional question. That assumption may be the decision’s most consequential legacy, more than corporate personhood or the idea that money equals speech.

To answer the objection, the Court pointed to corporate governance and disclosure. Sixteen years later, with $4.4 billion spent independently in a single cycle and more than $1.9 billion spent by donors nobody can identify, it’s fair to ask whether that confidence held up.

If a corporation spends $50 million telling us how to vote, shouldn’t we at least get to know who decided what it would say before we give it the benefit of the doubt?

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under US copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

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On July 23, 2026, Senators Ruben Gallego and Roger Marshall introduced a bill to create a federal Office of Men’s Health within the Department of Health and Human Services. A related bill had already been introduced in the House back in February by a Democrat from Louisiana and a Republican from North Carolina. The Senate bill garnered support from the American Medical Association and the American Urological Association—a rare coalition for a culture-war issue.

What followed was the usual debate. One side highlights five fewer years of life, while the other points to a long history of dismissing women’s pain as nerves. Both sides see each other’s evidence as a distraction, each convinced that the other is arguing in bad faith.

I thought one side would clearly stand up to the evidence and the other would fall away. Instead, the whole question itself unraveled. Imagine starting at the door, before anyone has had a chance for a physician to examine them. A detailed national review of how often people actually get the recommended preventive care shows that men are nearly twice as likely as women to have received only a quarter or less of the advised services — 21.9% compared to 11.3%. They are also three times as likely to have received none at all, with 7.3% versus 2.4%. Women tend to do better than men in blood pressure checks, cholesterol tests, obesity counseling, and depression screening. The only area where men received more attention was advice about aspirin.

The study was based on survey data collected in 2015, which is an important detail to mention. However, different measurement points show similar trends. Out of the 59.3 million American adults who had a mental illness in 2022, 56.9% of women received treatment compared to 41.6% of men.

It’s easy to think of this difference as just male stubbornness, but the evidence doesn’t support such a simple explanation. The researchers involved in the preventive-care study highlighted some familiar structural factors: lack of insurance, no regular source of care, and shortages in healthcare providers’ capacity. Men are also more likely to be uninsured. While some of this disparity may stem from behavioral differences, part of what appears to be refusal may actually be due to a lack of accessible entry points into the system.

Now, let’s take a closer look. In 2024, researchers looked at 21,851 patients visiting emergency departments across two countries because of pain. Despite considering the pain levels patients reported and adjusting for many patient, doctor, and emergency department factors, they found that women were less likely than men to receive pain medications. Their pain scores were also 10% less likely to be recorded, and women tended to stay about half an hour longer in the emergency room.

This finding was consistent whether the doctor was a man or a woman, which rules out the simplest explanation. In a separate, controlled experiment using identical clinical descriptions, nurses judged the same pain to be less severe when the patient was described as female.

Think about how different this is from the figures for preventive care. The woman visiting the emergency room did everything the system expects from a patient. She noticed a symptom, sought help, arrived at the hospital, was triaged, and used the pain scale she was given. It’s only once she’s in the room, with trained healthcare workers, that the difference in treatment really shows up.

Here’s an explanation of the two types of failure: one happens in the parking lot, while the other occurs in the treatment bay. They are separate and don’t cancel each other out; fixing one doesn’t necessarily fix the other.

But life span alone isn’t the whole story. What’s really important is what those years are filled with.

According to the latest figures from the CDC for 2024, men have an average life expectancy of 76.5 years, while women live about 81.4 years—a significant difference of 4.9 years. This gap highlights the importance of the new men’s health bill.

However, life expectancy doesn’t tell us what happens during those years.

A recent study in JAMA Network Open looked at the difference between how long people live and how many years they are in good health in all 183 countries that are part of the World Health Organization. The United States had the biggest gap, at 12.4 years. For women in America, that gap was even larger—13.7 years, which is 2.6 years more than for men.

But this doesn’t mean that women spend their last thirteen years in bed. It’s about the gap between overall life expectancy and the years spent in good health, considering illness and disability during those years. The interesting part is that American women live longer, but the space between their total life and healthy years is bigger.

So, men tend to die earlier, and women often live longer despite facing more health challenges. Both can be true at the same time. The confusion happens if we think of health differences as a single, simple number.

That’s the key insight here, and it took me a moment to understand it.

When we look at different ways to measure health, it’s clear that men and women face unique challenges. Men tend to have a harder time getting into the healthcare system and making regular visits, which can put them at a disadvantage right from the start. On the other hand, women often experience more difficulties once they are within the healthcare system, especially in the care they receive after they report pain or other concerns. These differences highlight that each measure tells a different story, and both are important. Overall, men’s struggles are most visible in how they enter and stay engaged with healthcare, while women’s challenges often become apparent in how they are treated once they’re in the system. Of course, there are exceptions, but this pattern helps us understand some key issues in American medicine.

It also helps clarify why the public debate often doesn’t reach a clear conclusion. Both sides are highlighting genuine concerns, just from different perspectives—like standing in different parts of the same building. Before jumping to policy decisions based on this, though, there are two important cautions to keep in mind.

The categories “men” and “women” are quite broad, often hiding more than they reveal. In 2024, the age-adjusted death rate for American Indian and Alaska Native women was 872.7 per 100,000, while for White men it was 871.1. These numbers are nearly the same. The striking average difference between males and females that we often see can actually shift or even disappear when we consider other factors like race, income, geography, age, or insurance status.

For example, Asian men had an age-adjusted death rate of 454.2 per 100,000, compared to 646.6 for White women. These varied factors don’t just make the male-female comparison more complex; they can significantly change what the numbers actually tell us about health.

The second important point to remember is that claims about health disparities can sometimes stick around longer than they should, even after new evidence has come to light. The idea that medical research has historically excluded women was once true and prompted important reforms. However, that is no longer an accurate picture of current participation levels. The Government Accountability Office found that from 2005 to 2014, women actually outnumbered men in NIH-funded clinical studies, making up 57% of participants in 2014. Still, the GAO also warned that these overall numbers might hide underrepresentation in research focused on specific diseases, and that the NIH didn’t always have enough information to determine if results were being analyzed by sex.

Neither simplified version is quite right. Women are no longer consistently underrepresented in overall NIH clinical research participation. The core issue in research still remains unresolved.

This takes us back to the original bill that sparked the debate.

The bill currently up for discussion in the Senate includes an important point that hasn’t received enough attention. It asks the Government Accountability Office to look into why American men tend to seek healthcare later and less often. It also clearly states that funding for the new Office of Men’s Health must not be taken from the Office on Women’s Health or any other women’s health programs within HHS.

Congress has made sure to include the principle that improvements shouldn’t come at the expense of others, likely expecting the kind of debate that has happened.

Whether that principle survives the appropriations process remains to be seen. However, if the GAO study is carried out as it should be, the focus won’t be on which sex is worse off. Instead, it will be about understanding where, along the path from symptom to treatment and outcome, each group is struggling the most—and what steps are needed to bridge that gap.

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© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under US copyright law.

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Somewhere in a federal office, someone opened up a keyword search box. Who did it or when doesn’t really matter; what matters is that federal agencies have admitted in court that they used keyword searches and broad criteria to flag research grants for possible termination, skipping any real review of whether the grants were scientifically sound or met their contractual requirements.

The keywords searched for in grant applications:

• Health equity

• Workforce diversity

• Structural racism

• Sexual orientation

• Transportation equity

• Vaccine hesitancy

Nobody’s claiming fraud, and no one’s accused anyone of fudging data, missing deadlines, or misusing money. The search terms just point to topics of interest, they don’t mean there was any scientific misconduct.

Thakur v. Trump started when researchers submitted their grant applications as the new administration began blowing up programs. Folks suing say the government didn’t bother to review each grant to see whether the work was actually lacking in any way. Instead, they think agencies just searched for certain topics or perspectives the administration didn’t like, and then axed those grants based on what turned up.

The agencies haven’t admitted to violating the Constitution. They just say it was okay to flag wording the administration didn’t like. That’s the basis for the plaintiffs’ request for a reviewed judgment—if the facts aren’t really in dispute, the court can skip the full trial and get right to the legal questions. The rest of the case is still just allegations for a judge to sort out.

If the allegations are genuine disputes of material fact, not normal disagreement regarding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, it is a test of whether the federal government can punish scientific research on the grounds of the language that researchers use when framing their questions.

I’ve been a systems and network engineer for forty years, so I’ve seen more classification schemes than I can count. Whenever people talk about free speech, they always seem to skip over the nuts and bolts of how keyword searches actually work.

There’s nothing wrong with keyword searches—they’re actually essential. Agencies use them every day to find grants in everything from Alzheimer’s research to cybersecurity, transportation safety, climate science, you name it. If you’ve got forty thousand active awards and want to find the ones about pediatric oncology, you just type in ‘pediatric oncology.’ That kind of search doesn’t threaten anyone’s constitutional rights.

The issue with regard to the Constitution does not lie in carrying out the search; it is whether the government uses the search to punish people for that kind of language. An ordinary search would not be a problem; it’s just an efficient method of sorting matters, and that is precisely what a search is meant to achieve.

The trouble starts when the keyword itself becomes the whole reason for the decision. If the list is treated as the final word, the government stops judging research and starts judging ideas.

Anyone who’s worked in engineering knows this: a classification system is only as good as the assumptions behind it. If you start with a bad assumption, you’ll get bad results—only faster and with more confidence than any person could manage. In this case, the assumption was that a word tells you what someone really means. That assumption is false.

Let’s look at this one step at a time.

‘Vaccine hesitancy’ isn’t just some political catchphrase. It’s a term public health folks have used for years to describe a real behavior that’s been studied over and over. When a grant mentions it, odds are they’re trying to tackle hesitancy, not encourage it. That’s usually what funders want anyway—they’re looking for answers.

The word “sexual orientation” is merely a demographic category that allows researchers to look at things like disease rates, mental health, or differences in the availability of treatment. Eliminating it doesn’t advance the science; on the contrary, it might conceal important findings.

Health equity isn’t just an idea—it’s about real questions, like why the nearest trauma center in a rural county is thirty minutes away, or why maternal death rates are so different for different groups. These are questions about real people.

Structural racism is a hot-button topic, sure, but it’s still just a hypothesis until the research is done. Studying whether certain factors affect health outcomes isn’t the same as saying they definitely do. Good science starts with questions, and sometimes those questions turn out to be wrong. That’s just part of the process, not a problem.

If you boil down decades of peer review, trial design, and analysis to just matching up words, you’re mixing up asking questions with endorsing the answers. Words alone can’t capture what the work is really about. The researchers made three main arguments, and it’s worth laying them out clearly.

First is the question of viewpoint discrimination; they claim that the administration deliberately stopped the research because the officials did not like the ideas or the subjects the grants covered—something the First Amendment makes it plain the government is not permitted to do.

Second, there is the issue of political retaliation based on geography. It is claimed that hundreds of grants administered by the Department of Energy were cancelled in states which voted for Kamala Harris, while similar grants in other areas were left unchanged. If this pattern holds true, then the criterion employed for sorting was not actually scientific merit.

And third is the power to appropriate funds. It is Congress, not the President, that controls federal spending. They argue that canceling research authorized by Congress without redirecting the funds constitutes an unconstitutional refusal to spend the funds as Congress has directed.

Each of these is a serious claim, but none of them has been proven yet. Now it’s up to a judge to sort them out.

Yet the constitutional argument misses something more concrete—and honestly, more upsetting.

A federal research grant isn’t just a check to some professor. It’s a payroll for grad students, lab techs, postdocs, data analysts, and even community partners who might’ve spent years building trust just to recruit patients. It pays for equipment that takes months to set up and covers the slow, unglamorous work of building a dataset that only starts to matter in year four.

If money is taken away partway through,If the money gets pulled halfway through, you can’t just fix it by putting the funding back later.cease to be traceable. People who take part in clinical trials drop out and stop taking part. Graduate students—people in their late twenties who have rent to pay and a dissertation to finish—give up on their projects and take jobs with other organisations. Laboratories are therefore obliged to fire their staff. Longitudinal studies lose the chance to observe since the cohort grows older no matter whether or not the funding stays. For the people carrying out the work, the loss is both immediate and personal. Ten years of work can just vanish.

We count losses in dollars because that’s easy, but the real loss is time. Science can’t get back lost time. There’s just no way to restore a year that’s gone. For the teams, that missing year breaks their momentum, wastes their effort, and leaves the project feeling unfinished forever.

There’s a fair counter-argument here, and it deserves to be addressed honestly.

Elections exist so policies can change. A new president shouldn’t have to fund things that go against their priorities, and nobody expects the same budget every year. Congress can shift its funding, and agencies can launch new programs to match new goals. Budgeting is political, so research funding is too. Those points are fair, but they miss the main question.

There’s a big difference between deciding which future proposals get funded and reopening competitions that are already closed just to weed out ideas you don’t like.

One is about policy. The other is about viewpoint and the Constitution has always treated them as different things.

The bigger worry isn’t about the grants that already got cut. It’s about the ones that never even get proposed. It’s really about the grants that never see the light of day.

Researchers know the score. If certain words might spark a political backlash, they change them. Studies get new names, some variables get left out, and people pick safe hypotheses instead of the ones that matter most. Grad students—the ones with the least protection and the most at stake—steer clear of anything controversial, because their future depends on steady funding. This isn’t just a theory; it shapes what gets studied and nobody has to censor anything or ban any topics; all it takes is uncertainty.

This is a quieter kind of control. The government doesn’t need to ban questions if scientists just stop asking them. There’s no record of suppression, because nothing gets censored out in the open—the research just never happens, the proposal never gets written, and the knowledge is lost before anyone even knows it existed. For the people who wanted to do the work, the silence comes long before any official ban.

That’s why the outcome of Thakur v. Trump matters way beyond whoever’s sitting in the White House right now. A precedent set by one administration doesn’t just stay there. If a Republican president can cancel grants just because they’re about diversity, structural racism, or vaccine hesitancy, then a Democratic president could do the same for research on immigration enforcement, biological sex differences, religious liberty, gun ownership, policing, or fossil fuels. The mechanism works no matter who’s in charge, and that’s what makes it so dangerous.

The power does not remain with those who first exercise it, as constitutional safeguards have been included for this very reason—namely, because majorities change and memories disappear.

The First Amendment isn’t valuable because it protects ideas we all agree on—we don’t need protection for those. Its real value is that it prevents the government from shutting down ideas it doesn’t like, especially when it’s most tempted to do so. This principle can’t depend on who won the last election, and it sure shouldn’t depend on the words used in a grant proposal.

Science moves forward because researchers get to ask tough questions—even though most of them turn out to be wrong. When the government starts deciding which questions are safe to ask, science ends up under political scrutiny.

The manner in which discoveries occur is not the issue; it’s about how a free society works.

Sources

1. Thakur v. Trump, US District Court for the Northern District of California, plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and stipulated facts (July 2026).

2. US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Thakur v. Trump, preliminary injunction decision (May 26, 2026).

3. CalMatters, “Federal agencies admit using keywords to terminate UC research grants” (July 2026).

4. US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Commonwealth of Massachusetts et al. v. NIH et al., memorandum and order concerning grant terminations based on changed agency priorities (July 2026).

5. National Institutes of Health Grants Policy Statement.

6. National Science Foundation Proposal & Award Policies and Procedures Guide.

Author’s Note

This essay is based on publicly reported court filings, judicial opinions, and contemporaneous news coverage available as of July 2026. The litigation remains ongoing, and several legal issues discussed here have not been finally resolved. Where allegations by the plaintiffs are described, they’re identified as such. The essay distinguishes, to the extent possible, between stipulated facts in the record, judicial findings at the preliminary injunction stage, and legal arguments that remain subject to further review. Readers shouldn’t interpret discussion of the litigation as a prediction of its ultimate outcome.

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under U.S. copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated or AI-assisted may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

If you want to know why AI detection is disabled for this piece, read this expose´ of how Substack deceitfully and erroneously displays Pangram’s actual assessment results.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

• Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”, 1883

Gazing up at the Statue of Liberty, I didn’t see metal or a monument. I saw something much more personal—the promise that brought my family here.

It wasn’t seeing our iconic symbol of liberty that overwhelmed me. No, it was standing on that island with my wife and our 11-year-old granddaughter, realizing that all three of us were standing in that place because, more than a century earlier, two frightened people had crossed an ocean carrying little more than their possessions and their hope. They had spent weeks aboard a ship headed toward a country they knew mostly through the stories of people who had gone before them. They were promised nothing.

I started looking into the history and discovered there were things I didn’t know.

Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883 to help raise money for the statue’s pedestal. She died four years later, at only 38. Her poem wasn’t placed on the pedestal until 1903, 16 years after her death, when her friend Georgina Schuyler began working to ensure those words became part of this symbol of what our country (once?) stood for.

So when my great-grandparents entered that harbor in 1893, there was no bronze plaque bearing Lazarus’s words. There was a statue rising from the water, a ship filled with other immigrants and whatever they had heard about America from those who had made the journey before them. The poem had already described them; we just hadn’t put the words on that plaque yet.

My great-grandparents passed through Ellis Island with little more than hope. They were among the people Lazarus had called “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” although neither of them had ever read or heard those words. There was nothing remarkable about them; they were just ordinary people who believed America might give them the chance to become something their circumstances had never allowed.

They were Waldensians, descendants of those who had been driven into the high valleys of the Cottian Alps and persecuted for generations for insisting on worshipping according to their own beliefs. Pursuit of wealth wasn’t why they crossed an ocean. They and many others came looking for a place where simply being who they were wasn’t an offense.

More than 130 years later, I was standing on Liberty Island holding my granddaughter’s hand because those two people had believed America might be their salvation—a place where they could finally live free. That realization is what nearly broke me.

I had brought my granddaughter there because I wanted her to see Lady Liberty. But standing beneath her, I realized I wanted this child to understand why she was there at all, and I realized that statues don’t change history. The ideals we choose to honor—and whether we’re willing to live by them—do.

I wanted her to understand that freedom isn’t merely a word carved into stone or memorized in a classroom. It begins with the belief that every human being possesses a dignity no government bestowed upon them and no government has the moral right to take away. One measure of a country is how it treats the stranger who arrives at its door carrying little more than hope, while remembering that where they came from should not confine their opportunities.

Then we took the ferry to Ellis Island, where, inside the Registry Room, she grew quiet as she stood there. Likely in the same way and place her ancestors had.

The room is mostly empty now—tile floors, high windows, a few old benches—but standing in the middle of it, you can almost feel the weight of the souls of the millions who passed through there. They stood in that room waiting while strangers examined documents, asked questions, and someone decided whether they could stay. Can you imagine traveling in the hold of that ship for weeks on end, wearing 3-4 layers of clothes so thieves didn’t steal them and still having to wait to hear you’re acceptable?

Somewhere in those records is our family name, written in another man’s hand. Whoever he was couldn’t possibly have known that the simple act of recording two immigrants’ arrival would mark the beginning of generations of lives that hadn’t happened yet. Including mine and my granddaughter’s.

I wish I could have stood there and told my granddaughter that America has always remained faithful to the promise Emma Lazarus put into words, but I can no longer say that.

Today we too often “bestow” upon desperate people detention, deportation and suspicion. Reasonable people can disagree about immigration policy. Borders and laws do matter, and governments have both the right and the responsibility to decide how immigration will work. But somewhere in that argument lies a deeper question, one that isn’t answered with statistics about border crossings or arguments over enforcement.

It’s about what kind of country we want to be.

Walking through the same place my great-grandparents had walked, I couldn’t avoid wondering what would happen if they arrived today. Two people with accents, empty pockets, and an unfamiliar mountain faith, asking America to give them a chance.

Would they find the welcome that changed everything for every generation of my family that followed? Or would we tell them there was no longer room for people like them?

I don’t know, and the fact that I have to wonder breaks my heart.

The Statue of Liberty has outlasted presidents and political movements, and I expect she’ll outlast many more. She has looked upon this country at its best and its worst. She has stood strong through wars and depressions, through periods of cruelty and times when Americans struggled to repair the damage we had done. The ideals she represents have been betrayed before. They have also been reclaimed. Standing there with my granddaughter, I understood that they don’t reclaim themselves.

That’s why I brought her.

I don’t want to teach her that America has always lived up to the promise represented by that statue. It hasn’t. Our history is filled with times when we denied liberty to the very people who needed it most, when fear and prejudice mattered more than the principles we claimed to hold. Maybe she’ll learn those things on her own, but I’d rather she learn them from me, along with something else I want her to understand: loving this country doesn’t require pretending it has never failed. Loving it all too often means refusing to look away when it does.

That day, standing with her on Liberty Island, I realized that this is part of what one generation owes the next. We inherit America as it is, with all its accomplishments and all its betrayals. What we leave behind is up to us.

Emma Lazarus understood something about that promise. Her poem wasn’t part of the Statue of Liberty when it was dedicated. The words that generations of immigrants would eventually come to associate with America weren’t placed inside the pedestal until 1903, 17 years later. They got there because people believed those words belonged there—that they said something essential about the country America aspired to be.

My great-grandparents believed in that America when they came through Ellis Island. They left the Waldensian valleys, crossed an ocean, and arrived among millions of other human beings, carrying little more than the clothes they wore and their meager possessions. They believed something better might be waiting on the other side. Their names ended up in a ledger, and generations later, their great-grandson stood there with his granddaughter.

My sincere hope for her is that she remembers this day. I hope she remembers standing beneath that enormous green lady with her grandmother and grandfather. I hope she remembers the poem I read to her and the story I told her about the people in her own family who once looked toward that same harbor and wondered what America might hold for them.

But more than any of that, I hope she remembers what I was really trying to tell her.

Liberty doesn’t live in a statue. It doesn’t live in a bronze plaque or in words carved into stone. Those things can remind us of what we once promised one another, but they can’t keep that promise for us.

That has always been our job. And, someday, it will be hers.

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under US copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated or AI-assisted may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

If you want to know why AI detection is disabled for this piece, read this expose´ of how Substack deceitfully and erroneously displays Pangram’s actual assessment results.

I’m tired. Some of it is physical. At 72, the 6 to 7 miles we walked almost every day for several weeks in Italy were exhausting. But I had to keep up with children in their late 40s and grandkids aged 10 to 14, and the little %#@&* are all in great shape.

This isn’t one of my political analyses, or a tale from the hell of my childhood. I need a break, albeit a very short one, from writing about those things. Today, I’m just sort of dumping thoughts and feelings. But I give you my word, I’ll try to tie it all up toward the end.

The mind can be tired too, and much of what’s weighing on me is the political situation in this country, which has become such a personal, even financial, burden for so many. Me, I’m okay. My wife and I probably have enough saved and earned to live out our lives comfortably.

Not like the billionaires. We don’t own a yacht or additional homes in exclusive locations on this earth that can only be reached by a CJ-4 or, for longer global jaunts, a G700. I have been, however, adjacent to that kind of wealth. Someone on my wife’s side of the family, by marriage, is worth billions. They have the homes, cars, and even TWO jets. But they’re not happy—the money has given them no more pleasure in life than my wife and I have, and sometimes I think maybe it’s Di and I who are better off. And all of her sisters and their children sponge off of Mark (that’s what I’m calling him), but not us. I wouldn’t accept financial help when my parents abandoned me at 16; I'm not going to start now. I carry my own weight.

This isn’t sour grapes. I don’t begrudge my Republican in-laws their money. It’s just that we would do something different with it. A love my wife and I share is the love for our dogs. 52 years ago, on the very night we first met, our attachment to and fondness for dogs was something we talked about. Now, in our older years (we’ve owned 11 through the years), we still have dogs. Right now it’s two Shih-Poos, neither more than 9 lbs. At one time, we had bigger dogs: a German Shepherd, a Weimaraner, even a Labradoodle that was more Lab than doodle. But we can’t handle big dogs anymore. We can’t get them the exercise we once could. For years, the big ones came along on my ritualistic 5-mile run, almost every day, until my body turned on me. And my wife, she biked while some of our dogs ran along, but only in the years we lived in a large subdivision with extensive winding and hilly roads (for both their safety). She once found this device that connected to the lower crossbar of the bike’s frame, and she leashed our 70 lb. Labradoodle to it, mostly to keep him from taking off when he spied a steaming pile of dog shit that just absolutely must be sniffed. All went well for the first hundred yards or so until Buford (we named him after the small town north of Atlanta we lived in; don’t ask why, it’s embarrassing) saw his sworn enemy, an American Bulldog (English bulldog with long legs for non-dog people). Buford went into high gear, pulling my wife down on the pavement, really tearing up her legs. It was a mess. We laugh about it now, because you have to admit it was hilarious: a dog racing to attack his Moriarty, dragging a bike behind him like it was a child’s toy, and my poor Diane, arms and legs askew and flailing, screaming things at the dog that embarrassed even me.

Anyway. The whole point of the dog story was to get to what we’d do with money like our in-laws have (they’d NEVER do this), namely buy or construct buildings where we could comfortably house older dogs who never get adopted from the kill shelters. We’d be hands-on, but with the kind of money Mark has, we could literally put six of these in every state in the US and not put a dent in the stash. Then, after we’ve got these old guys a comfortable, loving home, my Waldensian legacy would kick in, and we’d start handing out money to every vetted, legitimate situation that would truly help people. And I’d try to give it all away, leaving us just enough to live as we do now. Nobody needs to live better than we do, emphasis on “needs”.

We already do these things, on a far smaller scale, of course. But if we had Mark’s money, it wouldn’t happen fast enough, and anyone who knows me well knows that’s true.

So, on this day when I admit I’m both physically and mentally exhausted, rummaging in my brain about what the hell is wrong with maybe half the people in our country, what do I do to relax a bit?

It starts at 5 am. We ALWAYS get up early, and pathetically go to bed at what feels like 6:30. The first thing I do is ask Alexa what the weather is on this particular Atlanta morning. I should preface my weather report with a few remarks about our weather in general. Late July, early August, Atlanta is hot. Yes, it’s been hot everywhere, it seems, this summer, but Atlanta heat can shut your body down like nothing I’ve ever seen. You see, it’s the humidity. Imagine it being 98° and then, if you can envision this level of hell, go ahead and throw in 86% humidity—or higher. If you live in South Florida, my condolences, and you can skip the heat rant. Lived there in another life, experiencing 100° and 99% humidity, from June through September. Godawfullest (that’s a word in the South) place I’ve ever been, for a whole lot of reasons.

After weeks of heat like this, something happened. We were blessed with a very rare summer ‘cool’ front (the TV guys say ‘cold’; I don’t have the balls to say ‘cold’). Now a cool front in July means it will only get to 90°. But there’s more: an actual respite from the humidity, maybe as low as 50%. That’s practically the Mojave Desert in Atlanta’s world. Glorious! And a quick peek out the window revealed the sky to be as blue as, well, the blue my polarized sunglasses turn it.

Turning back to Di, she blurted, “I know that grin; when are you leaving?” I listed my regimen and chores, those preceding my departure anyway: coffee, feed dogs, empty/load dishwasher, eat, dress.

Here’s the thing. When I was in high school, finding myself living alone with literally no one to tell me no, which was probably one of the universe’s cruelest tricks—not on me; I was thinking of local law enforcement and hospital ERs—I owned motorcycles. And I didn’t just own them, riding them occasionally, wearing a helmet and taking all the safety precautions. No, I decided I would learn how to race motocross. My first bike was used, an enduro (with street and off-road capabilities), a Kawasaki 350 Big Horn. If you’re a little older and you know bikes, you know it’s a bigger bike, but nothing like the Harleys the REAL bikers rode. I wasn’t interested in that experience. Big, heavy, limited maneuverability vehicle, and flat, paved streets. Get a car, for God's sake. No, I wanted a challenge: only hills, rock scrabble ground, and even small cliffs. And I found the perfect training ground—rural power right-of-ways. Some of them went for miles, tens of miles, and the hills, rough ground, and things you could jump ran rampant on these things. I’d get out there for hours on Saturdays, sometimes weekdays, depending on what was going on in school. As some of you might know, a terrible addiction was chasing me in those days, but my motorcycles kept me almost sane. When I felt I was ready, my attention turned to a seriously modified Yamaha DT-1, the predecessor to one of the sweetest (and hellaciously fast) dirt bikes ever made, the YZ 250. All of this is another story, another day.

Probably should tell you something about me that might explain some of my behavior here, or you may have already read about it. While I feel most emotions equal to or to a greater extent than many people, there’s one emotion I’m not familiar with—fear. Psychologists sometimes call what I experience overmodulation of emotion. Instead of panic overwhelming the prefrontal cortex, my nervous system is doing almost the opposite: suppressing emotional flooding so that executive functioning remains online. My body was trained to do this because of the physical danger my father represented. I had to sense the vibes of danger minutes before it arrived. Panic wastes time; I didn’t have time to burn when I was trying to escape him. What this all means is I don’t experience fear. I’m not a psychopath, and I don’t have any damage to my amygdala—fear just isn’t in my playbook. I’ve awakened in a burning house and had to get everybody in that house out, as fear had confused and immobilized them. Out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, in a small craft, a terrible storm came up. I had to hit one of the people with me to keep them from jumping overboard, while navigating back to shore. I’ve initiated a 20-foot-high drop on a motorcycle, and my only thought on my way down was the disappointment of probably damaging my bike. I’m not brave. Give me no credit for any of it. I just psychologically don’t feel fear because I learned fear was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

Okay, that’s enough background; let’s get back to my perfect day. I headed downstairs to the garage where my baby gets her beauty sleep. A sea-blue convertible, not new, but in good shape. In fact, great shape. It doesn’t have all the features of newer cars, but it has a few other niceties, like tires and a custom suspension that allows it to, as Vivian said to Edward in Pretty Woman, “corner like it’s on rails.” And enough torque and horsepower to blow away the rednecks who think their tricked-out pickups can eat the city boy’s pretty car alive. Sometimes I wish I could see their faces, but they’re always 50 yards behind me in seconds.

I told you I’d tie it up, so here it is, and it isn’t much. The country will be exactly as broken when I pull back into the garage as it was when I left. Somewhere tonight an old shepherd mix with bad hips runs out of days at a shelter I’ll never hear about, and both of Mark’s jets will still be in the hangar. None of that changes because a 72-year-old drove his baby up a mountain on a rare cool morning in July.

But for four or five hours, I’m not dealing with it. My father, the news, the heat, the arithmetic of what we could do with somebody else’s billions—none of it means anything on those curves. Later, I’ll come home, feed the dogs, and pick it all back up.

So… what’s it going to be today? The Suches Loop or Hwy 52 near Ellijay and Chatsworth? That stretch of Hwy 52 has amazing curves, but the Loop changes elevations quickly. Both will clear the head, flush the stress of our country’s problems. For today anyway.

I think it’s a “both” day.

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under U.S. copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated or AI-assisted may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

Governments often have to decide between different energy options, considering factors like cost, reliability, environmental impact, and national security, while also listening to local concerns. However, the federal opposition to wind power brings up a unique question: what if a president’s personal disagreement takes center stage in shaping national policy?

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This isn’t just about standard energy policy debates. People genuinely hold different views on how quickly to develop renewable energy, the ideal mix of nuclear, natural gas, solar, hydro, and wind power, or the costs involved in building transmission lines. These are important public issues that deserve thoughtful consideration. What’s happening now feels different. It raises a serious question: is federal wind policy truly guided by national energy priorities, or by the president’s long-standing personal hostility toward the industry?

The evidence is quite strong. Let’s take a closer look at each piece.

Exhibit A: The Defendant’s Own Words

For over ten years, Donald Trump has been talking a lot about wind turbines. He often claims they cause cancer—though there’s no evidence to support that (American Cancer Society; World Health Organization). He also says they decrease property values—however, studies haven’t found consistent proof of that (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; US Department of Energy). He calls them unreliable, even though wind power now connects smoothly into the grid with high reliability in many states and is still among the cheapest ways to generate electricity (US Department of Energy; National Renewable Energy Laboratory). Additionally, he has accused offshore wind farms of causing whale deaths, but federal scientists have found no such connection (NOAA Fisheries). Finally, he describes the turbines as ugly, noisy, bird-killing monsters that should never have been built.

Exhibit B: The Origin Story

Obsessions often have a beginning, and this one traces to Scotland’s coast. When developers proposed an offshore wind project visible from his luxury golf course in Aberdeen, he took legal action to stop it—but lost twice. The UK Supreme Court unanimously dismissed his objections in 2015, delivering a clear and final rebuke (Trump International Golf Club Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers, [2015] UKSC 74).

Most people would have moved on. Trump did not.

Exhibit C: When Personal Hostility Shapes Public Policy

On January 20, 2025—his first day back in office—Trump signed a memorandum called “Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing,” which paused new offshore wind permits and asked for a review of existing leases (The White House, Jan. 20, 2025). That July, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Secretary’s Order No. 3437, titled “Ending Preferential Treatment for Unreliable, Foreign-Controlled Energy Sources in Department Decision-Making,” guiding the department to stop giving wind and solar projects special treatment when it comes to permits (US Department of the Interior, July 29, 2025). The next month, August, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued a stop-work order that paused construction on Revolution Wind without citing any legal violations by the company.

Revolution Wind had already employed over 1,000 union workers, logging more than two million labor hours, and was helping to power over 350,000 homes and businesses across New England (Ørsted, 2026).

Later, on December 22, 2025, Interior took further action: it suspended all five fully permitted offshore wind projects under construction—Empire Wind, Revolution Wind, Sunrise Wind, Vineyard Wind, and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind—due to newly classified concerns about national security risks related to radar interference.

The administration’s stated justification really deserves thoughtful consideration; radar interference from wind turbines is a real engineering issue that the Department of Defense has researched thoroughly over the years. The challenge is that the classified findings behind it have never been shared with the public, even though each of these projects had already gone through extensive federal environmental and safety reviews. Interestingly, the freeze was specifically targeted at projects connected to the president’s long-standing personal concerns from over a decade ago.

Exhibit D: The Courts Speak

The legal record provides some interesting insights. In September 2025, Revolution Wind took a step in court by suing in the US District Court for the District of Columbia (Revolution Wind, LLC v. Burgum, No. 1:25-cv-02999). They were successful in securing their first injunction on September 22. When Interior issued another stop-work order in December, Revolution Wind sued again and secured a second injunction on January 12, 2026. Empire Wind followed a similar path: Judge Carl Nichols of the D.C. District Court granted its injunction on January 15, 2026. The $11.2 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project by Dominion Energy also won its injunction on January 16. Meanwhile, a federal court in Massachusetts approved Vineyard Wind’s injunction on January 27, criticizing the suspension as “irrational,” and Sunrise Wind’s injunction was granted on February 2. By spring, the government chose not to appeal, and all five projects were cleared to move forward. It’s quite a story of perseverance. While these injunctions don’t definitively decide the legality of the administration’s actions, they do highlight that judges found enough procedural or statutory concerns to justify blocking those actions, time and again, as litigation went on.

Exhibit E: When Losing Isn’t Enough

When the courts weren’t on their side, the administration switched gears and started paying companies to give up their federal leases altogether, using taxpayer money. By mid-2026, Interior had arranged buyout deals for about eight offshore wind leases, totaling nearly $2.6 billion (Engineering News-Record, June 2026). Invenergy received $765 million to step away from four leases in the New York Bight, Gulf of Maine, and off Morro Bay, California. They planned to use that money to support natural gas plants across five Midwestern states and geothermal projects out west. TotalEnergies accepted roughly $1 billion to abandon two projects off New Jersey and North Carolina and redirected these funds toward gas and LNG facilities in Texas. Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind combined for another $885 million.

These two TotalEnergies projects alone could have created over 37,000 jobs, produced 4 gigawatts of power, and supplied electricity to about 1.3 million homes in New Jersey and North Carolina. The Center for American Progress estimates that this lost economic activity totals more than $56 billion, with annual wages lost topping $3 billion. Additionally, the American Clean Power Association projects that ratepayers in 15 states and Washington, D.C. could face approximately $45 billion more on their electricity bills over the next decade if the five stalled East Coast projects are ultimately canceled—adding nearly $1,000 per household.

It’s quite ironic. For years, conservatives criticized the government for “picking winners and losers.” Now, taxpayers are funding billions not to build infrastructure and eliminate, not produce electricity. They’re literally paying companies to walk away.

If a Democratic administration had spent $2.6 billion to buy out oil and gas leases just to block drilling, congressional hearings would probably already be in full swing. Cable news would be heavily covering it, and editorial pages might be questioning the motives behind such actions.

This approach has also faced legal challenges. A coalition of seven states led by New York is suing, calling these deals “blatantly unlawful” and arguing that Interior overstepped its authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. Interior, according to the suit, has improperly used the federal Judgment Fund to compensate a private company.

Exhibit F: The Human Cost

The immediate burden falls on hardworking Americans—electricians, ironworkers, laborers, engineers, helicopter crews, mariners, manufacturing employees, and union members. These are the very people politicians often claim to support. Many have dedicated months to earning specialized certifications, and some anticipated years of stable employment. According to the Center for American Progress, nearly 38,000 clean-energy jobs could be lost in 2025 due to policy actions by the administration and Congress targeting wind energy.

While officials have argued that no jobs were lost because many of the canceled leases hadn’t yet started producing electricity, this view misses the full picture. Construction jobs begin long before the grand opening, factories start hiring before products are finished, and shipyards build vessels well in advance of their first voyage. Economic activity is a continuous process, starting long before any switch is flipped.

Exhibit G: The Energy and Climate Cost

The damage extends well beyond payroll. The five East Coast projects caught in the December 2025 freeze together represent more than 4,000 megawatts of generating capacity. Every megawatt-hour that doesn’t come from wind has to come from somewhere else—in most of these regions, that means natural gas. The American Clean Power Association’s ratepayer estimate reflects the same dynamic: replacing power under contract at fixed, often below-market prices with newer generation costs consumers money, regardless of which fuel eventually fills the gap.

The irony is impossible to ignore. The administration talks constantly about “American energy dominance,” yet it’s spending billions of taxpayer dollars to stop American energy projects already under construction—projects that employ American workers, use American steel, and power American homes. If that’s energy supremacy, the dictionary needs to be rewritten.

No single statement, lawsuit, executive action, or canceled project proves that personal grievance has become public policy. Taken together, however, the pattern is difficult to explain in terms of ordinary energy regulation. The administration singled out one industry, disrupted projects already moving through federal review, lost in court five times, and then paid companies billions to walk away from projects it couldn’t stop through litigation.

This isn’t the picture of a coherent national energy strategy. It looks more like a grudge. The stakes reach beyond wind turbines: the real question is whether presidential power is being used to advance the public interest or to settle one man’s long-running grievance with a particular industry.

Government exists to serve the public interest, not to settle personal scores. History is unlikely to remember these billions as investments. It will more likely be remembered as the price taxpayers paid because one president couldn’t accept that the view from a golf course belongs to the public as much as it belongs to the clubhouse owner.

Sources:

• Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing — The White House, Jan. 20, 2025

• Department of the Interior Curbs Preferential Treatment for Wind Energy — U.S. Department of the Interior

• DOI Policy Changes Signal Major Shift Away From Wind Energy — Holland & Hart

• Revolution Wind, LLC v. Burgum, 1:25-cv-02999 (D.D.C.) — Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse

• Preliminary Injunction Granted in Ørsted Challenge to Revolution Wind Stop Work Order — Connecticut Attorney General

• US federal court grants preliminary injunction allowing Revolution Wind construction to resume — Ørsted

• US Government Sends Stop Work Order to All Offshore Wind Projects Under Construction — Offshore Wind

• US pausing five offshore wind projects over national security concerns, Burgum says — Reuters via Investing.com

• Empire Wind to resume construction after judge lifts Trump suspension — CNBC

• Federal court grants Dominion injunction, allowing offshore wind construction to proceed — Virginia Business

• Federal court allows offshore wind construction to proceed — Virginia Lawyers Weekly

• 5 offshore wind farms move ahead after Trump admin misses appeal deadline — Electrek

• Trump Offshore Wind Energy Buyout Deals Grow to Nearly $2.6B — Engineering News-Record

• Latest Offshore Wind Lease Buy-Backs Threaten Affordable Energy, Wildlife Protections — National Wildlife Federation

• Trump administration buys out 4 more offshore wind leases for $765M — Utility Dive

• Trading Offshore Wind for LNG: A Lose-Lose for Americans — Center for American Progress

• The Trump Administration and Congress’ Attacks on Wind Power Are Killing Thousands of Jobs — Center for American Progress

• The Trump Administration’s Attack on Offshore Wind Threatens To Raise Electricity Prices for Millions of Americans — Center for American Progress

• Billion-Dollar Deals to Quit Offshore Wind Leases Ignite Investigations and Investor Alarm — NRDC

• Revolution Wind Begins Delivering Power to New England — Ørsted

• Trump International Golf Club Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers — Wikipedia summary of UKSC 74 (2015)

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Author’s Note

This piece offers a thoughtful perspective on government policy, emphasizing that it isn’t about debating America’s future energy mix. It’s understandable that reasonable people might have different views on the right mix of nuclear, natural gas, hydroelectric, solar, and wind energy. Every government has a responsibility to carefully consider national security, economic factors, and environmental concerns before moving forward with significant infrastructure projects. Sometimes, concerns like radar interference, classified defense operations, or the need for additional wildlife research lead to reviewing and pausing offshore wind development. Such considerations are important in any public policy discussion.

The focus here is more specific: it points out that the pattern of executive actions, court setbacks, taxpayer-funded lease buyouts, and project delays seem to demonstrate federal influence against a particular industry in ways that are hard to justify legally or economically. These conclusions are based on publicly available government documents, court rulings, scientific research, and current news reports.

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under US copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated or AI-assisted may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

For most of my life, I’ve trusted numbers. It wasn’t blind acceptance; I felt comfortable with numbers from a trusted source. If someone said a bridge was safe, I thought “Okay, probably.” But if they told me it was built to carry 42,500 pounds with a certain safety factor, that actually meant something to me. Numbers are more likely to be free from opinion, politics, or emotion than other things. Unlike adjectives, they depict the cold reality of life.

I’ve worked as an engineer and software developer for over forty years, and in that time I learned that a number only matters if you know how uncertain it is. If a tool gives you a value but doesn’t say what it can’t measure, it’s not helpful. In fact, it’s risky because it makes you trust a level of precision that isn’t really there. In my field, we wouldn’t debate a readout like that—we’d just reject it.

That brings me to what Substack readers are seeing several times a day now.

In recent days, readers have started running essays through Pangram, the AI detection tool built into the platform, and sharing the results in Notes and comments. The results show up as a small graphic with a headline, a colored bar, three percentages, and a sentence. One version says Fully AI-assisted text, with a gray bar and numbers like AI 100 percent, AI-assisted 0 percent, Human 0 percent. Another says Fully Human-Written, with a green bar and Human 100 percent.

I’m not here to debate whether Pangram’s classifier works. I have no data to doubt it, and their published research suggests the model is well-built. My main concern is more specific and, I believe, more urgent: the current graphic Substack displays is not an effective way to show the results of a statistical classifier. The issue isn’t with the math itself, but that the graphic hides almost everything a reader needs to truly understand it. And for most people, this graphic will be all they ever see.

Let’s take a closer look at the two numbers a classifier can produce—and what they really mean.

A machine-learning classifier (that’s what an AI detector is) isn’t about offering perfect certainty. Instead, it provides likelihoods and compares them to a threshold. Like all such systems, it has a false positive rate and a false negative rate, and neither is ever zero. Pangram’s technical reports openly discuss false positives, which is transparent and helpful. But when the display shows 100 percent and 0 percent, it can give the impression of absolute certainty and doesn’t mention the likelihoods involved. These are absolute numbers, yet a probabilistic system would properly display these results as part of a range of possibilities, not as final answers.

Earlier, I was concerned about decimal points, like what the “.1” in 82.1% really signifies, or whether the system can distinguish between 82.1 and 82.2. But I realized that wasn’t the main issue. The display not only overstates precision with a decimal, but it goes further by rounding everything up to a certainty that simply doesn’t exist.

What the number actually means can be quite different from what readers might assume. This realization surprised me, and it led me to rewrite this piece from the ground up once I understood it.

The percentages shown aren’t actually probabilities, as clearly stated in Pangram’s API documentation. The values behind that graphic are fractions—specifically, fraction_ai, fraction_ai_assisted, and fraction_human—which represent the portion of the text falling into each category.

So, seeing “AI 100%” doesn’t mean the system is 100% sure that the AI wrote the entire text. Instead, it indicates that all segments of the document crossed a certain threshold for AI classification. This is simply a count of segments, not a measure of confidence.

These are two very different ideas. However, the graphic shows the same numbers for both. When you see 100%, you might think it signals complete certainty; in reality, it just means every block segment of text was placed on the AI side of the threshold. It doesn’t reveal how confident the model truly was about each segment. A document could be labeled 100% AI even if each segment just barely crossed the line—the graphic can’t display the difference between a segment being 50% or 1% over the threshold. But the results displayed on the graphic the reader sees is the same for both of these scenarios.

Throughout my career building software, I’ve learned that honesty and clarity are truly important. While no one probably intentionally tried to mislead anyone, it’s worth asking: did Substack ask for pertinent data to be left out, and if they did, was it done purposely or was it just a horrible mistake? Someone needed to show a fraction, so they used a percentage, which made sense at the time. However, this creates a small category mistake that many readers now notice. Once you see it, it’s hard to overlook—and I believe, even harder to forgive.

There’s some uncertainty here, and unfortunately, it gets discarded before reaching you. This is what shifts the issue from a simple mistake to something more serious that can’t really be justified or excused.

Pangram already calculates exactly the kind of information I’d love to see on that graphic. Their model card states that each segment has a confidence level—High, Medium, or Low—and a likelihood score from 0.0 to 1.0. Their API provides a variety of labels such as AI, Highly Likely AI, Likely AI, Possibly AI, Mixed, Unlikely AI, and Human. All the details and qualifiers are there—possibly, likely, and mixed.

The Substack graphic doesn’t reflect all the details. It simplifies the labels, reducing seven details to just three, and strips away qualifiers like “possibly” or “likely” before readers see them. It feels like practiced deceit.

This isn’t a limitation of the technology, and here’s how we know. Pangram’s integration with Inspera, the assessment platform used for academic exams, shows ‘confidence’ through an AI Confidence Score. This indicates how confident the prediction is, along with a detailed breakdown that provides confidence levels for each flagged passage. It’s the same vendor and the same model. It results in the same core uncertainty. The only difference is the partner involved. Having spent twenty years working with embedded software integrations, I can tell you this is a common process: the platform (Substack) creates the display specifications, and the vendor (Pangram) implements them. A detection company doesn’t get to change what appears inside another company’s product on its own—they just deliver the data, and the platform controls how much of that data is visible to the user. Inspera requested the full readout and received it. The process that produced the graphic on Substack wasn’t limited by technical constraints, this was all human (pun intended) since the same company distributes the honest version elsewhere.

I’m not asking Pangram to invent new science or solve complex research puzzles, or even admit their detector has flaws. It’s a much simpler issue—Pangram already calculates uncertainty and mentions it in their documentation. Yet, at the final stage, Substack leaves it out, so what the public sees is the only version that appears to show no uncertainty—though that’s not actually the case.

The documentation states that Pangram’s system is accurate with 75 words or more and indicates that short sections written by humans or mixed with AI might be labeled as AI-assisted. This sets a clear limit—something an engineer would expect, demand in its absence—to see displayed, but it’s missing here. They also mention that the model is tuned to avoid false positives. That’s a sensible choice—one I’d likely make too. But it means the numbers are adjusted, not just objective readings, and these nuances aren’t transparent in what Substack presents to readers.

Nothing I’m suggesting requires a redesign. It simply involves highlighting what the system already knows.

Instead of displaying fully AI-assisted text with a solid bar and three absolute numbers, the display graphic should say something like this:

Estimated probability of AI assistance: 40%–60% Confidence in this evaluation: Moderate

It’s also necessary to use a range to show that the estimate is a range, and add a confidence level—Low, Moderate, or High—since Pangram already provides one for each segment “under the hood.” That’s the only change needed, and it doesn’t require any extra cost to calculate or display.

Finally, below that, add a clear disclaimer right next to the result. Don’t hide it in documentation most people never read:

This is a statistical estimate, not a measurement of authorship. Accurate to roughly 75 words; shorter passages cannot be resolved. A high estimate may reflect the structure, vocabulary, or concision of the writing rather than the use of any AI tool.

That last point is especially important. Detectors tend to pick up on obvious features of writing. Elements like tight structure, formal diction, short sentences, and parallel construction are often signs of good writing, but text written this way is often construed as AI-assisted. If you’ve learned to write with structure and clarity, you’re more likely to be flagged as AI than someone who rambles: it’s how these systems are designed. Readers should understand this right away when they see the assessment, and they shouldn’t have to read through often very technical documentation to fully understand the meaning of the assigned “score”.

I’ve gone through Pangram’s technical documents, model cards, and API references. Their openly shared work covers much of what I’ve discussed here, and I truly appreciate their transparency. I couldn’t have written this without the resources they’ve provided, so I want to give them credit.

Most people, though, don’t dive into the documentation. I do, but I realize I’m probably in the minority. Many will only see that small graphic stating ‘Fully AI-assisted text’ in bold with ‘100 percent’ underneath. Sharing an explanation of uncertainty just in one place, but leaving it out where most people look, doesn’t really give us true transparency. It’s like making transparency visible where it doesn’t help at all.

That’s when a statistical estimate stops feeling like just an estimate. Someone posts a screenshot in a comment, and suddenly it’s considered solid proof. A writer then has to defend their own work against a figure that most people don’t fully understand—including the person who posted it. This leads to accusations, defenses kick in, and reputations become tied to a number that was never mathematically meant to be even a probability, let alone a certainty.

The algorithm didn’t jump to conclusions on its own. The depicted results were suggested by Substack, and we just followed along.

I’m not asking Pangram to stop assessing for AI. There are good reasons why it’s important to know who wrote something, and publishers need to identify undisclosed AI-generated content, too.

As these models improve, both of these needs become even more vital.

I’d kindly suggest four small updates to resolve Substack’s mistake:

• First, show a range instead of a single number, since the estimate is really a range.

• Second, display the confidence level the model already provides, right beside the result.

• Third, avoid using 0 percent and 100 percent, as probabilistic systems shouldn’t have those extremes, and showing them is misleading, at best.

• Lastly, list the limitations on the graphic—such as the resolution limit and the fact that structure and vocabulary alone can lead to a high score.

Pangram already generates this data in their AI assessment. Substack just chooses to hide it. No improvements in the model are needed; instead, it’s about recognizing that users should see the same level of uncertainty that any engineers would expect to observe.

A tool that hides its errors isn’t more trustworthy just because you can’t see them—it just makes it harder to question. Every field that deals with uncertainty learned this long ago—doctors speak in probabilities, pollsters share margins of error, labs list their tools and their limits. These practices weren’t adopted because people liked sounding uncertain. No, it was because someone was eventually hurt by a number that seemed more certain than it really was.

Currently, on Substack, that number appears as a bold headline and a colored bar, often hitting the writer hardest—usually unfairly.

Substack must first suspend AI detection until it shows the same helpful result information that Pangram already provides to Substack, which simply chooses not to display the honest results. This is the only ethical thing to do.

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under U.S. copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated or AI-assisted may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

What follows is one day. A Thursday in the early spring of my senior year of high school in Atlanta, when I was 17 and living alone in a rented house. I’ve reconstructed it as faithfully as I can from a memory that has never let go. The names are changed. Nothing else is.

It is not an unusual day. That’s the point. This was most of my Thursdays, as well as other days.

Running alongside that day is a second voice—the clinical literature on what was actually happening to me, which didn’t have a name in 1972 and has one now—the two alternate. I’ve done it that way because that’s how the understanding came 50-some years late.

I’m in my 7th decade. I’m writing this because one in six boys is sexually abused before he turns eighteen, and almost none of them will say so. The ones who go looking for their own story in print will not find it there. I spent five decades believing I was the only one. I’d rather not leave that tragedy intact for somebody else.

I didn’t know any of this between the ages of 15 and 20. I just believed there was something fundamentally, terribly wrong with me.

23 March 1972, 4.55 am

The glowing radium hands on my watch read 4.55 am, still dark outside, save for a street lamp flickering somewhere, wherever the hell I was. Not exactly sure, I reached out and my fingers found something familiar—a woman’s bra. Of course, a woman’s underwear didn’t offer any clues as to where, but maybe I should start with who. Rolling over slightly, I bumped into a body, the likely owner of the bra.

Light was coming in from something in front of me, and I realized I, uh…we were on the mattress in the back of my windowless Dodge van, one of several vehicles I owned. As the light through the van’s dirt-streaked windshield adjusted my eyes to the dark, I could see there was indeed a real woman right there next to me. Okay, but is she breathing? Checking for proof of life didn’t seem like an overreach. Drawing close, I detected muffled breathing, still face down; no way to know who this was yet. It’s not the first time I’ve been unsure of where or who, but I’d never get used to why I put myself in this situation.

I made my way to the front of the van, trying not to step on… what was it? A cocktail dress? I let myself out into a strip-mall parking lot. A quick look around confirmed I was at a bar I frequented, just off Clairmont, near Emory. Shirtless, barefoot, in nothing but my boxers, I felt suddenly and stupidly exposed—though there was nobody to see me. Just a yellow Camaro a few spaces down, which I figured belonged to my guest, who was likely a patron of the same bar. It was now a little after 5, and dawn was flirting with the horizon.

This was always my favorite time of day. As a kid, I learned to wake up before everyone else so I could grab the newspaper first. If my dad got to it before me, he’d take it to work, and that was that. He’d yell, “I messed the goddamn thing up,” and say I never put the sections back in order. But I always did. Sometimes I even rolled the paper up again, slapped the rubber band around it, and placed it exactly where the delivery person had left it on the sidewalk—to make it look untouched, like I’d never been there. Over time, after hearing countless times that I was stupid and never did anything right, “never been there at all” had become a common pursuit of mine.

The sky was doing its slow trick over the strip mall now, and I knew the spell would break soon. The bar’s neon was off. Someone would open the doughnut place at the end of the row before long, and a barefoot kid in his boxers leaning on an old van would be a story worth telling. I climbed back in.

She’d rolled over in the meantime, so now I had a face. It didn’t help. Pretty, older than me—but then most of them were older, sometimes a lot older—and no name to go with it. I want to say that bothered me. Truth was, it did, and it didn’t. I’d stopped collecting names a while back. Names were for people you intended to see twice, and I didn’t intend much past sunrise. A name was a thread, and a thread was something somebody could pull.

I found her dress and laid it over her, as if that were a kindness, which I’d somehow convinced myself it was. “Hey,” I half-whispered. “Sun’s coming up.” As openers go, it lacked poetry, but it was true and required nothing further from me.

She rose slowly, that half-second of not knowing where, the same fog I’d been in twenty minutes earlier. Except I was on the other side of it now, dressed, detached, and already gone in every way that counted. She asked my name. I gave my first, only, and not the one I went by. She asked whether she could call me sometime. I said I was so busy and hard to reach, which was the single most honest thing I’d say all day. I didn’t ask for hers. Finally understanding that was the whole transaction, she gathered herself with a dignity I didn’t deserve and slipped out the back to walk toward the yellow Camaro. It should have felt clean. Instead, it felt like leaving before anything could matter.

I watched her pull away. Then I was alone in the van, save for the scents of last night. I wish I could say I felt something. What I got was the quiet, and how fast the next thing rushed in—the low voice that asked, before she was even out of the lot, who’s next and when. That was the part nobody warned you about. Not the wanting. The way the need rushed back, before this was even a memory, and how little it cared what I’d just lost. That was my day: wanting, leaving, and wanting again.

It wasn’t quite six in the morning. I had a whole day. Surely, today, I can make it to Janice; I’m meeting her for dinner tonight. That should have felt like a plan. Instead, it felt like proof I’d be doing this again before nightfall.

There is now a name for it.

In the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, the World Health Organization formally recognized Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder as a diagnosis. The definition is deliberately clinical: a persistent pattern of failing to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges, resulting in repetitive sexual behavior over at least six months that causes significant distress or impairs important areas of life, including family, relationships, work, education, or health. At its core, the diagnosis is simple: a loss of control that begins to damage a person’s life.

The American diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, chose not to include it. As a result, many US clinicians lack a formal DSM diagnosis to use when documenting or billing for treatment. For more than forty years, researchers and clinicians have debated whether the condition is best understood as an addiction, a compulsion, or an impulse-control disorder. That debate continues today. What is no longer seriously disputed is that the condition exists, that it can devastate lives, and that the real argument is over what to call it.

Notice what the diagnostic criteria don’t say. They never specify a number of partners, a frequency of behavior, or any numerical threshold. Frequency tells us almost nothing. One man may meet every diagnostic criterion despite relatively infrequent behavior, while another may engage in sexual activity far more often and not meet a single one. The diagnosis isn’t measuring quantity. It’s measuring a pattern: repetitive behavior that becomes increasingly difficult to control and increasingly destructive to the person’s life.

The criteria also make another important distinction. The ICD-11 states plainly that distress based solely on moral beliefs or disapproval of one’s own sexual behavior is not enough to justify the diagnosis. Guilt is not the disorder. Shame is not the disorder. The disorder is the inability to regain control. Clinicians are careful to distinguish those things. I wouldn’t understand that distinction for another fifty years, while the damage quietly continued to accumulate.

Four characteristics define the disorder. Repeated but unsuccessful attempts to stop or significantly reduce the behavior. Continuing despite harmful consequences. Allowing the behavior to become the central focus of life at the expense of health, relationships, responsibilities, or personal interests. And perhaps the most revealing characteristic of all: continuing the behavior even after it has stopped bringing much, if any, satisfaction.

That’s the point. Not appetite. Not pleasure. The behavior continues long after the pleasure has faded, while the consequences continue to grow.

Nor is the condition especially rare. In one nationally representative study of American adults, 8.6% reported clinically significant distress and impairment related to difficulty controlling sexual thoughts, urges, or behaviors. Among men, the figure was 10.3%. Another study found that nearly one in five sexually active men acknowledged significant sexual impulsivity. The studies used different methods, but they reached the same general conclusion: far more people struggle with this disorder than most of us realize.

Whatever kept asking, who’s next? before the Camaro had even left the parking lot now has a clinical name. It wasn’t desire. It was the relentless hunger that followed desire—and the damage it left behind.

23 March 1972, 6.20 am

I made it back to the little two-bedroom in east Decatur a little before six-thirty, which gave me time I didn’t need. I was, as far as I ever knew, the only kid at my high school who came home to his own house, maybe the only kid in Atlanta. Nobody’s porch light on, nobody up waiting, not one person in the world who’d have noticed if I hadn’t come back at all—which at 17 sounded like winning, and I’d have told you it was. No shower—Thursdays I went in early to work out.

Connie taught biology. Connie was also, in my personal denial language, much more, though I’d have been hard-pressed to say more what. We had a standing appointment I’d never once been asked to confirm. We met in the chem supply room because that was the only place Connie would meet me—not in a car, not anywhere with a sofa or bed—in that windowless closet that smelled of chemicals and contained the long black island every chem supply room on earth seems to be equipped with. She’d flip the lock, and it didn’t last much longer than it took to secure the door. I’d been “trained” by Karen to last as long as a woman wanted or needed, but Connie wanted it quick, and that suited the part of me that didn’t want to be seen wanting anything. I told myself quick was fine, quick was efficient; I just pretended I had somewhere to be.

And I felt nothing. Again. That’s not me being hard on myself from a distance—I mean it the way you’d mean it about your hand falling asleep. Something was happening my mind knew shouldn’t, something it ought to protect me from, so a part of me had gone numb to it in real time. Connie didn’t have an intimate bone in her body, wouldn’t have recognized tenderness if I’d offered it, and I didn’t offer it. Afterward she’d plant one dry little “move along” kiss on my cheek. I’d go shower off two layers of sex and my workout, then walk to my 3rd-period class, telling myself the numbness was easier than wanting more.

Here’s the part I can almost laugh at, but not quite. That morning, I tried to skip Connie. I actually decided, somewhere on Columbia Drive with the radio blaring, that I’d work out, go to class, and leave Connie out of it, just this once, as if proving ‘I could’ might mean something. I got as far as the gym. I got as far as telling myself I’d made the choice.

Then second period came, and my feet took me up the stairs, down the hall the way they always did, and I understood—not in words, I didn’t have the words yet, I was 17—that I hadn’t overcome anything that morning. The decision had been made a long time ago by someone else, and I was just the one who kept showing up. She was already there. She locked the door. And the worst of it, the thing I couldn’t shake on the walk to 3rd period, was that some starved animal part of me had wanted even this—this cold, fast, loveless nothing in a supply closet—because it was the closest thing to being held I was going to get. I knew the difference—and I went anyway.

By the bell, I had it all neatly tucked away. That was the other thing I was good at, and I’d been good at it a lot longer than I’d been good at anything else. You take the thing you can’t look at, you fold it until it’s very small, then shove it deep in your pocket. You sit in third period and raise your hand and the teacher calls on you. I raised my hand. I got the answer right.

There is another problem as well: naming what happened.

Childhood sexual abuse is the most underreported form of child abuse, and boys are among the least likely to report it. Our culture teaches boys that they are supposed to want sex, while victimhood is often seen as something that happens only to girls. When the adult is a woman and the child is a 17-year-old boy, the verdict has often been written before anyone knows the facts. Lucky. Every boy’s dream. You should be proud. None of those are the right words. Every one of them pushes the victim further into silence.

The right word is abuse. A teacher who has sex with her student is not having an affair or a fling. She is not guilty of an indiscretion or a lapse in judgment. She is abusing a position of trust and authority over a child. The age of consent misses the point entirely. What makes the relationship abusive is the imbalance of power: the authority she held, the grade book she controlled, the classroom door she could lock, her full understanding of what she was doing, and the student’s inability to understand any of it.

Many states would not write that principle into law until years later. Georgia did not do so until 1983, when the law made it clear that a student’s consent could not be used as a legal defense for a teacher accused of sexual misconduct. But the law didn’t suddenly make the conduct wrong. It had always been wrong. It was wrong while it was happening, and the only person in that room who could not see it was the 17-year-old boy.

For years he believed he’d made a decision that morning on Columbia Drive and simply lacked the strength to carry it through. That’s how trauma often feels from the inside. It masquerades as weakness. It convinces its victims that what they lack is character, when what they are really confronting is a pattern laid down long before they understood what was happening to them.

It took me decades to reverse that sentence in my own mind. The pattern had been established years earlier, when I was 10. What happened that morning was not really a choice at all. It was an appointment someone else had made for me years before, and I kept showing up because the wiring had already been run. For most of my life, I mistook an injury for a weakness, when in fact it had been the predictable consequence of a childhood I never chose.

23 March 1972, 11.05 am

Walking to third period, I was already wondering about Teresa. Her mother worked days now, had since the divorce, which meant an empty house 11 minutes from school with a key under a flowerpot that fooled nobody. All I needed was Teresa.

She was standing at the lockers directly across from the doorway to my class. When she saw me, she started across the hall with that walk of hers—hips left, hips right, the whole thing cranked up about four notches past subtle, a girl doing an impression of a woman doing an impression of a vamp. Then the smile, the crooked, little wicked one she saved for exactly this, so slight you’d miss it at 10 feet.

That’s a yes, in case you were wondering. I’d found my lunch “date”.

Teresa and I had been at this since we were fifteen, which by the standards of the times made us practically institutional. There was no romance in it, and no pretending there was, which I knew at the time to be the healthiest arrangement I had. Nobody was lying. Nobody was married to a pilot. Nobody had children old as me. Nobody locked a door.

I had one class after lunch and then, most days, work. Janice had gotten me the job—write that down, it’ll matter later—keeping books at a big independent garage over in Kirkwood. I’d taken it because my other revenue streams, while considerably better paying, sat far enough on the wrong side of the law to put my freedom in play. I’d done the math on that one afternoon and decided I’d rather have a paycheck, albeit smaller. The garage owner, Albert, promoted me from gofer after he watched me run a finger down a vendor’s parts bill and stop cold on a $130 error. He wanted to know how I did that. I didn’t have an answer then and don’t now. Numbers jump out at me, and they can’t lie to me. That parts house near the Chevrolet dealer made errors all the time, and I want to be fair to them here—I’m sure it was sloppiness and not larceny—but in four years, I never once found a mistake that didn’t go their way. So Albert had his new bookkeeper at minimum wage, and I had the only thing in my whole life somebody wanted me for that had nothing to do with my body.

Not that day, though. Sharon was finishing up—she was the bookkeeper, and about eight days from having her baby—and Albert wanted the afternoon alone with her and the ledgers. No work today, he’d said. Come Monday.

So there it was, an afternoon with nothing in it. I’ve thought about that a lot since. That job was the only boundary left standing anywhere in the last twenty-four hours. It came down for the most ordinary reason in the world, and the space behind it filled up as if on cue. Teresa cut her last two classes; didn’t have to talk her into anything. That was the arrangement, and it showed me how little the rest had really mattered.

I’ll skip the salacious details, which were pretty much the same as every afternoon, and go to the part I struggled to understand. Nobody made me go to that house. Teresa wasn’t 29, and she wasn’t grading my work, and there was no lock on any door. She liked me, plain and simple, without complication. In the way a 17-year-old girl is supposed to like a 17-year-old boy. Every single thing that was wrong with the rest of that day was absent from this. It was the almost normal one. It was the one I emotionally allowed, the one I didn’t beat myself up over.

Yet I felt nothing. The same nothing as the van, the same nothing as the supply closet. Nothing.

That was the first moment all day I felt fear, and I have to be careful about how I say this, because I didn’t have the words then and I’ve had fifty-five years to find them. I’d been telling myself a story where the problem was the circumstances—the wrong women, the wrong rooms, the wrong hours. Fix those, and you’d fix the boy. But here were the right circumstances—the only right ones I’d get—and the boy came back empty from those, too. That was the real blow. It meant it wasn’t the rooms, it wasn’t the women. Something in me had been shut off a long time ago by somebody else’s hand, and it was not going to come back on because a really sweet girl in Decatur cut class for me. That was the truth of it.

Teresa and I put her mother’s house back exactly how we found it. Pillows straightened, glasses washed and put away, key under the flowerpot. Nobody would ever know we’d been there.

I was very, very good at that part.

The boy in that house asked the right question. He simply had no way to answer it.

At first glance, the research on childhood sexual abuse seems contradictory. Survivors are more likely than the general population to experience hypersexuality. They are also more likely to report diminished sexual desire, difficulty becoming aroused, and dissociation during sex. The same person can move between those extremes over the course of a lifetime, or even over the course of a single afternoon. They are not opposite conditions. They are different expressions of the same injury.

Once you understand what dissociation is for, the contradiction disappears.

Dissociation is a survival mechanism. It develops in children who cannot escape what is happening to them, so the mind learns to escape instead. It is remarkably effective, which is why the brain keeps using it long after the danger has passed. The nervous system doesn’t stop to ask whether this room is different from the last one, or whether this touch is welcome. It responds to familiar cues the way it was taught years before. It is doing exactly what it learned to do.

That’s the answer to the question the 17-year-old could not ask.

The numbness wasn’t a verdict on Teresa. It wasn’t evidence that something was wrong with her or with the relationship. It was the oldest survival reflex I had, still doing the job it had learned years earlier. What frightened me wasn’t simply the numbness itself. It was the realization that I could no longer trust my own reactions. If I couldn’t feel what I thought I should feel in the safest room I’d ever been in, what else inside me had already been taken away?

Everything else follows from understanding what the behavior was actually accomplishing.

Clinicians who specialize in compulsive sexual behavior often describe sex not primarily as the pursuit of pleasure, but as a way of changing how a person feels. It becomes a ritual, repeated whenever emotions become too difficult to regulate any other way. That understanding explains the interchangeability I have been describing throughout this episode. If the purpose is emotional regulation, then who is in the room matters far less than most people assume. The growing number of encounters is not evidence of greater desire. It is evidence that the smaller, older dose no longer works.

That helps explain another feature of the disorder. Over time, the behavior often produces less and less satisfaction, yet it continues anyway. The ICD-11 recognizes this pattern as one of the defining characteristics of Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder: repetitive sexual behavior that persists despite harmful consequences and despite providing little or no real satisfaction. The pursuit continues, not because the pleasure has increased, but because stopping no longer feels like an available option.

When I walked out of Teresa’s house at 17, I wasn’t experiencing adolescent melodrama. I had just conducted the only controlled experiment my life allowed. The girl was right. The relationship was right. There was no coercion, no manipulation, no locked door, and yet the result was painfully familiar. The problem had traveled with me.

That realization changed how I understood myself. I became convinced that no different relationship, no different woman, and no different room would ever solve it because the problem wasn’t waiting outside me. It had already been wired inside me years before.

What I did not know then—and would not learn for decades—is that the ways we learn to survive are not permanent. They can loosen their grip. People recover. Not quickly, and rarely in a straight line, but they do recover. The nervous system that learned fear can also learn safety, one experience at a time.

I was right about one thing that day. The problem really had traveled with me. What I was wrong about was believing it would travel with me forever.

23 March 1972, 6.15 pm

Thursdays, Jim flew to Los Angeles and didn’t come back until late Friday. I could have told you the flight number, the tail number, and the age of the plane.

I can’t make any of this funny; believe me, I’ve tried. Janice cooked. She’d have something going when I got there, and the windows would be steamed a little, and she’d ask how my day went as though it was a day you could answer that question about. I’d say fine. She’d hand me a plate. We’d eat at her table, in her kitchen, in the house she shared with a man who was somewhere over New Mexico by then, and for an hour I’d get the thing I’d been out combing the entire county for since a quarter to five that morning.

That’s what I want to say clearly, because the rest of this day makes no sense without it: the food was the point. The table was the point. Somebody asking about my day and waiting for the answer was the point. I’d have gone through the entire day all over again for a single evening of that, and in a manner of speaking, I had. It wasn’t just hunger. It was wanting to be wanted long enough to feel real.

Afterward—and I’ll leave the afterward where it belongs, since by now you know what it was and you know I felt about as much as I’d felt in that supply closet—we’d lie there and talk like people who’d been married 20 years, what so-and-so said in the teachers’ lounge. Should I take the harder math. Some administrator she couldn’t stand. It was ordinary, almost normal. God, it was so ordinary, and I was so starved for it that it felt like slipping into a warm bath.

Then she’d get to the other thing, the way she always eventually did, how she wanted out, how it had been over with Jim for a long time, whether he knew it or not, how things might look someday, meaning us, meaning a life, meaning a house like this one with a different man in it. She said it softly, and she said it like a plan, and she wasn’t joking. She would go on to do exactly what she said—she’d divorce him by my sophomore year at Tech, and stand there fully expecting the marriage I’d never once promised, but never once refused until I did.

I was 17 years old, lying in another man’s bed, being told about my future by a woman 11 years older who was in love with me, and the only honest thing in me was this: I didn’t love her. Not once, not for a minute. I was attached to how it felt to be cared for, which isn’t the same thing and isn’t even close, and I took it every Thursday anyway with both hands, the way a starving man would scratch and claw for any morsel of food. That was the part that frightened me. I knew it then, and stayed anyway.

So here’s where the day ends. It ends with me getting exactly what I’d been hunting since before dawn—warmth, attention, kindness, a person who wanted me around afterward—and it ends with me being unable to feel one honest thing about it. Everyone I’d touched that day I could file under something. A habit. A closet. Even nothing.

I’d wondered, all day, at every stop, what was wrong with me. In the dark, in that house, in another man’s bed, with the dishes still in the sink and a good woman asleep against my shoulder, I finally had it. The wanting had never been for any of them. It had been for this—for somebody’s kitchen, somebody’s table, somebody asking about my day—and I’d run through a whole county’s worth of bodies for several years, and I was never going to fill the hole in my soul. Not this way, anyway. That was the part I couldn’t forgive myself for because I knew the shape of the want, and I still kept chasing it.

I understood something that night that many 17-year-olds never would have seen. I knew none of those women had ever been what I was really looking for. What I couldn’t see—not then—was why. I mistook the wound for the weakness, and because of that, I walked out of that house believing tomorrow would be no different from yesterday.

So I lay there, and what came with the knowing wasn’t relief. It was simply math. Because if the wanting had never been for any of them, then none of them had ever been the answer, and there was no reason on earth to think tomorrow’s bodies would be either. Friday would come. Then another Thursday. Then a hundred more days, running out ahead of me in the dark like a hallway with the lights going off one at a time behind me. For the life of me, I could not see where it ended, or how, or what would be left of me by then. I wasn’t afraid of being alone so much as I was afraid of never stopping.

I was 17 years old and so tired, in a way that sleeping didn’t begin to touch.

But I slept anyway, because Thursday was over and Friday was coming, and Friday would want feeding, too.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) framework identifies eight categories of childhood adversity. Among American adults surveyed between 2011 and 2020, nearly two-thirds reported experiencing at least one, and just over 17 percent reported four or more. Emotional abuse was the most commonly reported category, followed by physical abuse and sexual abuse. Even those numbers are almost certainly low because they depend on people being willing to tell the truth about the hardest parts of their childhood.

The important finding isn’t any single category of adversity. It’s the accumulation. Study after study has shown that the number of different adversities a child experiences predicts later difficulties more accurately than any one of them alone. Violence, fear, neglect, and the absence of protection don’t simply add together. They compound one another.

The last of those is often the easiest to overlook because it consists of things that never happened. A child who is never comforted, never held, never made to feel safe carries those absences into adulthood just as surely as he carries the injuries that were inflicted on him. Research has shown that emotional neglect disrupts the development of healthy attachment, while childhood sexual abuse is strongly associated with anxious and avoidant attachment later in life. What a child is denied can leave marks every bit as lasting as what was done to him.

It took me most of a lifetime to understand that my craving was never really for sex.

A child terrorized by one parent and left emotionally untouched by the other grows into an adult still searching for safety, regulation, and simple human reassurance. He reaches through the only door he was ever shown. There is nothing perverse about that reaching. It is an attempt to find something that should have been there from the beginning.

The tragedy is that it cannot succeed. No sexual relationship, however loving, can satisfy a child’s unmet need for comfort and protection. An adult relationship cannot feed a childhood hunger. The hunger doesn’t know that. It simply keeps sending you back through the same door, hoping that this time the answer will be different.

That is how the cycle closes. The behavior produces shame, and shame becomes its own source of pain. Depression often follows, and research suggests that, in men, it helps explain part of the pathway from childhood sexual abuse to compulsive sexual behavior. Depression is not merely another consequence of the cycle. It becomes one of the forces that keeps the cycle alive, increasing the need to escape, to find relief, or simply to feel nothing at all.

I was 17 years old, lying in another man’s bed beside a beautiful young woman who loved me, and I had just worked out the arithmetic in the dark. Three years later I would arrive at the answer that arithmetic had been pointing toward. Looking back now, I realize I had correctly identified the pattern long before I understood its cause.

The 17-year-old boy was right about one thing. No room he could walk into was going to heal what had happened to him, because the wound always arrived before he did.

What he couldn’t possibly know was that wounds are not the same thing as life sentences.

Fifty-five years later, sitting in a therapist’s office, I finally began to understand the difference.

© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under US copyright law.

False public statements alleging that this work was AI-generated or AI-assisted may constitute defamation or other actionable conduct. The author reserves all rights and remedies available under applicable law.

Test scores were slipping before COVID, and the losses are increasingly concentrated among students who started with the least support. The causes are multiple, cumulative, and harder to confront than any single political explanation. For educators, this pattern poses a sharp professional challenge: how to address widening gaps and declining preparedness with the resources and responsibilities already on their shoulders. Nowhere has that problem come into sharper focus than at the University of California, San Diego, where faculty began encountering a problem they could not teach around.

Placement results showed that an increasing number of incoming students lacked the mathematical skills typically expected before college. A January 2026 report from a university Senate–Administration working group found that between 2020 and 2025, the number of entering students testing below high school mathematics standards increased nearly 30-fold. Seventy percent of that group tested below middle-school levels, representing roughly one student in twelve in the entering class.¹ The report identified several developments that coincided with the decline, including pandemic-era educational disruption, the elimination of admissions testing, grade inflation, and increased enrollment from under-resourced high schools. However, coincidence is not causation, and the working group could not tell us precisely how much responsibility belonged to each.

It would be tempting to treat this as a California story, another argument about admissions standards, testing, or university politics. But the problem visible at UC San Diego is part of a much larger national pattern. Across the country’s most reliable assessments, American students are losing ground, and the losses are not evenly distributed. In several of the newest assessments, students near the top have held their ground relatively well, while those near the bottom have continued to fall.

The decline is clear. Its causes are not. COVID did severe damage to American education, but the downturn began before the pandemic, and no single explanation accounts for its timing, breadth, or unequal effects. Instead, what appears is a system of reinforcing weaknesses: poorer attendance, diminished reading habits, fragmented attention, uneven instruction, inadequate practice, disrupted classrooms, weakened expectations, and difficult conditions outside school. Each may explain only part of the decline. Together, they begin to explain why the floor is giving way.

What the Tests Can Tell Us

Discussions of falling test scores often devolve into arguments about testing itself. Standardized tests don’t measure creativity, character, persistence, curiosity, artistic ability, moral judgment, or the many other qualities that make a life go well. Family income, school quality, disability, language, nutrition, stress, health, and home stability all influence performance. All of that is true, and none of it makes the tests useless.

A reading assessment was never designed to measure compassion, and a mathematics assessment was never intended to identify musical talent. Their purpose is narrower: to estimate whether students can read, calculate, reason, and apply knowledge at levels associated with their age or grade, and to show whether those abilities are improving, holding steady, or declining over time. No instrument captures the whole person. A bathroom scale cannot measure cardiovascular or mental health, but it can still tell you whether someone has gained thirty pounds.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, provides a similar measure. Its value does not lie in perfection but in continuity. Unlike state proficiency tests, which can be redesigned, rescaled, or politically softened, NAEP provides a common national measure intended to preserve meaningful comparisons across years. it’s not an infallible yardstick, but it’s the closest thing American education has to a stable national one. And lately, it has been pointing in one direction.

The Report Card Keeps Delivering Bad News

The 2024 results were difficult to explain away. The average eighth-grade reading score fell another two points from 2022 and stood five points below its 2019 level, with losses between 2022 and 2024 occurring at the 10th, 25th, and 50th percentiles, the lower and middle portions of the performance distribution.²

Twelfth-grade reading showed an even longer deterioration. The 2024 average was three points below 2019 and ten points below 1992, when the comparable trend line began. Compared with 2019, scores were lower across all reported performance percentiles except the 90th.³

Mathematics tells a similar story. Fourth-grade mathematics improved by two points between 2022 and 2024 but remained three points below 2019, and even that partial recovery was uneven: students at the 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles improved, while those at the 10th and 25th percentiles showed no statistically significant progress.⁴

Among eighth graders, the 2024 national mathematics average was not significantly different from 2022 and remained well below its pre-pandemic level. Beneath the average, however, the divide widened, with scores rising at the 75th and 90th percentiles while falling at the 10th and 25th.⁵

Twelfth-grade mathematics was three points below both 2019 and 2005, the beginning of the current trend line, and once again scores fell throughout nearly the entire distribution, with the 90th percentile the sole exception.⁶

That pattern matters more than the national average alone suggests. This is not a uniform slide in which every student loses the same amount. There is an increasing divergence between students who can obtain educational support privately and those who depend almost entirely on schools to provide it. Students with stable homes, demanding schools, educated parents, tutors, quiet places to work, ample books, and adults who enforce academic expectations are more likely to remain on track. Students without those advantages depend more heavily on schools to supply structure, continuity, instruction, and practice.

Schools can respond to this widening gap by strengthening support systems for students who lack these private resources. Possible interventions include targeted small-group tutoring, after-school academic programs, access to quiet study spaces, and expanded partnerships with community organizations to provide mentoring or enrichment. Providing additional reading materials, technology, and regular communication with families can also help close learning gaps. Professional development for teachers focused on differentiating instruction and cultivating strong relationships may further support students most in need.

When schools weaken at those functions, inequality widens even if no policy formally intends it.

The average compresses that divergence into a single number. Underneath it, the floor is falling faster than the ceiling.

COVID Accelerated the Decline - It Did Not Cause It

The pandemic inflicted real and lasting harm. Classrooms closed. Remote instruction ranged from competent to nearly nonexistent. Students disappeared from rosters, attendance declined, and teachers tried, often unsuccessfully, to replicate in a virtual setting what had previously relied on presence, routine, conversation, and human attention.

Mathematics absorbed an especially large share of the damage because it’s unusually cumulative. A student who misses a unit on the Civil War can still follow a later unit on the Progressive Era, but a student who never masters fractions carries that gap into ratios, algebra, geometry, chemistry, finance, and almost every quantitative course that follows.

COVID, therefore, belongs near the center of any account of recent learning loss. It does not, however, deserve to be treated as the sole cause. American academic performance had already softened before 2020, following years of gains and then stagnation, and international results show a similar, though not identical, pattern.

Across OECD countries, average PISA mathematics scores fell by a record 15 points between 2018 and 2022, while reading fell by 10 points. The OECD concluded that the pandemic accounted for only part of the deterioration, as reading and science had already been trending downward for roughly a decade, while mathematics had been broadly stable across the OECD before its unprecedented 2022 collapse.⁷

In the United States, 2022 math performance was among the weakest the country had recorded in PISA. Reading and science were closer to their longer-term levels, indicating that the picture is not uniform across all tests, subjects, or age groups.⁸ That distinction matters, but so does the larger pattern: progress had slowed or reversed before COVID, deteriorated sharply during it, and has recovered unevenly since, with the weakest students generally losing the most.

The pandemic was the accelerant. It wasn’t the match.

A System of Causes

The evidence is stronger for some explanations than for others. Attendance, instructional quality, practice, classroom climate, reading habits, attention, family circumstances, and academic expectations all affect learning, but researchers cannot yet precisely calculate how much each contributed to the national decline or explain why their combined effects became so visible when they did. No honest account should pretend otherwise. Still, several developments fit the pattern.

Attendance and Continuity

A child cannot learn material they are not present to be taught. That sounds too obvious to require emphasis, yet attendance has long been in the background of an education debate dominated by curriculum, funding, testing, and accountability.

Chronic absenteeism is generally defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year, approximately eighteen days in a typical 180-day calendar, which is nearly a month of instruction.⁹ Absenteeism rose dramatically during the pandemic and remained elevated afterward. The national increase does not, by itself, prove how much absenteeism caused the fall in test scores, and the relationship runs in both directions: students who are struggling may become more reluctant to attend, while missing school causes them to struggle further.

But the educational mechanism is not difficult to understand. A student who misses the introduction to fractions may return for the lesson on multiplying them. A child absent when phonics patterns are introduced may encounter later texts without the decoding tools other students possess, and a teacher must then choose among slowing the class, reteaching earlier material, giving the returning student separate help, or allowing the gap to widen. Multiply that problem across a classroom with several frequently absent students, and the pace of instruction changes for everyone.

Learning depends on sequence, and missed lessons don’t disappear. They return as future confusion.

The pandemic may also have weakened the social expectation that attendance is nonnegotiable. Mandatory quarantines, intermittent closures, remote assignments, and mixed schedules blurred the line between attending school and merely keeping up with schoolwork. That does not prove a permanent cultural shift, but it does suggest a plausible reason attendance did not immediately return to its former pattern when buildings reopened. School stopped feeling like something with a firm floor beneath it.

Reading and Attention

Reading is not simply one subject among others. it’s part of the machinery that makes nearly every other subject possible. A student with weak comprehension does not struggle only in English; that student also struggles with history, biology, written instructions, and math problems whose difficulty lies as much in language as in calculation.

Sustained reading develops vocabulary and background knowledge. It requires readers to retain earlier information, follow an argument across an extended text, tolerate ambiguity, and postpone the gratification of reaching an immediate conclusion. American children appear to be doing less of it. In 2023, only 14 percent of thirteen-year-olds reported reading for fun almost every day, compared with 27 percent in 2012, the lowest rate recorded in that NAEP series. Students who reported reading more frequently also tended to earn higher reading scores, although that association alone cannot prove that recreational reading caused the difference.¹⁰

At the same time, students are spending more of their lives with electronic content organized around novelty, speed, reaction, and interruption. The problem is not that screens are inherently corrosive: a tablet can hold a library, and a computer can provide access to lectures, archives, simulations, and the accumulated knowledge of civilization. The question is what the screen usually delivers.

Books ask readers to stay with one subject, recall earlier information, follow a line of reasoning, and resist the impulse to move on. Short-form digital services generally reward something different: reacting quickly, seeking novelty, scrolling onward, and staying available for the next interruption. Those habits are not morally opposed, but neither are they cognitively interchangeable.

it’s easy to overstate the argument by claiming that smartphones are “rewiring the brain” or destroying an entire generation. Every new medium has inspired predictions of intellectual ruin, and many proved absurd. But rejecting the exaggerated claim does not require denying the more modest one. Repeated task-switching divides attention and can reduce the effectiveness of encoding and retaining information. A student may complete an assignment while moving among messages, videos, music, games, and notifications; the work gets submitted, but submission is not mastery, and looking at an explanation is not the same as absorbing it.

PISA results present a reason for concern without settling the causal question. Across OECD countries, roughly 30 percent of students reported being distracted by their own use of digital devices during most or every mathematics lesson, while approximately one quarter reported distraction from other students’ devices. Students reporting such distraction also scored lower on average, even after accounting for socioeconomic differences.¹¹ Those results don’t prove that phones caused the national decline. Lower-performing students may use devices differently, and struggling classrooms may permit more distraction, but these don’t establish that digital distraction is common or associated with weaker performance.

No teacher with a whiteboard is competing on equal footing with an industry built to hold attention, reward repeated engagement, and make disengagement feel like deprivation.

Instruction and Practice

Method matters. In reading, influential instructional approaches sometimes encouraged children to identify unfamiliar words using pictures, context, and sentence patterns rather than relying first on systematic decoding. The renewed emphasis on explicit phonics reflects extensive evidence that beginning readers generally benefit from direct instruction in the relationship between letters and sounds. Phonics is not the whole of reading; children also need vocabulary, fluency, background knowledge, comprehension, and exposure to worthwhile texts. But children cannot comprehend words they cannot consistently identify.

Mathematics experienced its own reform cycles, many of which were valuable efforts to help students understand why procedures work rather than merely imitate a sequence of steps. That was a legitimate correction to mindless instruction, but it was never a reason to abandon practice.

Understanding and fluency are not rivals. A child should understand what multiplication means and also know the multiplication tables well enough that elementary arithmetic does not consume the working memory needed for more difficult reasoning. A reader should understand a passage and also recognize common words rapidly enough that decoding does not exhaust attention before meaning can emerge.

The same principle applies to factual knowledge. “Critical thinking” does not operate in a vacuum. People evaluate claims by comparing them with what they already know: they recognize an implausible date because they know the sequence of events; they identify a misleading statistic because they understand percentages and probability; and they detect a false historical analogy because the relevant history is already in memory. Knowledge was never the enemy of thinking; it’s the material on which thinking runs.

Practice fell under suspicion in some educational circles because too much of it had become dull, mechanical, or poorly designed, and the criticism was not baseless. Busywork deserves to be criticized. But the alternative cannot be a system in which students encounter a skill briefly, perform it with assistance, and move on before they can reproduce it independently.

Musicians drill scales. Athletes repeat movements. Pilots rehearse procedures. Surgeons build routines they can execute reliably under pressure. No serious discipline assumes that understanding something once eliminates the need to practice it. Automaticity is what practice buys. Without it, students may appear to understand during a guided lesson yet be unable to perform the same operation later without prompts, examples, or assistance; recognition is mistaken for knowledge until an independent assessment exposes the difference.

Order and Expectations

Learning requires an environment where teachers can teach and students can focus on what is in front of them. Many disciplinary reforms responded to genuine injustice: suspensions were sometimes overused, applied unevenly, or imposed in ways that worsened academic failure without addressing its causes. But reducing consequences without creating an effective alternative produces a different kind of injustice. A small number of persistently disruptive students can consume the learning time of everyone else in the room.

National data don’t establish that any particular discipline reform caused worsening academic performance, but they do show that disruption is a meaningful obstacle to instruction. In the 2020–21 school year, 32 percent of public-school teachers agreed that student misbehavior interfered with their teaching, while 37 percent said tardiness and class cutting did so.¹² PISA offers a corresponding student perspective: more than one fifth of students across OECD countries reported that they could not work well during most or all mathematics lessons, and substantial numbers said students did not listen, teachers waited for classes to quiet down, or work did not begin promptly.¹³

A classroom repeatedly interrupted by conflict, defiance, noise, phone use, or disorder cannot move at the pace of an orderly one. Lessons fragment. Teachers spend attention negotiating behavior rather than explaining material, and students who arrive ready to learn receive less instruction because other needs dominate the room. None of that appears neatly in a test score until, eventually, it does. Lost minutes become lost hours, lost hours become unlearned material, and the deficit follows the student into the next grade.

Compassion for a struggling child should not require indifference to the other children trying to learn.

Expectations matter for similar reasons. They shape behavior not through inspirational slogans but through the work adults actually require. In some schools and classrooms, grading has become more forgiving through minimum-grade policies, adjustable deadlines, repeated revisions, reduced penalties for incomplete work, or efforts to separate academic mastery from behavior. Some of those reforms have legitimate purposes: a zero can distort an average, a missed deadline may reflect a family crisis rather than a lack of understanding, and allowing revision can encourage a student to keep working rather than accept failure.

But such policies can also weaken the link between the grade awarded and the knowledge independently demonstrated. The UC San Diego working group explicitly identified grade inflation as one possible contributor to the widening mismatch between students’ transcripts and their placement performance. That does not prove grade inflation caused the national decline, but it does illustrate the problem: a credential can remain impressive even as the competence it supposedly represents weakens.

Students with disabilities, illnesses, language barriers, or family crises may need different routes to the same academic objective, and proper accommodations offer equitable access to instruction and assessment without necessarily eliminating the underlying expectation. The concern arises when what must ultimately be demonstrated quietly diminishes. Lower expectations can improve grades, promotion rates, and graduation statistics while leaving actual competence unchanged. Eventually, an assessment conducted outside the local grading system exposes the difference.

Holding a line on expectations is not cruelty. it’s one way adults communicate that students are capable of serious work and that adults are willing to help them do it.

Conditions Beyond School

Not every explanation belongs in the classroom. Children carry the rest of their lives with them: housing instability, food insecurity, family stress, community violence, untreated health problems, interrupted schooling, and parental exhaustion. Some are learning English and academic content at the same time. Others move frequently between schools or arrive after long gaps in formal education. Some live in homes where no adult has the time, education, or emotional reserves to supervise homework and reading.

These conditions make teaching more difficult and learning less consistent. They also make simple explanations dangerous. it’s easy to blame schools for problems rooted in housing, health, employment, family breakdown, or neighborhood safety, and it’s equally easy to invoke poverty as though it relieved schools of responsibility for teaching children who need them most. Neither position is adequate.

Social conditions influence how difficult the work of schooling will be. They don’t determine whether schools must do it.

Nor can demographic change by itself explain the international pattern. PISA declines occurred across countries with very different immigration levels, household structures, poverty rates, educational systems, and cultures. In the United States, immigrant students did not perform significantly worse than non-immigrant students in 2022 PISA mathematics before socioeconomic adjustment; after adjustment, they performed better.¹⁴

The more unstable a child’s life outside school becomes, the more important it’s for school to provide order, continuity, knowledge, and high expectations. When those functions weaken as outside pressures intensify, students with the least private support suffer the most.

AI Is Not the Cause - It May Become the Complication

Artificial intelligence is too new to explain a decline that began years before ChatGPT. It may, however, make recovery more difficult.

Used well, AI can serve as a remarkably patient tutor. It can explain a concept repeatedly, generate practice problems, adjust difficulty, translate material, and provide immediate feedback. However, realizing these benefits requires deliberate use. Effective integration of AI in learning depends on several best practices: educators should emphasize using AI for guided practice rather than for completed answers, encourage students to show their reasoning and learning process, and design assignments that require original thought, reflection, or in-person demonstration of skills. AI tools can be most valuable when paired with clear instructional goals, periodic supervised assessment, and honest conversations with students about appropriate use and moral boundaries. Used badly, AI allows students to bypass the mental work that produces learning. A machine can summarize the chapter, solve the equation, draft the essay, and write the code, and a student can submit a polished result while understanding very little of the underlying content.

That creates a measurement problem. Take-home work increasingly shows what a student can produce with assistance, not necessarily what the student can do independently. In the AI era, supervised assessment may become more important rather than less, because it’s one of the few remaining settings in which the work must meaningfully originate with the person being evaluated.

There is not yet sufficient longitudinal evidence to determine AI’s net effect on student learning at the national scale. AI itself is not the enemy, and students will use it in their future workplaces and should learn to use it intelligently. But a calculator helps only when the user understands enough mathematics to recognize an absurd answer, and an AI-generated argument is useful only to someone capable of detecting faulty reasoning, fabricated evidence, and confident nonsense.

Tools amplify competence. They don’t create it.

The Same Weaknesses Appear Beyond School

The OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills suggests that the problem extends beyond K–12 assessments. American adults between sixteen and sixty-five scored near the OECD average in literacy, yet below it in numeracy and adaptive problem-solving. More troublingly, Americans between sixteen and twenty-four scored below the OECD average in all three categories.¹⁵

These assessments don’t measure obscure academic knowledge. They examine whether people can understand written information, reason with numbers, interpret practical material, and solve problems whose solutions are not immediately obvious. The consequences extend beyond individual earnings. Citizens must evaluate political claims, understand probability, interpret risk, and distinguish a meaningful statistic from a misleading graph. Employees must learn new systems, identify errors, and exercise judgment when an automated answer sounds plausible but is wrong.

A society can compensate for declining general competence by relying more heavily on a limited pool of highly capable people. That works until the pool becomes too small, the institutions surrounding it become too weak, or the experts themselves are mistaken.

What We Know and What We Don’t

We know that American reading and math scores have fallen. We know that several measures had stagnated or declined before the pandemic. We know that the pandemic made matters worse. We know that the losses have often been greatest among lower-performing students, while many of the highest-performing students have remained comparatively stable. We know that absenteeism rose, recreational reading declined, digital distractions became widespread, and substantial numbers of teachers and students report that classroom conditions interfere with learning.

Educators now face decisions about where to focus limited time and resources. Strengthening core supports—such as improving attendance, increasing opportunities for sustained reading, fostering orderly learning environments, and ensuring that expectations and grading practices reflect genuine mastery—are promising areas for action within schools. Beyond the classroom, educators can champion stronger partnerships with families, expanded access to tutoring or enrichment, and policies that sustain consistency and engagement. By concentrating efforts where needs are greatest and collaborating to rebuild the foundations of learning, educators can help reverse these troubling trends.

Research gives strong reason to believe that attendance, instructional quality, practice, classroom climate, family circumstances, technology, and expectations all affect achievement. What we cannot honestly do is identify one villain. No single policy, party, union, curriculum, technology company, demographic change, or educational philosophy accounts for the whole pattern.

Education is cumulative. So is educational failure. A child who receives weak reading instruction, misses 20 days of school, spends much of the day distracted by a phone, rarely reads at home, sits in a disorderly classroom, gets little independent practice, and advances without fully understanding the material is not suffering from a single cause. That child is living within a system of causes, each making the others more damaging.

The most important division in American education may no longer be between students who attend “good schools” and “bad schools” in any simple sense. It may be between students whose families can privately replace what schools fail to provide and those whose families cannot. A child with tutoring, books, academic supervision, stable routines, and enforced limits on technology may survive a weak curriculum, inconsistent classroom order, or relaxed grading. A child without those supports has nowhere else to obtain what school withholds.

That is how a general decline becomes an inequality crisis.

The Warning Light

American students have not lost their native intelligence. They remain as capable of curiosity, discipline, invention, and achievement as any generation before them, and students still performing at exceptional levels prove that human capacity has not changed. The environment in which that capacity must develop has.

Children are reading less for pleasure, attending less consistently, and trying to learn amid distractions no previous generation faced to the same degree. Teachers are being asked to compensate for social problems they did not create, often without the authority, time, or support needed to maintain order and uphold academic expectations.

The pandemic hurt. The decline began before it. Technology may help repair the damage, or it may replace the effort that repair requires. Poverty and instability make teaching harder, but they don’t make failure acceptable or improvement impossible.

The tests did not cause the decline. They are the instrument reporting it, the warning light that has been flashing for years.

The tempting response is to cover the light. The only response worth anything is to find out why it’s on.

Sources and Further Reading

1. UC San Diego Senate–Administration Working Group on Admissions, Final Report on Admissions Review, January 8, 2026. The report found a nearly thirtyfold increase from 2020 to 2025 in entering students testing below high-school mathematics levels; 70 percent of that group tested below middle-school levels, amounting to roughly one in twelve students in the entering cohort. (Senate)

2. National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 Reading Assessment, Grade 8. The average fell two points from 2022 and five points from 2019; scores declined at the 10th, 25th, and 50th percentiles between 2022 and 2024. (Nations Report Card)

3. National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 Reading Assessment, Grade 12. The average was three points below 2019 and ten points below 1992; all selected percentiles except the 90th declined from 2019. (Nations Report Card)

4. National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 Mathematics Assessment, Grade 4. The average rose two points from 2022 but remained three points below 2019; gains were recorded at the 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles, but not at the 10th or 25th. (Nations Report Card)

5. National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 Mathematics Assessment, Grade 8. The national average was statistically unchanged from 2022, while scores rose at the 75th and 90th percentiles and fell at the 10th and 25th. (Nations Report Card)

6. National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 Mathematics Assessment, Grade 12. The average was three points below both 2019 and 2005; all selected percentiles except the 90th declined from 2019. (Nations Report Card)

7. OECD, PISA 2022 Results, Volume I: The State of Learning and Equity in Education. Across OECD countries, average mathematics performance fell by 15 points, and reading performance fell by 10 points between 2018 and 2022. The OECD reported that reading and science had already been declining over the preceding decade, while mathematics had been broadly stable before 2022. (OECD)

8. OECD, PISA 2022 Results: United States Country Note. The United States recorded one of its weakest mathematics performances in the PISA series, while reading and science were comparatively more stable.

9. U.S. Department of Education, “Chronic Absenteeism.” The department defines chronic absenteeism as missing at least 10 percent of school days, or approximately eighteen days in a typical year. (U.S. Department of Education)

10. National Center for Education Statistics, NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment Results: Reading and Mathematics at Age 13, 2023, together with NCES data on recreational reading. (Nations Report Card)

11. OECD, PISA 2022 Results, Volume II: Learning During—and From—Disruption. Approximately 30 percent of students across OECD countries reported being distracted by their own devices in most or all mathematics lessons, and approximately 25 percent reported being distracted by classmates’ devices. (OECD)

12. National Center for Education Statistics, “Teachers’ Reports of Disruptive Student Behaviors and Staff Rule Enforcement.” In 2020–21, 32 percent of public-school teachers said misbehavior interfered with their teaching, and 37 percent said tardiness and class cutting did so. (National Center for Education Statistics)

13. OECD, PISA 2022 Results, Volume II, chapter on life at school and support from home. More than 20 percent of students across OECD systems reported being unable to work well during most or all mathematics lessons. (OECD)

14. OECD, PISA 2022 Results: United States Country Note, analysis of immigrant and non-immigrant performance.

15. OECD, Survey of Adult Skills 2023: United States, published 2024. US adults scored close to the OECD average in literacy and below it in numeracy and adaptive problem-solving; Americans aged sixteen to twenty-four scored below the OECD averages in all three domains. (OECD)

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Author’s Note

The decline in American student performance is firmly documented. The relative contribution of the possible causes discussed here is not. Attendance, reading habits, digital distraction, instructional practices, classroom climate, grading, family circumstances, and academic expectations are supported by varying degrees of evidence, but no existing research permits us to assign each a definitive share of the national decline. Where this essay moves from established findings to interpretation, it does so deliberately and with that limitation in mind.

There are several promising areas for further research. Future studies could examine the relative weight and interactions among variables contributing to learning loss, such as separating the impact of absenteeism from that of digital distraction across demographic groups. Longitudinal research could track the long-term effects of pandemic-era disruptions on student outcomes. Other important questions include how grading reforms and classroom management practices affect learning over time, how best to integrate technology and AI for meaningful improvement, and which supports most effectively close gaps for students with limited resources outside school. Deeper investigation into these areas would help teachers and decision-makers design more effective interventions.

- William Faulkner

“Don’t let the past steal your soul.”

- Keith Bumgarner

Sometimes, when I begin to write another chapter about my childhood, the memories threaten to overwhelm me, and I find myself frozen with emotion. Other times, I dissociate, allowing the writer within me to step back from the pain of the little boy who always emerges when it’s time to tell his story. The writer in me carefully chooses the right words, phrases, and order to tell the story. Eventually, the words begin to flow, translating my thoughts into sentences and paragraphs. Once I have a first draft, I step back to review and gently edit it for flow, clarity, and to catch any grammatical or phrasing errors. When I feel the piece is complete, I pause, reading it as if I were another person, trying to see it through someone else’s eyes. The piece below, however, struck a different chord. As I read, I started to shake, initially almost unnoticed, but then with a physical trembling that grew until I broke down in uncontrollable sobs. I found myself trying to comfort that little boy inside, telling him he’s safe now, that nobody can hurt him anymore—practically pleading with him to hear me. Fortunately, only my dogs were nearby, and I was grateful for their presence. My poor wife has already borne so much because of my pain, and it hurts her deeply to see me suffering. As I sensed I was regaining some control, I looked down to see one of my dogs sitting patiently at my feet. I reached out to gently hold her, sitting there quietly, rocking softly, just as I often did in moments of trying to soothe my pain — pulling close my loyal friend, letting the tears flow freely down my face.

There’s a special kind of weariness that many children feel when they’ve never really been allowed to just be kids. It doesn’t show up loudly or suddenly; instead, it quietly settles into your body and stays there, making you think it’s part of who you are. I carried this feeling out of my parents’ house, like how other children might carry a favorite book or toy. It took years for me to discover that there’s a name for this experience: parentification. This isn’t just a personal feeling—it’s something that many professionals recognize, and it influences how children grow up, how they survive, and how they carry their burdens into adulthood. Spotting it is important for anyone working with children or adults who’ve been shaped by these early life challenges. When I learned its name, it didn’t instantly fix everything, but it gave me something surprising—certainty that what I experienced was real. It confirmed that I hadn’t imagined the reversal at the heart of my childhood, and that I wasn’t weak for bearing a weight no child should have to carry.

Clinicians often see parentification as a disruption of the family’s normal boundaries, where a child has to take on the responsibilities of a parent, while the actual parents may become the ones who need support. The family therapist Salvador Minuchin first identified this pattern back in 1967 while studying families facing difficulties, noticing how it blurs the usual line between who gives care and who receives it. A few years later, in their 1973 book Invisible Loyalties, Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy and Geraldine Spark gave this phenomenon its well-known name and highlighted its moral significance. They explained how a child can be involuntarily pulled into a parental role through unspoken loyalties and expectations that silently move through a family. What they described wasn’t merely about chores; it was about a fundamental reversal of the natural order of caregiving.

In my house—it wasn’t a home; I refuse to call it that—things felt like they were being turned upside down from two directions at once. My father was often away, sometimes for days, and when he was around, he was more likely to cause harm than to provide protection—a kind of damage that, when explained to someone outside the family, sounds like what therapists call extreme abuse. My mother was physically present but mostly absent in other ways. First, it was barbiturates, then alcohol. Because of this, she was rarely able to be the nurturing mother a family needs. Often she slept past nine in the morning, and some nights she struggled just to get into her own bed. My younger siblings needed feeding, watching, comforting, and help getting to places. Someone had to be the adult here, and the simple, honest truth was that I was the one left to fill that role.

Two Kinds of Labor

Researchers exploring parentification, especially the influential psychologist Gregory Jurkovic, identify two main types. From my own experience, I can relate to and now recognize both. The first is instrumental parentification, which involves taking on practical household tasks like cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and caring for younger children—the visible chores everyone notices. Clinicians look for signs of this in children who shoulder responsibilities beyond what’s typical for their age, such as preparing meals, managing family schedules, or caring for siblings with the seriousness of an adult. The second type is emotional parentification, which can be quite heavy. It means being a confidant, comforter, and stability agent for a parent—monitoring moods and absorbing family fears so others don’t have to. Children in this role often seem especially aware of their parents’ feelings, act as mediators during disagreements, offer constant comfort, or worry excessively about keeping the household running smoothly. Studies consistently reveal that emotional parentification can be more damaging, often linked to higher levels of psychological distress, depression, anxiety, and long-term relationship challenges compared to instrumental parentification.

I experienced both, and for a long time I didn’t realize they were different things. The visible labor was what I could see happening, and because my father was lazy in that wonderful, fatherly way that made his laziness my burden, everything outside the house fell onto my shoulders. We had a first-generation self-propelled walk-behind mower, which was powerful but brutally heavy, and a yard with steep inclines. Even my mother, who was heavily medicated, told him I wasn’t big enough to handle the mower on those slopes, but it didn’t change his mind. His response was either to mow the lawn or face his belt—or worse, the weapon he had made in the high school shop class that he beat me with four or five times a week. So I mowed, feeling afraid of both the mower and him. I’d slide down those inclines behind a mower I couldn’t control, almost cutting my foot off more times than I can count. I also pruned, raked, cleaned the porches and sidewalks, and took down and washed the window screens every spring. When I was eleven, he told me I’d be painting the house, and I did—there was never a time I didn’t do what I was told to do. This is what instrumental parentification looks like when it crosses the line clinicians warn about: when the task is dangerous—impossible for even some adults to handle—and enforced through the threat of great pain if I failed.

The emotional labor was more subtle and harder to recognize. I learned to read my mother’s face (actually, I could read anyone’s face) immediately upon entering a room—to sense from her posture on the couch whether the day would stay intact or fall apart, whether I’d get a brief moment of being a child or have to step back into the role of adult and parent. This kind of constant vigilance is its own form of labor. A child who is constantly watching a parent for signs of trouble or need isn’t doing what children typically do—playing, growing, and resting safely in the knowledge that someone else is looking out for them. I worked to maintain my own safety; no one was helping me in this effort. The intensity of my vigilance peaked when I was fourteen, after my father moved to New Jersey to live with a 26-year-old woman (or the “whore” as my mother affectionately called her), and my mother, still living in the Decatur house, officially named me the man of the house. Although I’d held that position since I was around six or seven, the title brought a new responsibility—an evening duty that sickened and horrified me. My mother, sedated with barbiturates, would fill a tall plastic cup with half a bottle of wine and go to the den, where I was expected to sit with her and listen to what she called our “conversations”. Often, they were about my parents’ marriage, and sometimes even more uncomfortable—discussing their sex life or the lack of one, laid out for a boy who shouldn’t have to hear such things, as if I were a friend her own age or the husband who had left. Other nights, she’d talk about our mounting debt or criticize my father—the “jackass”—which I actually agreed with and often added my own 2¢. I didn’t have a name for what those moments were back then. Today, I understand it as spousification—a form of emotional parentification, sometimes called covert incest—where a parent unconsciously takes on the role of a partner instead of a parent, drawing the child into adult intimacy and blurring boundaries. It’s not physical, but it damages the same sense of personal space and leaves behind the same emotional residue: guilt from separation, feeling that your worth depends on how well you meet someone else’s needs. I was her confidant, her referee, and her mirror. I was only fourteen, and it seemed that no one in that house saw anything unusual about it.

It Happens, and It Isn’t My Fault

The conditions that lead to parentification are sadly well-known and almost feel like a complete list of my early experiences. Having a parent struggling with substance abuse is one of the strongest indicators. Research involving adult children of alcoholics shows they tend to recall more instances of parentification—more hands-on caregiving, more emotional support, and a sense of unfairness within their family—compared to those whose parents weren’t addicted. But substance abuse isn’t the only factor. Other common risks include parental mental health issues, chronic illnesses, divorce or separation, losing a parent, incarceration, and ongoing family conflicts or instability. Children can also find themselves taking on a parentifying role when parents are overwhelmed by stress, disability, financial hardships, or after sudden traumas or crises that disrupt the family’s stability. Studies have shown that both family unreliability and parental alcoholism independently contribute to a child’s likelihood of parentification. In simple terms, both of those challenges at my house were enough on their own to push a child into that role, and together, they made it almost unavoidable.

There’s a part of this story I’ve never quite known how to say, because it shifts the tone from neglect to something sharper. When I needed to take my siblings somewhere—trying on shoes or buying something one of them urgently needed—I often had no way to get there. I couldn’t drive, and during the day, there were no men around in the neighborhood because they all worked. My grandfather and uncle were 60 miles away. So, more than once, the only adult I could find was Peggy—the alcoholic woman who had sexually abused me from the time I was ten until just before I turned thirteen. She would sometimes drive us, often while drunk, to wherever we needed to go. As I grew older, it was more mature teenage girls with licenses, but several of them were only in my life because they knew the sister of the woman who had forcibly raped me at age 13. The cycle never really broke; it only handed me from one version of itself to the next. I realize now that this wasn’t just bad luck; it was a part of a larger, structural issue. Research on child sexual abuse is heartbreakingly detailed, revealing how quickly adults and older teenagers in positions of power take advantage of the isolation children face, especially when parents are unaware of their children’s relationships—children driven to seek connection outside the house they shared with family that can’t provide it. I was definitely that child. My mother kept a small stash of cash I could access because she had to pay me to do things she should have done herself. Getting into those cars was uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t fully understand at the time, because it stirred feelings in a boy too young to have words for them—the confusion and pain that abuse leaves inside, making even danger look like attention. The absence of my parents didn’t just drain me; it kept pulling me back to the exact people I desperately needed to stay away from.

This topic is deeply meaningful to me, and I believe it will resonate with anyone who reads this and sees their own childhood reflected in it. Many children who are parentified often hold onto the belief that they were somehow responsible for fixing the situation or were blamed for it. But that’s not true. The gap between generations is the responsibility of those who are above, the older ones. When that gap breaks down, it’s because the adults who should maintain it either couldn’t or chose not to. When a nine-year-old steps into that space, it’s not because they’re making a real choice; they’re simply responding to a void, like water filling a low spot. The responsibility was never really theirs to bear.

The Part That Wounds Is the Silence

Here is the distinction that took me quite a while to grasp, and I really want to make this clear. Not all caregiving by children is harmful. Researchers highlight that a moderate amount of helping—like a child doing chores, looking after a younger sibling occasionally, or contributing to the family—is completely normal. It can even help children develop skills and create stronger bonds. Parentification becomes harmful when the responsibilities become too much—when they are beyond what is suitable for the child’s age, when they start to define the child’s entire identity, or when they cross the boundaries needed for healthy development. The most important thing is that these excessive responsibilities are never acknowledged or supported.

That last condition is the hinge on which the damage turns. What hurts a parentified child isn’t just the work itself, but also the experience of assuming an adult’s responsibility within a family that behaves as if nothing unusual is happening. It offers no recognition, gratitude, or acknowledgment of the sacrifice, nor does it reciprocate. The child gives care to a system that doesn’t acknowledge or even see what is being offered. I understand this silence very well — no one in my home ever told me that what I was doing was extraordinary, unfair, or too much for a child my age. The care I provided simply blended into the everyday chaos of a broken household, as if it had always been my natural role. Being unnoticed in such a way is a unique wound, separate from the exhaustion, and it’s one that lingers the longest.

There was one thing that was mine. I played baseball in local leagues in my small town, and for reasons I never understood, my father didn’t stop me—though he never once came to watch. Not a single game. I was good; this isn’t the softened memory of a man being kind to the boy he once was. Other fathers in the neighborhood would stop him on the street—did you see Keith last night, he pitched a two-hitter and hit three home runs—and he’d tell them he’d had to work. It was a lie. He could barely hold a job. Such silence I’ve been describing wasn’t only the absence of acknowledgment for the caregiving; it represented the absence of a witness to the one place I got to be a child. The care I gave disappeared into the running of the house, and the thing I did purely for joy disappeared too, into a father who couldn’t be bothered to sit on rickety bleachers behind a chain-link fence for two hours and see his son be good at something. Non-acknowledgment, the researchers say, is the harm. I have a two-hitter—and other performances—no one in my family ever saw, and I’ve carried it for nearly sixty years, which tells you the researchers got it right.

What It Leaves Behind

The literature on the long-term effects of parentification is not an easy read, and I will not pretend it was anything but excruciating for me. Adults who were parentified as children carry elevated risks of depression, anxiety, and substance use, and a persistent difficulty in trusting others and in forming relationships that are not organized around caretaking. Two feelings surface again and again in the research, and they are the two I have had to reckon with most: guilt and shame. Parentified adults tend to feel guilt for the most ordinary acts of putting themselves first, and to carry a vague, sourceless shame that attaches to nothing in particular and so attaches to everything. Some studies connect these patterns to codependency and to the impostor phenomenon—the sense, no matter what you accomplish, that you are only performing adequately and will eventually be found out.

It’s important to acknowledge that there are meaningful ways to move forward. Interventions aimed at addressing the effects of parentification often start by helping clients identify and understand these early roles, gently breaking the silence around them. Approaches like attachment-based therapy, trauma-informed care, and cognitive-behavioral methods can support individuals in unraveling distorted beliefs about responsibility and self-worth. Group therapy and support groups offer comforting spaces for validation and building connections with others who have shared these experiences. For children who are currently at risk, family therapy that helps restore healthy generational boundaries and fairly distributes responsibilities can change their path early on. While naming the wound is essential, finding practical ways to support its healing is equally important.

I recognize the whole menu of symptoms. The reflex to prioritize everyone’s comfort before my own, often feeling that rest must be earned—something I probably haven’t done enough of. I notice a strange guilt that appears just when I attempt to choose myself. For a long time, I thought these were just flaws in my character, but research and therapy has shown me they might be more like emotional injuries—common aftermaths of being made responsible, too early and too alone, for people who should have been there for me. In fact, there’s evidence that chronic early stress can leave physical marks in the body and affect the brain’s stress regulation systems. The fatigue I mentioned at the start might not be just metaphorical after all.

Naming It Isn’t the Same as Being Freed From It

I want to avoid a buttoned-up ending because it feels dishonest. Understanding parentification didn’t recover the childhood stolen from me while caring for my sedated mother and scared siblings, especially when my father was absent or dangerous. What it gave me was smaller but more genuine than repair. It provided me with words to name what had been happening silently all along, and language is where I could start drawing the boundaries that were never set for me—to finally say, on my own terms, that I was forced to carry burdens meant for adults, that this wasn’t love or normal, and that the weight was never really mine to bear. Still, I see how survival can shape something resilient.

Despite the pain, the resourcefulness and perseverance I needed as a child laid the foundation for strengths I’d only recognize much later—endurance, vigilance, and a quiet determination not to give up hope. Naming the harm isn’t the same as being healed, but maybe it’s where the slow process of healing begins.

A journalist friend of mine and I keep circling back to the same question. She’s spent her career writing for fact-conscious publications. I’ve spent mine as an engineer, where conclusions live or die by evidence. And yet we both notice the same thing: writers who stay tethered to verifiable facts struggle to build the audiences that those who confidently tell readers what they suspect is happening do.

For years, I assumed people were bored by facts. I don’t think that anymore. People aren’t bored by facts. They’re hungry for certainty, and that’s a different problem entirely.

Facts arrive incomplete. They contradict each other. They shift as evidence surfaces, forcing us to live with words and phrases like probably and we don’t know yet. Certainty offers relief from all of that—it assigns heroes and villains, explains motives, and answers questions before anyone has finished asking them. Psychologists call this the need for cognitive closure: our preference for a definite answer over a lingering uncertainty. It isn’t a partisan trait. It’s a human one.

But here’s where I’d push back on my own instinct to treat that hunger as fixed. We didn’t arrive at this appetite by accident. Social media platforms don’t measure accuracy; they measure engagement. Algorithms don’t ask whether a conclusion is supported by evidence; they ask whether people will click, share, or argue. Confidence outperforms caution because the platforms built beneath us were tuned to reward it. That means the appetite for certainty isn’t something writers must simply work around forever—it’s something audiences were trained into, click by click, headline by headline. And what was trained can be retrained. If readers learned to want outrage, they can learn to want evidence again. That’s the more useful and more hopeful story here.

Imagine two writers covering the same investigation. The first writes: “Officials released several thousand pages of documents. Witnesses disagree on key details. Investigators continue reviewing additional evidence.” Every sentence is accurate, yet few readers remember it. The second writes: “The documents expose the cover-up we’ve suspected all along.” Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps it isn’t. But it satisfies something the first sentence doesn’t, and that’s the whole problem in a nutshell.

None of this means facts alone make compelling writing. Facts are evidence, not the story—readers want someone to connect the dots and explain why events matter. That’s legitimate. The failure isn’t drawing connections; it’s drawing connections the evidence doesn’t support and then hiding the seam. A few words do the honest work here: “according to investigators,” “it remains possible that,” “there is currently no evidence to support this claim.” They cost a writer very little and tell a reader exactly where the reporting ends and the guessing begins.

The real erosion happens when speculation quietly stops labeling itself. Readers who discover that certainty rested on assumption rather than evidence don’t just question the conclusion—they start questioning the writer. Credibility doesn’t vanish all at once. It leaks away, one unlabeled guess at a time.

Which is why I’d add one more thing to the mix: readers have a job here, too. We’ve grown reticent about calling out speculation dressed as fact, as if noticing the problem might be rude. It isn’t. When an article states a motive no one has confirmed or a cause no one has established, say so—in a comment, a note to the author, or a chat. I witness speculation and conjecture implicitly dressed up as facts all the time on Substack and other platforms; that’s what motivated me to write this piece. Writers respond to what gets rewarded, and right now, confidence and speculation is rewarded more than caution and verifiable facts. That only changes if readers start treating unlabeled speculation as a flaw worth naming out loud every time they see it.

I understand the appeal of certainty. The world is noisy, institutions disappoint us, and there’s comfort in believing someone finally has all the answers. But certainty bought before the evidence arrives is counterfeit. The harder path—admitting what we know, what we infer, and what remains unknown—draws fewer headlines. It also builds the one thing confidence can’t buy: trust. If I have to choose between being confidently wrong and cautiously right, I’ll take the slower road.

Facts may not win the day’s argument, but they’re the only basis on which tomorrow’s history gets written honestly.

On the morning of June 23, in a federal courthouse in Fort Worth, two judges announced sentences totaling 450 years. Benjamin Song, in an orange-striped jumpsuit and in cuffs, was sentenced to a hundred years by Judge Mark Pittman. Song was found guilty of rioting, providing material support to terrorists (18 U.S.C. § 2339A), attempted murder of officers and employees of the United States (18 U.S.C. § 1114), and three counts of discharging a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence (18 U.S.C. § 924(c)). The other seven individuals sentenced that day received sentences ranging from 30 to 70 years—but they were all acquitted of attempted murder, and those charged with firearm offenses for helping Song were also acquitted. Their convictions were based on charges of rioting, supporting terrorists, using explosives, and, for two of them, obstructing justice. Nearly a year after the July 4, 2025, protest outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, the defendants returned to federal court for sentencing.

The political response was as expected. One side saw it as terrorism seeking justice, while the other viewed it as a protest driven by a prosecutor’s ambitions. Interestingly, both sides are focusing on the wrong question.

There are four questions here, and the law considers each one separately. Did the defendants commit serious federal crimes? Were they all equally responsible? Were the rulings consistent with how federal courts typically impose sentences? And will these sentences hold up on appeal? You might say yes to the first question but still feel unsettled about the others. That’s really what this case is about.

This was not prosecuted as a peaceful protest

Let’s focus on what often gets overlooked in the chaos. The convictions weren’t for simply protesting ICE. As the trial evidence showed, the participants arrived armed with firearms and body armor, used fireworks to distract officers and lure them into the open, vandalized federal property, and coordinated their actions via encrypted chats. One of them—Song, a former Marine Corps reservist—was heard on bodycam shouting “get to the rifles” before opening fire, hitting Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross in the neck. Thankfully, Gross survived and has made a full recovery.

A jury heard weeks of evidence and returned a verdict. The defense rested without presenting its own case. These are jury verdicts, not accusations, and any honest reckoning has to begin there. Appeals will determine whether court errors occurred. They won’t undo the fact that twelve jurors found these crimes proven.

The act itself isn’t the real issue. What’s truly surprising is how the numbers add up.

Sufficient, but not greater than necessary

Federal judges have three main guidelines when setting sentences: the maximum limits established by Congress, the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, and the factors outlined in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). Those factors include an important reminder that’s easy to overlook but impossible to ignore once noticed. A sentence should be just enough to achieve its goals—punishment, deterrence, protecting the public, and encouraging rehabilitation—without going overboard. Lawyers often call this the parsimony principle. It’s the law that encourages judges to impose the lightest penalty necessary to get the job done, rather than the harshest they might think they can get away with.

It’s not just a footnote. As sentencing expert Douglas Berman explains:

“The parsimony provision is the crowning jewel of the Sentencing Reform Act… it instructs judges to be no harsher than necessary to achieve the purposes of punishment.”

Keep that phrase—‘no harsher than necessary’—in mind when considering what happened in Fort Worth, and you’ll see where the gap lies. That standard is central to understanding the rest of this argument.

It appears the judges ran many of these sentences consecutively rather than concurrently. Some stacking is required by statute—a § 924(c) firearm count must follow the underlying crime. However, the way they structured the sentences here went far beyond what the law requires. Stacking sentences is legal but uncommon, except in cases involving genuinely distinct crimes rather than a single series of events. In this situation, making the sentences consecutive significantly increased the overall punishment.

Think of the trial penalty as a serious obstacle—it’s a well-documented fact that defendants who choose a jury trial often face much longer sentences than those who plead guilty. This creates a tough choice: fight the charges and risk a harsher punishment or accept a plea deal. According to NACDL’s 2018 report, based on US Sentencing Commission data, federal trial sentences are, on average, about three times longer than plea sentences for similar crimes, and in some cases, they can be eight to ten times longer. Experts like Mark Osler and Berman didn’t hold back when describing these punishments—they called them extreme.

The further you stand from the rifle

American criminal law rests on a foundational principle: punishment should reflect what the defendant actually did. The Guidelines aim to honor this principle by assigning more severe offense levels to organizers who plan, recruit, and direct acts of violence, rather than to those who arrive later and simply follow orders to disperse.

Federal courts also rely on USSG § 1B1.3, the “relevant conduct” doctrine. This allows judges to sentence a defendant not only for their own actions but also for acts that co-conspirators might reasonably foresee and that are carried out to support the shared criminal plan. There’s a clear limit—such conduct must be within what the defendant actually agreed to, not just anything someone else involved in the case did. However, courts tend to interpret foreseeability quite broadly. As a result, even someone who never fired a shot can end up serving decades for a shooting. The central question—how far each defendant agreed to go—will be a key point in this case and its appeals.

Let’s walk through the sentences together, starting with the trigger and moving outward to see what they suggest.

Benjamin Song stands out as the easiest sentence to defend. If the jury’s finding that he deliberately fired on police—connected to attempted murder, terrorism-related charges, and using a weapon during a violent crime—is correct, a sentence close to life imprisonment aligns with past federal practices. When the federal terrorism enhancement under USSG § 3A1.4 is applied—and given the likelihood that the terrorism counts support this—it would increase both his offense level and criminal-history category, significantly expanding the guideline range and making a sentence of this length possible.

Whether a 100-year sentence is necessary is a legitimate question for debate. Whether it is legally permissible, however, is practically unquestionable.

Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years—the second-longest term. In addition to the riot and material support charges, she was convicted of obstructing justice for asking that boxes be moved after her arrest. That 70-year sentence really hits hard when you consider the idea of proportional punishment.

The 50-year sentence given to the five defendants is truly shocking, especially since a jury found them not guilty of the violence itself. Instead, their convictions are based on charges like rioting and supporting explosives. The defense argues that several arrived late, didn’t fire a shot, and didn’t even carry a firearm. Receiving fifty years for defendants who were cleared of the violence by a jury is extraordinary in any federal case. This situation worries civil-liberties advocates, and their concerns are quite valid. If simply being near a protest can lead to a half-century sentence for actions you didn’t commit or plan, it discourages any ordinary person from participating in protests altogether. This is the real impact, regardless of what was intended. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada’s case is especially striking and concerning. Reports say he wasn’t even there that night and had no role in planning the event. Yet he was convicted of hiding evidence—like moving boxes of zines and journals after a jail call—and faces thirty years. That’s an unusually harsh sentence for what appears to be minor post-event actions, and it deserves close review on appeal. It’s a clear sign of what truths are really being weighed in this case.

Notice the pattern. The closer a defendant stood to Song’s rifle, the more the sentence tracks conduct. The further away they stood, the more it tracks something else—association, alignment, belief. By the time you reach a man moving a box of antifascist literature, the thing being punished isn’t an act anymore. It’s a worldview.

What the zines were charged with

Let’s talk about the First Amendment, where two common questions often get tangled and shouldn’t be. Possessing political literature—whether anarchist, communist, fascist, or left-wing zines—is fully protected. The government simply cannot punish you for the ideas you hold. That’s a clear and straightforward matter.

Prosecutors can also use a defendant’s writings to show motive, intent, conspiracy, or planning. The Supreme Court clarified this in Dawson v. Delaware, stating:

“The First Amendment does not erect a per se barrier to the admission of evidence concerning one’s beliefs and associations at sentencing simply because those beliefs and associations are protected by the First Amendment.”

The key question isn’t whether the zines existed, but whether protected expression was wrongly used as evidence of a crime or subtly turned into the crime itself. During trial and sentencing, prosecutors presented excerpts from the seized literature to argue that the defendants’ politics showed a motive and plan to commit violence against government agents. They pointed to the presence and movement of these materials as evidence that hiding them was part of an effort to block an ideologically driven conspiracy. A thirty-year sentence for moving a box raises an important, real question, not just an academic one.

The Eighth Amendment won’t save them

Here’s the hard truth for anyone hoping the Constitution will snap these numbers back. It probably won’t.

The Eighth Amendment forbids punishments that are grossly disproportionate. It does not forbid merely severe punishments. Justice Kennedy laid it out in Harmelin v. Michigan:

“The Eighth Amendment does not require strict proportionality between crime and sentence. Rather, it forbids only extreme sentences that are ‘grossly disproportionate’ to the crime.”

Federal courts rarely overturn long sentences simply because they are harsh. Life terms for repeat theft and drug offenses have withstood the same high standards. If someone appeals on Eighth Amendment grounds, it’s often considered the weakest argument.

Where the appeals will actually land

The core issues are more focused and more impactful. It’s important to consider whether the terrorism enhancement, if applied, was properly justified. We should also reflect on whether the rules regarding conduct were pushed too far, linking even peripheral defendants to Song’s shooting. Additionally, it’s crucial to consider whether the judges clearly explained— as required by § 3553(a)—why such extraordinary sentences, stacked in this manner, were necessary rather than merely available options. Finally, we need to ensure that protected speech or association didn’t unfairly influence the jury’s decision or the court’s sentencing calculations.

There’s also a more technical issue pending on appeal. Song’s attempted-murder charges were filed under 18 U.S.C. § 1114, which covers officers and federal employees and those assisting them. However, the individuals involved in the incident were a city police lieutenant and two employees of a private detention facility. Whether § 1114 applies to them is a question of legal sufficiency that the defense has already raised. It’s an important point because the firearm charges, if carried, carry their own mandatory consecutive sentences and could be dismissed if the underlying count is dropped.

Regarding the terrorism enhancement, the defense has strong precedents to consider. For example, in United States v. Ansberry, the Tenth Circuit ruled against a § 3A1.4 enhancement for a man who attempted to bomb a police station, stating that when the enhancement is based on retaliation, the conduct in question must clearly be government conduct—something the sentencing court failed to determine. Similarly, the Fifth Circuit—which will hear these appeals—has made similar rulings. In United States v. Fidse, the court overturned a § 3A1.4 enhancement and ordered a new sentence because the trial court didn’t specify which federal terrorism crime the defendant aimed to promote or provide sufficient evidence of the motivation. However, on appeal, the court upheld the enhancement after clarifying those findings. The key point—that the conduct was intended to influence or retaliate against the government—is exactly what a defendant from the Prairieland area might challenge. Usually, though, appellate courts defer to the trial court’s findings, and reversals are rare unless there’s clear procedural error or misconduct. So, while the chances of success might be slim, they are certainly possible. Plus, these legal arguments tend to be more successful than proportionality challenges and go straight to the core issue.

The verdict the appeals won’t reach

Remove politics, and you’ll see a simple but troubling fact: most of these punishments are likely legal, and that’s what makes them so unsettling. Song’s hundred years can be justified by law, but as you go further down the scale, the law seems less involved, and other factors—like proximity, alignment, or what’s inside a box—take over. The parsimony principle was meant to be the guiding rule: no harsher than necessary. It’s like the conscience of federal sentencing, yet these sentences make it seem as if it was never part of the discussion.

The power to punish is held in trust. It isn’t the state’s right to use freely; it’s more like a loan from everyone, to be used responsibly based on what a person actually did. When a sentence focuses on how close you were, what you believed, or which box you carried, it chips away at that trust. Sure, it might stand up after an appeal, but surviving an appeal isn’t the same as truly earning it.

A Note on Sources

The account of the June 23 sentencing highlights an impressive total of 450 years in sentences, providing details on each sentence, the judges Mark Pittman and Reed O’Connor, and Lt. Thomas Gross’s injury and recovery. It draws on announcements from the Justice Department via the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, along with recent reports from the Fort Worth Report and KERA News. Notably, every defendant except Song was acquitted of attempted murder and firearm charges, as reported. The specifics about the charges, the applicable statutes, and the argument that the victims in § 1114 were a local police officer and two private facility employees—rather than federal officers—are taken from Benjamin Song’s own motion for judgment of acquittal (N.D. Tex. No. 4:25-cr-00259-P).

The legal framework is built on statutes and public laws. The instruction to impose a sentence that is “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” comes from 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). The terrorism enhancement is outlined in U.S.S.G. § 3A1.4, which uses the definition of a “federal crime of terrorism” from 18 U.S.C. § 2332b(g)(5). The relevant-conduct rule is specified in U.S.S.G. § 1B1.3. Additionally, Song’s main charges included 18 U.S.C. § 1114 for attempted murder of officers and employees of the United States, § 924(c) related to firearms, and § 2339A concerning material support to terrorists.

There are a couple of noteworthy cases regarding how appellate courts handle the terrorism enhancement. In United States v. Ansberry (10th Cir. 2020), the court overturned a § 3A1.4 enhancement because the sentencing court hadn’t clearly determined whether the retaliatory conduct was truly government conduct. Similarly, in United States v. Fidse (5th Cir.), the court first overturned the enhancement for insufficient findings (778 F.3d 477), but later affirmed it once those findings were provided (862 F.3d 516). The limits of the First Amendment are explained in Dawson v. Delaware, 503 U.S. 159 (1992), and the standards for the Eighth Amendment are laid out in Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957 (1991).

The trial-penalty figures come from the 2018 report by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, titled ‘The Trial Penalty: The Sixth Amendment Right to Trial on the Verge of Extinction,’ which draws on data from the US Sentencing Commission.

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A nurse who can’t do dosage math doesn’t just disappoint a professor—someone gets the wrong medication. A diploma is a promise made to strangers, and we’ve spent forty years quietly hollowing it out. Now AI offers everyone a way to stop noticing. In my new piece, I argue the machine doesn’t reduce the need for educated people—it mercilessly magnifies the gap between those who understand and those who only produce convincing output. The crisis was never about algebra. It’s about honesty.

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Something is happening at many of America’s top universities, and those who are close to the issue can no longer ignore it.

Recently, over 1,800 math and science instructors across the University of California system, one of the world’s largest and most respected public university systems, signed an open letter expressing concerns they can no longer ignore. They observed that first-year students are arriving without the basic skills needed for a successful start. At Berkeley, instructors are seeing that between 20% and 33% of students in entry-level calculus classes arrive with significant gaps in their preparation. Professors find themselves reteaching middle-school fundamentals before they can even begin teaching college-level math. In response, many are trying different supportive strategies—such as extra tutoring, testing to find specific gaps, and bridge courses—to help students catch up. Others are rethinking course standards or making curriculum adjustments to better support students who need extra help. All these efforts aim to close skill gaps and ensure no student is left behind.

This isn’t just a challenge for struggling regional schools trying to fill seats. In fact, it’s happening at flagship campuses that turn away tens of thousands of applicants each year.

Down the coast in San Diego, the situation is even more concerning. Local academic leaders reported a nearly 30-fold increase over five years in the number of first-year students entering with math skills below the high school level—almost 1 in 8 students. About 70% of these students were not meeting the expected level for a 14-year-old.

The same concerns are echoing from three thousand miles away, and it’s not just limited to public institutions. At Harvard, faculty in the humanities and social sciences have begun shortening their reading assignments. A report circulated last fall noted that students are arriving with less experience reading complex texts and a reduced capacity for sustained focus compared to students just ten years ago. Students are now finding it harder to keep up with readings that earlier classes could easily manage.

This isn’t supposed to happen.

These students aren’t just unlucky or overlooked. They’re the ones who’ve navigated one of the most challenging admissions processes in history. They’ve worked hard, earning impressive GPAs, accumulating Advanced Placement credits, and filling their résumés with clubs, sports, internships, and community service. Many of them graduated near the top of their high school classes.

Yet, an increasing number of them are unable to continue the work.

We can consider only two possibilities: either today’s students have become less capable than previous generations, or the credentials we have been giving them no longer truly measure their abilities.

The evidence strongly suggests the second option. Once you see that, everything shifts—because the focus moves from children to us and our responsibility.

The Comfort of Blaming Somebody Else

For years, people have been discussing who might be responsible for challenges in American education. Advocates from different sides often point fingers at each other—conservatives blame progressive educators, progressives blame conservative legislatures, teachers blame parents, and everyone seems to have a different scapegoat. Even parents blame smartphones, while universities point to high schools, and high schools point to the pandemic. It’s almost as if everyone accepts this cycle because it’s easier than taking responsibility.

But honestly, the real story is more complex and a bit uncomfortable to face. Almost everyone involved in education over the past forty years played a part in gradually lowering our expectations—even if, at the time, their reasons seemed reasonable or well-meaning.

This is an important thing to reflect on before we start pointing fingers. It wasn’t a plot or a sudden failure—it was a slow erosion, happening over many decades through a series of decisions that, when taken together, led us to a place none of us really intended.

To see how we got here, you have to go back much further than COVID. You have to go back to a beeping metal sphere passing over the United States in the autumn of 1957.

The Sputnik Reflex

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik—the first artificial satellite—which sent shockwaves across the United States. It was seen as a wake-up call, suggesting that American students might be falling behind. Suddenly, education was no longer just about reading, writing, and math; it became a matter of national security.

Within a year, Congress acted. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 channeled federal funds into science, math, and foreign languages. The very name reflected how seriously the country took the challenge—viewing education as a form of defense, with classrooms standing as a frontline in the Cold War. The goal was high, and showing effort was considered patriotic.

This sense of urgency sparked real ambition but also led to some overreach.

By the 1970s, the urgency of Sputnik had faded, and quietly, so had the push for performance. The popular reforms of that decade leaned the other way—toward open classrooms, looser structures, and a belief that children learn best when they’re free to follow their curiosity. Some of these ideas were kind and thoughtful, while others might have been a bit indulgent, but the results weren’t very encouraging. SAT scores gradually declined throughout the decade and continued to fall into the early 1980s. As the country’s fears subsided, the motivation for rigorous standards diminished as well. This teaches us an important lesson about the long-term pattern in education: when Americans feel scared, they tighten standards; when they feel safe, they loosen them — and the loosening usually goes unnoticed. Headlines highlight the alarms, but the quiet, slow changes often happen out of sight.

A Rising Tide of Mediocrity

The concerns raised in 1983 truly resonated with many people. That year, a federal commission released a report called “A Nation at Risk,” which felt more like a rallying cry than a typical education review. Its language was powerful, warning that the country’s educational foundations were being eroded by mediocrity, jeopardizing our future. The report famously claimed that if an adversary had tried to impose such subpar schooling, it might have been considered an act of war. It even implied that we had, in a way, disarmed ourselves educationally. This document made a lasting impact over the next forty years, inspiring the standards movement—an important step toward holding schools accountable with clear measures for student achievement. During the late 1980s and 1990s, states began crafting academic standards—detailed lists of what students are expected to learn and accomplish at each grade level. The federal government supported these efforts by providing funding that aligned with the standards. At its core, this was about creating a system to answer a vital question: Are our students truly learning what we believe they should?

The instinct was a good one. It’s true that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and for much of American history, the country hasn’t measured very much once students finished high school. The standards movement was a sincere effort to shift education from relying on faith to relying on evidence.

The challenge arises when high stakes are attached to the evidence — and when those being measured quickly figure out how to manage the measurement rather than focusing on actual learning.

The High-Water Mark and Its Undertow

Back in January 2002, President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, which gained strong support from both parties—including co-sponsor Senator Ted Kennedy—and marked a significant moment in accountability efforts.

The law’s idea was quite straightforward and heartfelt: schools would conduct yearly tests in reading and math for students from third to eighth grade. The results would be broken down by race, income, disability, and language to ensure no group of children could be overlooked behind an average. Schools that didn’t meet the necessary progress would face increasing consequences. The aim, as written in the law, was for all American students to reach proficiency by 2014.

This goal was sincere and, in a way, inspiring—it aimed to ensure that schools couldn’t hide their struggling students within their overall success numbers. For the first time, the achievement gaps that many preferred to ignore were clearly displayed.

However, No Child Left Behind also contained the potential for a common misunderstanding. When strict penalties are tied to just one measure, it can create intense pressure to make that measure look better, even if the actual situation doesn’t truly improve.

And that is exactly what happened. Schools began focusing primarily on the subjects that were tested, while the time previously spent on history, science, art, and music gradually shifted toward reading and math drills. Teachers aimed to meet test standards because their schools’ survival often depended on those scores. Most concerning of all, since each state could define proficiency differently, some states subtly lowered their standards. If too many students struggled to meet the criteria, the standard could simply be adjusted. Consequently, a child considered proficient in one state might have been seen as failing in another. Over time, the term “proficient” came to mean whatever a state needed it to mean.

The Backlash and the Retreat

By the early 2010s, the accountability movement faced challenges, and the pendulum began to swing back toward a more balanced direction.

The Common Core State Standards, introduced around 2009 and 2010, aimed to address one of the main issues with No Child Left Behind—the fifty different definitions of proficiency—by creating a clear, high-standard set of expectations that most states adopted. On paper, this was a logical step forward for the standards movement. In reality, it became one of the most politically divisive issues in America. It faced criticism from the right for federal overreach, despite being primarily driven by state efforts, and from the left for imposing another layer of high-stakes testing on children and teachers. In the midst of this controversy, some states that adopted the standards began to distance themselves, sometimes simply renaming them to navigate the political landscape.

This is when the political conflicts really started to shape the conversation, coming from all directions. Education transformed into a battleground not just over curriculum but over cultural identity and values. Energy that could have gone into meaningful teaching and learning instead went into debates over standards, tests, and curricula—discussions that often left teachers exhausted and classrooms no better off. I want to acknowledge that this is a complex issue with many factors, and no single party bears all the blame. The politicization added an extra layer of difficulty at a time when honest measurement and progress were most needed. However, educators still have a voice. Many teachers and school leaders have found ways to promote professional dialogue and focus on shared goals for student learning, intentionally keeping classrooms and communities centered on students’ needs rather than partisan fights. When educators collaborate openly and thoughtfully about teaching and learning, schools can grow more resilient against politicization. Through these subtle yet powerful efforts, they can help steer the conversation back toward what truly benefits students.

From that exhaustion, a heartfelt grassroots revolt against testing took root. Parents in places like New York started withdrawing their children from standardized exams in the hundreds of thousands. The opt-out movement wasn’t just foolish; it was a genuine response to years of children being drilled, ranked, and stressed in the name of school accountability. But it also had a hidden price. As people pulled back from the misused tests, the country began to shy away from measurement itself.

In 2015, Congress officially recognized this shift. The Every Student Succeeds Act replaced No Child Left Behind, handing more power back to the states and easing the federal pressure that had dominated the past decade. The era of aggressive accountability was coming to an end. It’s understandable—and perhaps inevitable—that we realized the treatment had sometimes been worse than the disease.

And here’s an important but often overlooked fact: the decline in academic performance didn’t start with the pandemic. Our own reference exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the so-called Nation’s Report Card, one of the few measures that states can’t manipulate—peaked in the early 2010s and has been gradually declining since then. Similar patterns of decline are evident in international assessments across much of the developed world, with particularly notable drops in countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. By the time COVID became a household word, the foundation had already begun to settle.

When the Crisis Became a Catastrophe

In the spring of 2020, the schoolhouse doors closed, bringing a challenging time for everyone. The pandemic revealed and expanded existing issues in American education, much like a stress test highlights weaknesses in a structure. Instead of creating new problems, it exposed what was already there, especially affecting our most vulnerable students. The results were stark: the latest NAEP scores showed unprecedented declines, with students who had previously faced difficulties hit the hardest.

This decline quickly turned into a crisis. In response, many of our institutions faced a tough choice. Instead of bridging the gap between what credentials suggest and what students can actually do, many lowered their standards.

This shift happened across all levels, often under the guise of compassion. States relaxed graduation requirements, lowering the marks students needed to earn their diplomas, often to avoid penalizing children for circumstances beyond their control during the pandemic.

Grade inflation has been a growing issue for quite some time, and it seems to have sped up recently. At Yale, for example, in a recent year, 79 percent of grades were A’s or A-minuses, up from 67 percent just ten years earlier. In some departments, over 80 percent of grades are A’s. Even the senior faculty there have openly admitted that decades of grade inflation have rendered the grading system nearly meaningless as a measure of student achievement. A report from Harvard honestly pointed out the factors behind this trend: students who have never received a mediocre grade before tend to challenge every imperfect mark, professors worry that strict grading might scare students away or harm their careers, and administrators keep a close eye on course evaluations, making it somewhat necessary to keep students happy to maintain professional standing. This isn’t just an American problem, either—in Britain, the percentage of students earning a first-class degree jumped from about 7% in the mid-1990s to nearly 30% in 2025. That sharp rise can’t be fully explained by any real improvement in learning.

The result is that admissions officers now rely on signals that are losing their significance. Application essays, which have often been polished by parents and counselors, are now almost meaningless since any student can produce a convincing one in seconds. High school grades have also become nearly useless; for instance, in San Diego, about a quarter of students enrolled in the weakest remedial math class had earned perfect math grades in their final years of high school. One Berkeley professor who signed the open letter described admissions as becoming a black box, humorously noting that choosing students at random doesn’t benefit anyone.

This reflects the illusion’s structure. The decline occurred gradually over decades, and the pandemic accelerated it. Yet, just as the problem became evident, our institutions reached for the dimmer switch, attempting to hide the issues.

What We Confused and Why It Matters

None of these decisions were driven by malice, which is what makes the story so complex and heartfelt.

Schools aimed to ensure no children were left behind. Universities sought to open doors wider for students who had historically been excluded. Teachers wanted to reduce unnecessary stress for kids. Legislatures aimed to boost graduation rates to reflect their commitment to progress. Civil rights advocates fought for fairer opportunities, recognizing that the old system had fallen short. Parents simply wanted children to believe in themselves.

Each of these goals, on its own, was truly admirable and justified.

However, when combined, they unintentionally created something quite different from what anyone initially planned because, somewhere along the way, the nation misunderstood two crucial ideas. We confused the goal of removing barriers with the goal of lowering standards.

Knowing the difference between these two is crucial.

Compassion means providing every student with the support, time, and quality teaching they need to truly understand challenging material. It means standing up against the notion that a child’s zip code or family situation should determine whether they receive a proper education.

But compassion does not mean pretending a child has mastered something when they haven’t. That isn’t kindness. It’s a falsehood told to a child about their own readiness—something they cannot afford to be misled about.

We lost track of that important distinction, and in doing so, what we thought was kindness ended up feeling like something else entirely.

The Bill Comes Due Off Campus

It’s important to remember that the impact of our skills extends far beyond graduation. An inflated transcript might only seem like a private matter between a student and a registrar, but the truth is, competence doesn’t stay confined within campus walls.

Imagine an engineer who cannot perform basic quantitative reasoning—it’s not just about receiving a disappointing grade; it’s a failing grade that could affect real lives when they design a bridge that’s not up to standards.

Similarly, a nurse struggling with dosage calculations isn’t only disappointing a professor—she could also put patients at risk by administering the wrong medication amount.

And a software developer who lacks solid mathematical reasoning isn’t just writing inefficient code; they might inadvertently make someone’s bank account, medical records, or power grid more vulnerable than anyone expects.

Civilizations don’t advance simply because they hand out diplomas. They thrive because those diplomas reliably demonstrate that the person holding one can actually do what the diploma represents. It’s a promise to strangers—patients, passengers, account holders—that the work behind it is real and trustworthy. Every inflated grade and hollow degree chips away at that promise, and over time, these small breaches can lead to bigger problems when we least expect them.

The Machine That Makes It Easy to Stop Trying

And now, artificial intelligence enters a system that is already struggling to distinguish between achievement and certification. The arrival of tools like ChatGPT in late 2022 didn’t cause this crisis, but it might be what keeps it going—because it allows everyone involved to overlook the issue. The facts are already eye-opening. In Britain, where data is notably reliable, surveys show that most undergraduates now use AI for their assignments, and the number admitting to directly copying machine-generated text has increased sharply in just a year. In the United States, researchers monitoring grades at a large university in Texas found that top marks in courses like writing and coding—where AI is particularly helpful—have soared since late 2022, while subjects less influenced by machines haven’t seen such gains. For now, students who rely on AI are being rewarded, and cheating seems to pay. This temptation is both alluring and somewhat understandable. If a machine can handle the essays, coding, and problem sets, maybe students no longer need to develop the core skills. Some tired professors might even think that future work could just involve tweaking what the machines create, leading to a sense of resignation.

That is exactly backward, and it’s worth saying so plainly. Throughout history, every effective tool has increased—not decreased—the value of the people who actually understand what it does.

The calculator didn’t eliminate the need to understand mathematics; instead, it emphasized the importance of knowing which calculations to choose and whether the answers make sense. GPS didn’t erase the need to know your location; it simply revealed the ones who hadn’t learned to find out. Artificial intelligence won’t replace skilled, judgment-capable humans; rather, it will sharpen the contrast between true understanding and convincing output. A graduate who can’t recognize when the machine is confidently wrong isn’t freed by it—they’re actually caught by it.

The growing resignation among faculty—that students no longer require strong fundamentals—isn’t just practical; it’s a form of surrender. And this surrender often masks itself as compassion.

What honest institutions are realizing is that there’s no technological shortcut for a problem rooted in honesty. Tools claiming to detect AI-generated work are often unreliable, and educators are hesitant to accuse students of cheating based on tools that frequently err. Sometimes, the best solution is an old one: return to supervised, in-person exams, bluebooks, and secure rooms where students must demonstrate what they truly know without a machine whispering in their ear. But there are other promising approaches as well. Some teachers are revisiting alternative assessments such as oral exams, presentations, and project work, which require students to articulate their ideas and demonstrate understanding in real time. These methods make it much harder to substitute fake effort for genuine mastery and can help restore both rigor and trust in assessment. What’s truly encouraging is that the most advanced technology we face has led us to renew our focus on authentic, personal demonstrations of knowledge. Sometimes, the best way forward is to start measuring honestly again.

An Honest Report Card

When we set aside the numbers, test scores, and big words, it becomes clear that America’s education challenge isn’t really about algebra or tests at all. It’s about honesty and trust. Are our schools truly sharing what students actually learn? Can colleges honestly admit which students are truly prepared? Are teachers able to assign grades based on genuine effort, even when there’s pressure to do otherwise? And can leaders honestly tell us that a rising graduation rate means little if students aren’t truly able to read, write, think critically, and solve problems?

These questions might feel tough because they hold everyone accountable. They remind us that every part of the system needs to look at itself honestly. No rules or budgets alone can create excellence. No teacher can turn a resistant student into a star, no matter how talented they are. No parent can make it happen on their own. Even colleges can’t reform their way into excellence overnight. At the heart of it all, real learning is up to the students—they must do the work. And it’s our job, as adults, to make sure we’re building a system that honestly shows each student where they stand and how much they can grow.

For educators, this means taking thoughtful steps to make the system more reliable and fair. They can create transparent grading policies that clearly show how assessments truly reflect students’ mastery. Departments can work together to set common standards for rigor, which helps maintain consistency across courses and years. Teachers can regularly review and adjust their grading practices or invite colleagues to observe and provide feedback, helping everyone maintain high expectations. Schools can also offer professional development focused on honest feedback and formative assessments. Above all, teachers and staff can foster open, ongoing conversations within their communities about what it really means to measure achievement meaningfully. By taking these caring and deliberate actions, we can rebuild trust and uphold the professional standards that students truly deserve.

We owe children so much. We owe them encouragement, patience, and excellent teachers, as well as safe schools and a fair chance—no matter where they come from. We owe them opportunities that are generous and unconditional.

And there’s one more important thing we owe them—something that has become surprisingly controversial. We owe them an honest report card.

The harshest lie a school system can tell a child isn’t that they’ve failed. Sometimes, honest failure is the first step toward mastery. The cruelest lie is convincing a child they’re already successful when they’re not—sending them across a stage, diploma in hand, with applause ringing in their ears, only to discover in the real world that the credential is more of a formality than a true indication of their abilities.

That isn’t kindness. It never was.

What it is, instead, is educational malpractice. Over the past forty years, many have committed this slow, harmful mistake, mostly with good intentions—the first step toward fixing it is to start telling the truth again.

Back in December 2025, a Pennsylvania outlet shared a thought-provoking headline: “John Fetterman had finished the year as Donald Trump’s favorite Democrat in the United States Senate.” A legislative tracker showed that the Pennsylvania senator voted alongside Trump and the Republicans 26% of the time that year—his highest alignment rate among Democrats in the chamber, more than 140 votes, with New Hampshire senators Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen following behind in second and third place. To put that in perspective, in earlier Congresses, even the most moderate Senate Democrats usually aligned with Republican presidents on roll-call votes about 15 to 20% of the time. So, Fetterman’s 26% really stood out as quite notable in recent Senate history.

Fetterman’s answer to that headline was a number of his own. “I vote a 91% Democratic line,” he told CBS, “and if Democrats have a problem with somebody that votes 91% of the same times as you are, more than nine out of ten times, then maybe our party has a bigger problem.”

Both numbers are accurate, which is part of what makes understanding him so tricky. When you strip away the labels like heretic, sellout, or the last sane Democrat—things people use to categorize him—the reality is a voting record that doesn’t quite fit into the extremes critics accuse him of or the certainty he proclaims. The truth lies somewhere between his two numbers, and that’s where the real story unfolds.

What the record actually shows

Start with the nominations, as that’s where the initial disagreements first appeared and became most noticeable. Fetterman was the first sitting Democrat to visit Mar-a-Lago after the 2024 election, meeting Trump there in January 2025 before the inauguration. He supported roughly half of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, more than any other Democrat. On February 4, 2025, when Pam Bondi was confirmed as Attorney General by a vote of 54 to 46, Fetterman was the only Democrat to vote yes. He was one of just three Democrats to support Kristi Noem’s confirmation at the Department of Homeland Security, and when Noem later left, Markwayne Mullin was proposed as her replacement, with Fetterman’s vote again playing a key role. Regarding Pete Hegseth, he was the only Democrat to vote to move the nomination forward through a procedural step, although he later joined other Democrats in opposing Hegseth’s final confirmation. Fetterman explained his support for nominees as a matter of principle, arguing that presidents should be able to choose their teams unless a nominee is clearly unfit or unqualified. He highlighted the importance of respecting election outcomes and maintaining the norms of teamwork and cooperation across party lines.

The pattern extended into immigration matters as well. Fetterman co-sponsored the Laken Riley Act, notably the first bill Trump signed during his second term, and he voted for its final passage. However, it’s important to be precise here: that vote wasn’t made alone. The bill passed with a 64 to 35 vote, with twelve Democrats joining all the Republicans. On the Laken Riley issue, Fetterman had eleven allies. The vote that truly set him apart came a year later, in February 2026, during a cloture vote on a continuing resolution to fund the Department of Homeland Security. It failed 52 to 47, and Fetterman was the only Democrat voting to move it forward. He explained his stance clearly: he believed that blocking the funding would harm the Coast Guard, FEMA, and federal cybersecurity efforts, while it wouldn’t practically affect Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which had been funded separately.

Let’s look at Iran, which has made him seem even more distant from his party than any other issue. After the United States joined Israel’s conflict against Iran in early 2026, Senate Democrats kept pushing for votes to restrict the president’s war powers. On June 23, 2026, one of these resolutions was approved by the Senate with a narrow vote of 50 to 48. Fetterman was the only Democrat to vote against it. What’s particularly interesting is what happened across the aisle: four Republicans—Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy—chose to vote in favor of limiting Trump. During this vote, Fetterman didn’t just position himself to the right of his party; he also aligned more with these four Republicans. He clearly explained his stance beforehand and didn’t back down: “My vote is not a pro-war vote. It’s absolutely a pro-no nuclear Iran.” He also shared that he believed this position was, in his words, “deeply, deeply unpopular, absolutely poisonous for me as a Democrat.” The following day, he voted no again on another Iran-related resolution that didn’t pass, falling short with a vote of 50 to 47.

In June 2026, he achieved a notable first. Using a traditional Senate courtesy called the blue slip, which allows home-state senators to have a say in judicial nominations—either approving or blocking them—Fetterman returned a positive slip for Antonio Pozos, Trump’s pick for the federal district court in Philadelphia. This made him the first Senate Democrat in Trump’s second term to approve a judicial nominee in this way. The significance is even greater than it might seem: while nineteen Democrats had already voted to confirm Trump’s judicial nominees, voting to approve a judge after a hearing is different from clearing the way for the hearing to happen in the first place, and on this second point, Fetterman was the only one.

The other ninety-one percent

If the story ended there, it would be a brief summary for the prosecution and wouldn’t tell the whole story. The same record shows a senator who generally votes along with his caucus on major domestic issues. He opposed the Republican budget reconciliation that cut Medicaid and SNAP while extending tax cuts. Advocacy groups that evaluate these matters often see him as being on the left: he’s rated 100% by Planned Parenthood, 100% by the AFL-CIO, and only 7% by the conservative Heritage Foundation. When it comes to the most contested nominees—Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel—he voted against final approval, often after voting to move the nominations forward, aligning with his Democratic colleagues.

The overall numbers paint a clear picture. GovTrack’s ideology score, which is based on the bills a senator sponsors and co-sponsors, shows Fetterman falling at the 32nd percentile among Senate Democrats—making him somewhat more moderate than most of his caucus. However, he’s still comfortably within the Democratic spectrum and not crossing over into Republican territory. His Trump-alignment rate of 26% is the highest among Democrats, yet he still opposed Trump about three out of four times, highlighting his balanced approach.

Let’s look at the attendance record for Fetterman, which is an important aspect of vote analysis. Between February 2023 and June 2026, he missed 199 out of 1,531 roll-call votes—about 13%—compared to the median of just 2.8% for sitting senators. While GovTrack mentions it doesn’t track the reasons behind missed votes, we do know from public records that Fetterman experienced a stroke during his 2022 campaign, underwent treatment for clinical depression, and fell during a morning walk in November 2025—an incident linked to a heart-rhythm flare-up by his office. However, there is no documented evidence connecting these medical events to his voting choices. Some commentators have speculated about a possible link, but since there’s no proof, it’s best to acknowledge this and keep the focus on the facts.

The enigma, quantified

Combine the two halves, and the puzzle shifts from being a mere puzzle to becoming a way to measure. Overall, Fetterman identifies as a Democrat—placing him at the 32nd percentile within his party, not outside of it. When it comes to marquee votes, he stands out as the Democrat most willing to break away, especially on a few key issues—such as Israel and Iran, immigration enforcement, anti-shutdown politics, and respecting a president’s nominees—where he sometimes positions himself to the right not just of the median Democrat but also of the median Republican. This contrast between those two facts is at the heart of the entire controversy.

His critics have drawn their conclusions. The progressive group Demand Justice has run six- and seven-figure ad campaigns against him over his judicial votes, and talk of a 2028 primary contest has moved from whispers to open planning. One Pennsylvania poll found that just over 20% of the state’s Democrats approve of him, even as his overall approval in the state recovered above 50%, a split that captures his bet precisely. Publicly, Democratic leadership has largely refrained from overt rebukes, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer offering neutral comments that emphasize unity and the party’s broad tent, while Whip Dick Durbin has stated, “We respect the independence of our members, but Senator Fetterman’s votes have understandably elicited concerns among colleagues.” Other Senate Democrats have issued civil but pointed remarks, suggesting disappointment without directly calling for disciplinary action. He has wagered that more Pennsylvanians want a senator who works with whoever is in office than activists who want a reliable no.

Fetterman has been asked directly if he’d leave the party, and he has graciously refused. “I’m a Democrat,” he said when an interviewer raised the question. “It’s a strange question.” The available evidence supports him 91% of the time. It’s those other 9% he opposed the Democrats that he’ll be remembered for—and which his party is still debating whether to forgive.

A Note on Sources

The roll-call figures here come from official Senate and GovTrack records, as well as contemporaneous reporting by CBS, NBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, Roll Call, The Hill, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Punchbowl News, and Bloomberg Law. The ideology%ile and attendance figures are GovTrack’s. The advocacy-group ratings are from Planned Parenthood, the AFL-CIO, and the Heritage Foundation, as compiled in public reporting. The 26% Trump-alignment figure comes from a legislative tracker reported by Keystone Newsroom in December 2025; I’ve attributed it rather than presenting it as settled, since alignment scores vary depending on which votes a tracker counts. Direct quotations are drawn from Fetterman’s on-record interviews with CBS, NewsNation, ABC News, and The View.

My grandfather—John Francis Tron—raised me to love this country the way you love something you’ve been made responsible for: clear-eyed about its sins, and unwilling to abandon it to them. He taught me to stand against racism in every guise it takes, to deplore fascism wherever it stirs, and to honor the men and women who gave everything so that all of us—even the unfortunate poor—would inherit the same chance at a free and abundant life. He called this country’s democratic values our Crown Jewels, and he didn’t mean it as an embellishment. He meant it as an instruction: you guard them, you never pawn them, you hand them to the next generation whole. He was the finest kind of American—the kind who knew the promise hadn’t yet been kept for everyone and loved the country anyway, because to love it was to spend your life making the promise and potential come true. Everything I understand about what’s being squandered now, I understand because a good and decent man stood me up in front of it and told me to look.

On April 28, the White House shared a photo of Donald Trump standing next to King Charles III, captioned “Two Kings” with a crown emoji. When asked about the image, a spokesperson described it as a joke, calling it “a slang term of praise.” Perhaps it was. But a joke is often where people say what they truly mean and keep things light. Interestingly, just two days earlier, during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, the President had already expressed a different perspective: “I’m not a King. If I were a King, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.”

Take a moment to consider that. He wasn’t suggesting that America shed a king in 1776. Instead, he pointed out that a king wouldn’t need to negotiate or handle all these people. The issue isn’t that the comparison is insulting; it’s that the office itself presents too many hurdles. He doesn’t like the dealing involved. He feels frustrated with the Congress, the courts, the laws, and the public. Simply put, he has his frustrations with the republic.

Set aside the caption for now. The real question isn’t whether Donald Trump thinks he’s a king, but whether he’s acting like one. It’s also about whether the strong foundation built by the Framers—and the countless Americans who fought to defend it—still holds today.

Remember, a king, as the Founders understood it, isn’t just a man in a crown. It’s an official who answers to no one. A president, by contrast, is answerable to four key principles: the weight of tradition, the text of the Constitution, the decisions of the courts, and the consent of the people. Remove those four elements, and you don’t get a tyrant in a cape—you get something more subtle, yet all too familiar to those early colonists who fled such rule—another kind of sovereign.

So, let’s examine him carefully and see how he measures up against all four of these standards.

Tradition

For over two hundred years, presidents saw their role as caretakers of the office. They proudly supported the institution, the Constitution, and the country—rather than focusing on themselves. They often put their assets in blind trusts or sold them, not just because of legal requirements, but out of a sense of honor. They viewed executive orders as practical tools to govern, a means to manage the government Congress had established, rather than as a means to replace Congress altogether.

This presidency has completely changed the usual way things are done. Instead of just passing laws, the focus has often been on issuing decrees—such as sweeping emergency declarations and unilateral action —even when the Constitution calls for more deliberation. The personal touch on these matters is clear. Trump promotes himself, his businesses, and his movement, even as he continues to hold major business interests and start new ventures from his office. A notable example is his announcement of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., which has attracted foreign delegations and special interest groups, despite ongoing lawsuits challenging it under the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. He also issued executive orders like 13769, the so-called “travel ban,’ without extensive consultation or regard for existing legal standards. Reports from 2018 and 2019 showed that both domestic and foreign officials spent millions at Trump properties to try to influence policy decisions. During the G7 negotiations, he even tried to direct the summit to his Doral resort but was forced to change plans after public outcry. All these actions married public trust with private gain, bringing the Emoluments Clause—rules many Americans thought were long settled—back into a lively debate.

Take note of the move. None of this is illegal in every case, and that’s exactly the point. Tradition isn’t law. It’s what persists when the law is silent—the unwritten vow every past occupant of that desk chose to uphold. He didn’t break it during a crisis. Instead, he did so intentionally, for profit and vanity, because the restraint was never truly his to begin with. Monarchies personalize government—the state becomes the man. In contrast, republics make it institutional—the man is temporary, but the office lasts. Trump is often busy, day by day, turning the second into the first.

The Constitution

In this moment, what was once abstract becomes clear, and the strongest evidence against him is none other than the Supreme Court itself.

On February 20, 2026, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the Court decided 6–3 that the President didn’t have the authority to impose widespread tariffs. Chief Justice Roberts explained that the Constitution begins with Article I, Section 8, which clearly states that only Congress has the power to levy taxes and duties. Since a tariff is essentially a tax, this was a crucial point. The Framers specifically reserved the taxing power for Congress to prevent the executive from having too much control, especially since, in the past, the Crown used taxation to exert pressure. The Court emphasized that the administration’s interpretation would have given one person the power to tax any product from any country at any rate, and for any period, which wouldn’t be acceptable, wrote Roberts, because it was too much authority to grant to a single individual.

Note the response, because that’s where character truly reveals itself. Just hours after being told he had taken a power that the Constitution specifically gives to Congress, the President went ahead and used a different law to impose almost the same tariffs in a different way. The Court closed one door, but he was already looking for another. This isn’t someone who is genuinely humbled by constitutional limits. Instead, it’s a person who hears the verdict, shrugs it off, and then searches for a loophole—showing a disregard for the supreme law of the land, treating it as an annoyance to work around rather than a rule to follow.

The tariffs are just the most noticeable part. Beneath them, there’s a legal idea that’s just as concerning: the notion that once the President makes certain decisions, the courts shouldn’t really second-guess him. This idea—known as the “political question doctrine,” or, in its stronger form, a version of the “unitary executive theory”—has arisen in important constitutional debates and cases such as United States v. Nixon and Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. But here, it’s taken even further: not just about how he manages his branch, but about reducing judicial review so much that it almost disappears, allowing presidential powers to operate almost without oversight. It’s one of the boldest claims of presidential power ever made before the Court. He isn’t just looking to win the argument; he wants to put an end to it.

The Courts

Every administration faces setbacks, but what really matters is the consistent pattern—judges’ orders that are delayed, half-implemented, quietly bypassed, or simply ignored. Now, outside groups are tracking whether the executive branch follows court decisions at all. It’s worth reading that sentence again. We’ve reached a point where citizens need to create a dashboard to monitor whether the president is obeying the law, much like a parole officer overseeing a repeat offender.

Let’s consider the campaign against the law firms. The administration issued executive orders that revoked security clearances and federal access from firms solely for representing the President’s opponents or causes he didn’t support. Four firms stood firm and refused to back down. Four federal judges ruled against the orders, finding them unconstitutional and violating the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. One judge specifically called out the order against Susman Godfrey, describing it as a “personal vendetta” and a “shocking abuse of power.” Another judge made it clear: crossing the President meant facing punishment. While the orders were struck down in court, several firms had already relented, offering tens of millions of dollars in free legal work just to avoid being targeted. These orders failed in court but succeeded in creating fear. This reveals a tendency towards monarchical instincts: when fear is used as a tool, it governs — regardless of legality— because fear waits for no judge.

Everything rests on the foundation laid by the Court itself—the 2024 immunity ruling, which essentially means that a president’s official actions are largely beyond criminal scrutiny. A leader who can impose taxes without Congress’s approval until stopped, treats injunctions as mere suggestions, and is protected from prosecution for official conduct is a figure the eighteenth century would have had a single word for, and it wasn’t “President.”

Let’s recognize the importance of fairness in maintaining our justice system, as history shows us time and again. Courts have consistently upheld the law by striking down unjust tariffs and firm orders, reinforcing the essential checks and balances. Reflection on past events, from Andrew Jackson challenging the Supreme Court to Nixon’s defiance of the Watergate investigation, reminds us that our system relies on courageous judges and justices willing to stand firm, especially when others may falter. The strength of these checks depends on the collective effort of all branches, particularly Congress. Currently, with Congress not intervening, the judiciary is doing its vital part as the sole counterbalance. This situation highlights that our republic’s health doesn’t depend on a few district courts—its vulnerabilities, sadly, do. Recognizing this is crucial for understanding the true state of our governance.

The Governed

A king doesn’t need a majority; he needs a throne.

Recently, more than half the country has been expressing disapproval of the President’s performance. His approval ratings are near their lowest point, with nearly half of Americans strongly disapproving. In a republic, such numbers typically lead to reflection—a move towards moderation and the search for common ground. Instead, what we see is quite different: a growing push for the idea that only his will matters, with institutions like Congress, the courts, the press, the civil service, universities, and even the Federal Reserve seen as enemies to be defeated rather than partners to collaborate with.

This is the constitutional inversion that the Founders worried about the most. They believed that ambition would be kept in check by other ambitions: Congress contrasting with the executive, courts balancing both, states standing against the federal center, and a free press holding everything accountable. They designed these separations carefully because they understood that someday, someone eager for power might try to seize the office. Their biggest concern wasn’t a president wanting control— they expected that. The real danger was when the checks and balances failed, whether because they lost their resolve or strength to act—leaving one branch hungry, another silent, and the majority’s disapproval just another issue the president chooses to ignore.

The Witnesses Who Can’t Speak

More than four hundred thousand Americans didn’t return from the fight against fascism. They rest in cemeteries across Normandy, the Pacific, and throughout every county in this country. They gave their lives for a simple yet powerful idea—that no one is above the law, that authority should come from the people, not from a dictator, and that a free press, an honest court, and every vote truly matter, not just as symbols but as the core of our democracy. Many others around the world made the same sacrifice beside them. They never knew us personally, but they paid the price in advance, trusting us to preserve the country they believed in.

And I don’t revere those graves by accident. My grandfather—John Francis Tron—raised me to love this country the way you love something you’ve been made responsible for: clear-eyed about its sins, and unwilling to abandon it to them. He taught me to stand against racism in every guise it takes, to deplore fascism wherever it stirs, and to honor the men and women who gave everything so that all of us—even the unfortunate poor—would inherit the same chance at a free and abundant life. He called this country’s democratic values our Crown Jewels, and he didn’t mean it as an embellishment. He meant it as an instruction: you guard them, you never pawn them, you hand them to the next generation whole. He was the finest kind of American—the kind who knew the promise hadn’t yet been kept for everyone and loved the country anyway, because to love it was to spend your life making the promise and potential come true. Everything I understand about what’s being squandered now, I understand because a good and decent man stood me up in front of it and told me to look.

That’s the promise this disgrace, Donald Trump, holds in contempt. Not the country’s flaws—we have always had them, and there has always been hope of resolving them, the slow, stubborn work of a people striving to become what they claimed to be. Our president holds the promise itself in contempt. The dealing, the negotiating, the answering to others—the very machinery those soldiers died to protect—he calls an obstacle and a humiliation to his power. He would pawn my grandfather’s Crown Jewels for his own crown. And the dead, who cannot rise to testify, are owed at least this, that the living say plainly what is being done to the America they died for.

Two Kings

Return to the photograph. “Two Kings”—a joke, a slang term of praise. The trouble with the joke is that it may be the most honest thing this White House has ever said. Strip away the deniability, and you have the confession in full: govern by decree, treat the Constitution’s limits as mere obstacles, treat the courts’ orders as negotiable at best, treat the disapproval of most of the country as random noise, and treat the sacrifice that built it all as someone else’s foolish sentimentality.

The Framers didn’t fear a man who wanted a crown. They feared the slow conversion of an office—from one bound by the Constitution, Congress, the courts, tradition, and the consent of the governed—to one bound by nothing but a single man’s appetite for his own authority. They wrote the entire document, our Constitution, to keep that type of leader from ever rising on American soil.

The unanswered question—the one the caption asked and then laughed off—is whether we will keep our king. Two and a half centuries later, that isn’t a joke. It’s the charge. And the verdict is still, for now, in our hands.

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I know, I know—I didn’t put much thought into the title. I say it to myself, or to whoever’s nearby, several times a week, and it always comes out sounding like a joke. Like, I’m not serious—but I am. If points were awarded for clever headlines, I’d still be stuck at the starting line—aging doesn’t seem to help with that either.

So let me elaborate: getting old sucks, big time. There’s no elegant way to say it, and I’ve stopped trying. The people around me—my wife, my close friends—either agree just to shut me up, which I suspect, or hand me the standard line, “Welcome to the world of us mortals.” That’s what I get when I complain about my memory, about reaching for the right word and coming up empty, about struggling with math I used to do in my sleep, or about any of the other small intellectual feats I mastered so long ago that I now realize I took for granted. Just last week, I spent five minutes in the kitchen trying to remember the word for and find the “colander.” I stood there, muttering to myself, “It’s the thing with holes, the pasta-saver, the... sieve-ish device.” Eventually, I just called out, “Hey, Di, do you know where that pasta-drainy-thing is?” She hasn’t let me forget it since.

I’d done these things with ease since I was a small child. I was the kid who always had the answer. The one with the right word ready. The one who solved the trig or calculus problem on the board in his head before the instructor had laid the chalk down.

And here I am at 72, finally dealing with—and slowly healing from—complex PTSD, with some dissociative episodes thrown in. My most serious traumas ran from roughly age zero to twenty, which means I’m getting to them about sixty years late. The work has been, in my case, a mixed bag: traditional talk therapy, EMDR, brain spotting, and cognitive behavioral techniques, woven in wherever they might actually stick. It’s strange to be learning basic emotional management this late in life—to sit with the same therapist for years and realize that certain wounds don’t care how old you are. They just wait for you to finally notice them. I lament this to Kim, my therapist, and she always has the truth loaded and ready. She asks whether I’d have preferred not to find the healing path I’m now on. And, annoyingly, she’s right. Nobody with two brain cells to rub together says, “Oh no, I much preferred the distorted hellhole of a life I lived for so long.”

But here’s the part I can’t make peace with. The cruelty isn’t just that the gifts are dimming. It’s the timing. I spent sixty-plus years with the gifts intact while the trauma blocked the runway. Now the runway’s finally clearing—and one of the wings is falling off.

My brilliant therapist said recently, “Your mind at 80% is better than the rest of us at 150%.” I came back hard, “That really doesn’t help; I still want to be fully me.” She conceded the legitimacy of my frustration with settling for less ‘me’.

And there’s a second loss tangled up in the first, and it’s older. My whole life, I’ve struggled with confidence, but not in the obvious way. I never shrank from a challenge, never looked at a problem or a goal and thought I couldn’t do it. I’d set out, get some early traction, taste a little success. Then someone well-known in the field, someone I respected, would compliment the work. You’d think that would settle the question. It did the opposite. The praise never landed as proof I belonged. It landed as a countdown. Now they’ll look closer. Now they’ll see right through me.

My therapist calls it impostor syndrome. Whatever it’s called, the outcome was predictable—I’d back away from what I was doing and dress the retreat up as a decision. “Well, I proved I could do it. What’s the point of continuing?” As if walking away were strength instead of the oldest emotional reflex I had.

Share Don't Let the Past Steal Your Soul

It took me most of my life to understand where that voice came from, because it wasn’t humility, and it wasn’t realism. It was installed.

My father used to bend down—I was small enough that he had to—and whisper in my ear that I was stupid. Or ridiculous. As I got older, he stopped whispering and started announcing it to the room: I’d never amount to anything; I was too stupid to succeed at anything. My mother worked the other side. She begged me not to try to accomplish anything, not to put myself out there, because I’d fail and the failure would destroy me. One parent declared me stupid. The other swore I’d fail, no matter the circumstances. My cheerleaders, in stereo, for the better part of 15 years.

A child raised on that doesn’t grow into a man who can hear “good work” without bracing for the correction he’s sure is coming. The impostor was never me. It was the trauma, mimicking my voice, making sure I could never enjoy the gifts it couldn’t steal from me directly.

The strange thing—the thing that should have told me earlier who I really am—is that I sometimes took the cruelty as a dare. In junior high, my second in three years and only a month in (my father couldn’t hold a job, so we frequently moved from town to town), I decided to run for school president. My mother said, “Honey, please don’t run; you won’t win, and you’ll be hurt. You don’t know anyone; you have no friends.” My mother was always saying I had no friends, as if no one would want to be my friend.

I ran anyway and won. A teacher was the one who told me by how much—he reached for the word landslide, not me. He’d seen the trauma I was carrying, recognized it for what it was, and said it out loud because he understood I needed an adult to say it. For once, someone bent down to put the opposite message in my ear.

I did it again in high school. By then, a number of the teachers (not all—another story) actively opposed me. They thought I was too wild for the job, that my beyond-unconventional life might embarrass the school. So they doubted my temperament and lifestyle, but none of them questioned whether I could win the job; that’s what concerned them. The boy everyone at home had spent more than a decade calling stupid—a failure—turned out to be someone even his detractors took seriously.

That boy is still in here. He’s the reason I can write this at all.

Which brings me to the part I can’t quite forgive, and the part I’m only now learning to live with. I’m finally healing enough to quiet that voice—to maybe, at 72, receive a compliment and let it be a compliment. And right on schedule, the faculties the voice always lied about are beginning to slip. For the first time, the fear that I’d be exposed as not good enough has its witness: the man in the mirror, frustrated by the absence of things that used to be right there.

Still, something surprising has begun to surface—acceptance, in small pieces. Some days, I can hold the loss and the grief without letting them drown out everything else. There’s something honest about naming what hurts and standing beside it rather than running or pretending. Sometimes, while writing or talking to someone I trust, I catch a moment of hope: the sense that even as these abilities fade, I’m more myself than I’ve ever been. It’s not the kind of hope that insists things will get better, but the kind that lets me keep moving anyway. That feels, at last, like a kind of peace.

Although if acceptance at 72 means I can misplace my keys, wander into rooms with no idea why, and call it “eccentricity,” then maybe I’ve been an old soul all along. I suppose the upside is that when I forget what I was upset about, I get to start the day with a clean slate—sometimes twice before breakfast.

So when a retired editor friend recently told me that my work was good and a national publication had reached out to inquire about buying some of my recent pieces, the old alarm went off right on cue.

Now they’ll see right through you; you’re done.

But look at what that fear requires me to believe: that editors of national publications can’t tell good writing from bad—but I can—and I alone can see I’m a fraud. Laid out plainly, the math collapses. They aren’t easier to fool than I am. They’re harder. Their praise is worth more, not less.

And it isn’t the first time the verdict has come back this way. A teacher once made sure a frightened boy heard how the vote had gone. A high school faculty, afraid of what I might do (admittedly a reasonable fear; the overwhelming majority thought I should be in social services or juvie), never doubted my capabilities. Now, some are saying what others have already said. The witnesses keep arriving, credible and unconnected, across six decades, to testify to the same fact. I just couldn’t hear them over my father’s voice.

The voice has been working overtime lately, and I think I finally understand why. It’s threatened. After all this time, I’m starting to believe the witnesses.

So here’s where I’ve landed, for now. The faculties may keep slipping; the neurologist will keep telling me what he tells me, and I’ll grieve the engine for as long as grief takes. But the boy who ran for president against both his parents is the same person writing this. That part of me—the defiance, the refusal to accept a verdict handed down before I could even spell the word stupid—was never a faculty. It can’t be lost the way intellectual gymnastics are lost. It isn’t in the engine.

I stand by the title, getting old indeed sucks. But I’ve spent my whole life being told what I couldn’t do and proving, over and over, that I could. I’m not about to start agreeing with them now.

If you find yourself struggling with the same voices or watching old strengths slip away, I hope you’ll remember that your worth isn’t measured by what you lose. Healing is slow, and sometimes it comes late, but it’s never wasted. Take whatever piece of your story survives the hardest days and keep moving forward, even if the steps are small. Let the witnesses to your strength help you believe it yourself, and never hand the final word to anyone who fails to see who you truly are.

If I can keep going, so can you.

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