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David Inserra

Large portions of the EU’s sweeping “Digital Services Act” (DSA) went into force at the end of August. In addition to several controversial provisions for freedom of expression, the DSA requires member states to establish dispute resolution tribunals that will adjudicate social media content moderation decisions. Of course, having member states establish these tribunals makes it likely that they will reflect the interests of EU governments.

This is in contrast to Meta’s attempt at content moderation oversight by its Oversight Board, which is private and mostly independent.

In 2020, Meta established an independent organization known as the Oversight Board to “help Facebook answer some of the most difficult questions around freedom of expression online: what to take down, what to leave up, and why.” The Oversight Board has the power to review and even overrule content‐​moderation decisions made by Meta, as well as issue non‐​binding recommendations on Meta’s policies.

The Board is comprised of 22 members from around the world, including a former prime minister, human rights leaders, journalists, judges, and think tank experts, including Cato’s First Amendment scholar John Samples. To date, the Board has decided fifty‐​two cases looking at specific content and three broader policy advisory opinions. For full disclosure, I recently worked on Meta’s content policy teams and directly supported Meta’s efforts on the Oversight Board.

But unlike the Oversight Board, which is a private and mostly independent body established by Meta, the new DSA dispute tribunals are required by EU law. This means they are more likely to be influenced or connected to government.

As a result, these tribunals will likely be yet another way in which the EU will attempt to dictate content policy decisions to social media companies. These decisions will vary from tribunal to tribunal and certainly differ from social media companies’ current policies, not to mention the laws or speech protections of countries outside the EU.

Furthermore, this approach has the EU member states dictate the way content moderation appeals and disputes must be handled rather than allowing different platforms to develop their own solutions. For example, Reddit and Wikipedia both have processes that handle content moderation disputes differently than Meta or its Oversight Board. As social media companies continue to change and innovate, this requirement may also inhibit the growth of new solutions.

With an increasing amount of content policy jurisprudence built around the EU, these regulations will inevitably impact the broader content policies governing users in the US and beyond. As my colleague Jennifer Huddleston recently wrote, what happens in Brussels doesn’t stay in Brussels, and so the growth of EU content moderation schemes under the DSA can affect Americans and what some have termed “a free speech recession.”

While the DSA model raises concerns for freedom of expression, even the underlying Oversight Board model is not fully understood yet. Critically, how well has the Oversight Board completed its stated purpose of “protect[ing] free expression by making principled, independent decisions about important pieces of content and by issuing policy advisory opinions on Meta’s content policies?”

Answering this question will require a more comprehensive analysis of the Oversight Board’s processes, cases, rationales, decisions, and overall impacts on freedom of expression online. Some of the major elements of the Oversight Board worth exploring, both on its own merits as well as how the model might work more generally, include:

Processes and organization: How is the Board organized and operated? What is its decision‐​making process? What does it see as its mission and values?
Cases, priorities, and rulings: What cases has the Board taken (and not taken)? What is it prioritizing? What themes or precedents is the Board establishing in its decisions?
Scalability and impact on content moderation: How broadly or narrowly has Meta’s content moderation been changed or affirmed because of Board decisions? What content policy changes have been made because of the Board’s rulings?
Impact on expression: Has the Board supported greater expression or more restrictions of speech online?

The promise of the Oversight Board is certainly greater for freedom of expression than EU regulations and tribunals that are likely to push government views and limit future innovations in content moderation, but more research is required to determine just how impactful the Board has been.

Jon Hoffman

Twenty Democratic senators signed an open letter to President Biden today supporting the administration’s move to help broker normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but also signaling their concerns over providing Saudi Arabia with a formal security guarantee and help developing their civilian nuclear program.

The letter strongly suggests its authors worry that such a deal will not advance US interests and could result in heightened regional tensions or Washington’s further entanglement in the Middle East:

“We are concerned about reports that Saudi Arabia is requesting a security guarantee from the United States in exchange for normalization with Israel. Historically, security guarantees through defense treaties have only been provided to the closest of U.S. allies: democracies that share our interests and our values. Further, the U.S. has long refrained from committing our nation to treaty‐​backed security guarantees in the volatile Middle East, a region rife with conflict. A high degree of proof would be required to show that a binding defense treaty with Saudi Arabia – an authoritarian regime which regularly undermines U.S. interests in the region, has a deeply concerning human rights record, and has pursued an aggressive and reckless foreign policy agenda – aligns with U.S. interests, especially if such a commitment requires the U.S. to deploy substantial new permanent resources to the region.”

The letter echoes themes I detail at length in my recent policy analysis, Pariah or Partner? Reevaluating the U.S.-Saudi Relationship. Entering into a mutual security agreement with Saudi Arabia would represent a catastrophic miscalculation. A security guarantee for Saudi Arabia would entrap Washington as Riyadh’s protector despite a fundamental disconnect between the interests and values of the United States and the kingdom. Washington must not pay the costs of normalization while sacrificing its own interests in the process.

Washington’s ongoing support for actors like Saudi Arabia has resulted in a vicious cycle: by committing itself to propping up the underlying sources of regional instability, the United States repeatedly finds itself having to confront challenges that are largely the product of its own presence, policies, and partners in the Middle East.

The United States must decide whether it will continue underwriting actors such as Saudi Arabia and the artificial status quo in the Middle East, or whether it will recognize the failures of its own policies and limit its involvement to a level commensurate with US interests. The United States should approach Saudi Arabia as it would any other state that does not share our interests or our values: from arm’s length.

It is good to see so many senators asking tough questions about the administration’s thinking here. They should keep asking them. More of their colleagues ought to join them.

Ian Vásquez

This week Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries that led to the development of mRNA vaccines used against COVID-19. Moderna and Pfizer‐​BioNTech produced those vaccines, saving millions of lives and helping to reopen the world. According to the Nobel Assembly, the awardees “contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”

I celebrated that achievement in my column in El Comercio (Peru) this week, reposted here, by reviving a great article that Scott Lincicome wrote in December of 2020 just as the vaccines were about to come online. The COVID vaccines, Scott rightly pointed out, were a triumph of globalization.

The much‐​deserved Nobel Prize to Karikó and Weissman highlights that truth. As I wrote:

It was the flow of people, ideas, capital, goods and services that made it possible to discover and produce a vaccine in record time…

First, [this is a story] about immigrants. Karikó is Hungarian and went to work in Philadelphia, where she met Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work there, however, was undervalued, so Karikó went to a job at BioNTech. This German‐​based company was, in turn, founded by a Turkish immigrant and a German woman of Turkish descent. Pfizer, founded in the 19th century by German immigrants to the United States, collaborated with BioNTech to produce the vaccine. Its CEO is a Greek immigrant to the United States.

Moderna’s co‐​founder and chairman of the board, meanwhile, is of Armenian descent, born in Lebanon and immigrated first to Canada and then to the United States. The company’s other executives, like those at Pfizer, hail from numerous countries.

Global capital markets also played a role by providing the massive funding needed for the biotech and pharmaceutical companies that developed and distributed the vaccines. When Chinese researchers publicly shared the genetic map of the virus in early January 2020—without seeking permission from the Chinese authorities—the international scientific community also played a role, immediately getting to work on creating possible COVID tests and vaccines.

The production and distribution of the vaccine required complex international collaboration in terms of logistics, shipping, storage, and supply chains that were adaptive but based precisely on the knowledge, technology, and networks built up by decades of global commerce.

None of the above could have been accomplished by a preconceived government plan. The production and distribution of the vaccines really were a triumph of globalization.

Read my article in Spanish here, or, better yet, read Scott’s longer article on which it is based, here. For a more complete view of the blessings of globalization at a time during which it is coming under attack by both the left and the right, see the essays in Cato’s new project, “Defending Globalization.”

Jeffrey Miron

This article appeared on Substack on October 4, 2023.

What should libertarians think about government shutdowns due to Congressional failure to approve new spending bills? Libertarians oppose most spending affected by shutdowns, so one might assume they are on board.

That is not my view. While shutdowns suspend some government expenditures, the effect is temporary. Furloughed employees, for example, get back pay when the shutdown ends.

No evidence shows that shutdowns have slowed the path of government growth after reopening. Even the temporary reduction is small, since many discretionary programs continue, as does entitlement spending (which is more than half of federal expenditure).

The same caution applies to using tax cuts to shrink government. Milton Friedman famously argued that all tax cuts are good because they “starve the beast.” Even if Congress cuts taxes now, however, it can raise them later, which is what seems to happen in practice.

More broadly, process or institutional “fixes” to big government are unlikely to succeed. State balanced budget amendments do not seem to restrain spending, and requiring fiscal scoring from external agencies like the CBO leads to gimmicks that circumvent accountability. If the electorate wants more spending, politicians will find a way.

The only way to shrink government, significantly and sustainably, is to convince more people that smaller government is better.

Walter Olson

The Supreme Court today hears oral argument in Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, in which it will decide whether a self‐​appointed Americans with Disabilities Act “tester” has Article III standing to challenge a place of public accommodation’s failure to provide disability accessibility information on its website, even if she lacks any intention of visiting that place of public accommodation.

The constitutional breadth of Article III standing aside, the case is one that Congress could have long ago have defused simply by clarifying that a consumer who lacks genuine intent to patronize a business, or who could have gotten a defect in accessibility fixed on simple request to the business, has not suffered a cognizable legal injury from the problem.

In the meantime, the case spotlights the enduring phenomenon of mass‐​production ADA complaint mills, which may file hundreds of lawsuits against Main Street or online businesses with cookie‐​cutter complaint language, demanding a sum of money to go away that is often related to the cost of legal defense. While this is dressed up for its visit to the high court as “tester” litigation, it tends to be a good bit more cash‐​driven than the activities of, say, law school clinics that send so‐​called testers to apply for apartment vacancies to see whether landlords are treating applicants of one race less well.

I’ve written about ADA filing mills often at this site over the past decade. Here are a few examples: “New York Times Covers ADA Shakedown Lawsuits;” “Clint Eastwood, Lawyers, and the ADA;” “ADA’s Assault on the Web: Your Turn, Congress;” and “Lawyers Sue Retailers for Not Putting Braille on Gift Cards.”

Those in search of a deeper dive on the subject should check out my Cato blog Overlawyered, which ran from 1999 to 2000 and at which ADA filing mills were a recurring theme through a hundred or more posts.

Adam N. Michel and Chris Edwards

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley recently proposed eliminating the 18.4 cents per gallon federal gas tax. She reiterated her support for the idea at the second Republican debate in California.

Federal gas tax revenues go into the Highway Trust Fund and then are dished out to the states to use on highway and transit projects. However, since 98 percent of the nation’s streets and highways are owned by state and local governments, it would be simpler and more efficient if those governments were responsible for the funding. Having the federal government raise the funds and then return the funds to the states with regulations attached is unnecessarily bureaucratic.

States have the best information to determine their local infrastructure needs. States that want to improve their highways can increase their own state‐​level gas taxes, sales taxes, or user charges. Or they can issue debt or pursue full or partial privatization. The states have all the necessary fiscal tools to tackle their own infrastructure challenges.

In contrast to presidential candidate Haley, many policymakers favor raising the federal gas tax rate. They note that the tax has not been raised since 1993 and that its real value has been eroded by inflation. That is true. But in the absence of federal tax increases, states have filled the void.

The chart shows Federal Highway Administration data for federal gas tax rates and average state gas tax rates. The average state rate rose from 19.3 cents per gallon in 2000 to 27.8 cents per gallon in 2021, a 44 percent increase. On top of the gas excise tax, states impose an additional 6 cents per gallon on gasoline in other taxes and fees. States know their own highway demands and can raise taxes or user charges anytime they need to.

A Fox News story makes Haley’s proposal to cut the federal gas tax sound like a policy reversal because she supported a state gas tax increase as South Carolina governor. But from our perspective, these proposals are entirely in sync. The states should have responsibility for highway funding, and we need to start reversing the increase in central control over infrastructure supported by many Republicans and Democrats.

By the way, Haley’s proposed swap of higher state gas taxes for lower state income tax rates when governor was sound economics.

Nikki Haley’s proposal to repeal the federal gas tax would be a positive step away from the continued consolidation of government power in Washington. We encourage all the presidential candidates to propose strategies for reviving the more efficient and democratic federal structure of the U.S. Constitution.

Chris Edwards

Congress may consider a farm bill in coming months, which provides an opportunity for the two parties to come together on spending reforms. Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree that millionaire farmers do not need taxpayer subsidies.

Cato held a Capitol Hill forum last week on the economics of farm subsidies. The keynote speaker was Vincent Smith, director of agricultural policy studies at AEI and professor emeritus at Montana State University. The following are some excerpts from Vince’s comments on the need for farm program reforms.

Vince discussed the complexity of the farm bill and the power of special interests to set the agenda.

There are quite literally hundreds of programs and thousands of rules and regulations … The extraordinary complexity of the farm bill makes it easy for vested self‐​interest groups—such as the Farm Bureau, national agricultural commodity associations, private insurance companies, agribusinesses, and environmental groups—to persuade congressional members to put in provisions that serve their own interests.

In many cases, these provisions come at the expense of the nation as a whole by encouraging the wasteful use of resources, government spending in excess of the benefits accruing to the farm sector, and the redistribution of income to wealthy households from average taxpayers. The federal crop insurance program is the poster child for such wasteful initiatives.

Vince then discussed how federal crop subsidies are not crucial to the farm economy. If subsidies were repealed, there would be modest improvements in efficiency and America’s farm production would continue apace.

[The rationale for crop subsidies] is the claim asserted by some legislators that the U.S. farm economy and agricultural production will collapse and U.S. consumers will face the threat of significant food insecurity if programs that provide subsidies to farmers go away or are funded at a lower level.

This claim is unambiguously incorrect. Multiple studies have found that most farm income safety net subsidies have relatively small impacts on the production of most commodities. With one exception, they also have very small impacts on the amount of land used for crop production. To the extent that the subsidies bring new land into production, which is the case for the crop insurance program, that land is of relatively poor quality, fragile, and subject to soil erosion and other degradation (including increased carbon emissions) when moved out of grazing land, pasture, or forestry.

To see why this is the case, consider that apart from three recent years—2018, 2019, and 2020—such government subsidies provide exceptionally modest shares of total farm revenues from all sources including market sales and government subsidies. Further, subsidies translate rapidly into higher land prices, as peer‐​reviewed quantitative research has consistently demonstrated. This creates the associated problem of increasing the costs of entering farming for new, often younger farmers.

To repeat, there is no credible content to claims that the farm sector and agricultural production would collapse if farm income safety net programs, including the federal crop insurance program, were to go away.

If anything, the evidence points the other way. Current farm subsidy programs allow poorly managed, inefficient farms to survive for long periods of time, inhibiting the transfer of those resources to more efficient and productive operations, which are also likely to be more environmentally responsible. The case study that supports this conclusion is the well‐​documented and substantially positive productivity impacts of ending farm subsidy programs in New Zealand.

Vince also tackled “the claim that farm subsidies are essential for the survival of the family farm, which is a major appeal to the heart and purse strings of the public.” He finds that the vast majority of American farms are family farms, including most of the largest farms in the nation. The largest farms receive the great bulk of federal subsidies even though these farms are in top financial shape and do not need taxpayer handouts.

Over 97 percent of all farms in the United States are family farms, and that includes the overwhelming majority of such businesses often described as factory or corporate farms, which in terms of production are in the largest 10 percent of all farms. Those farms produce over 50 percent of all output and receive about 60 percent of all subsidies, as documented by AEI scholars and other researchers using USDA survey data. Large farms have low levels of debt and substantial assets, and they can readily access loans when commodity prices are lower than expected or crop yields are low because of adverse weather. Absent farm subsidies or the federal crop insurance program, large farms face almost no risk of going out of business because of year‐​to‐​year variations in farm income.

Mid‐​sized and small commercial farms that produce about 10 percent of U.S. agricultural output likely face more financial risks, but they get very little from price and income support programs. For example, under the crop insurance program, median‐​sized farms that use crop insurance receive about $2,500 a year in subsidies, while farms in the largest 10 percent receive over $70,000, on average, and the very largest farms (the top 1 percent) receive hundreds of thousands of dollars. That pattern is replicated in other farm income support initiatives, and initial research indicates the same holds true for the large conservation programs.

Vince Smith provides extensive analyses of agricultural programs and farm subsidies on his AEI webpage.

Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group also presented at the Cato forum. His commentaries on farm programs are available here.

I echoed many of Vince’s and Scott’s points about crop subsidies at the forum, but I also pointed to foreign food aid as another area for budget reforms.

Romina Boccia

It’s a positive sign that Congress avoided an unnecessary and wasteful government shutdown this weekend. But the work to responsibly fund the government for the next fiscal year remains. Meanwhile the bigger fiscal challenge – growing debt and rising interest costs – continues to worsen.

As I predicted about six weeks ago, Congress would likely punt on funding the government in full by the statutory deadline of October 1, due to deep divisions over discretionary spending levels, how to fund federal disaster relief accounts, and whether to provide additional emergency spending for Ukraine.

Now they’ve done it, punting this fight to the Friday before Thanksgiving, once again pushing lawmakers up against a holiday deadline. This is an old story in Washington that continues to repeat itself. There’s nothing quite like deadline pressure to persuade legislators to let bad policy slide.

It’s not a completely clean continuing resolution, as Congress added $16 billion in emergency designated spending to shore up federal disaster accounts. This new deficit spending is in addition to the spending caps Congress agreed to in the debt limit deal (FRA, Fiscal Responsibility Act) to primarily cover a pre‐​existing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) budget shortfall that legislators knew about for many months. FEMA’s disaster accounts should be fully budgeted for under existing spending caps, not rely on a separate deficit funding stream because it’s more convenient for Congress to spend more than to cut wasteful and ineffective federal spending in other parts of the budget. Congress once again took the easy way out.

Congress should adhere to the spending caps agreed to in the debt limit deal without phony budget gimmicks and without blowing the budget by designating regular funding as if it were for emergencies.

More importantly, Congress must get serious about addressing the unsustainable growth in the U.S. debt that’s almost entirely driven by increases in health care, Social Security, and interest costs. Just last week, the interest rate on the 10‐​year Treasury bond reached 4.5% for the first time since 2007, driving up the cost of federal debt servicing—a debt that’s now as large as the entire U.S. economy and growing at a dangerous rate.

Under current projections, the federal government will seek to borrow in excess of four times the amount of debt, in just the next 30 years, as the United States has borrowed over its entire history ($120 trillion versus $26 trillion in publicly held debt).

While controlling discretionary spending, which funds a declining share (now 27 percent) of the federal government’s activities, is important, the ongoing government funding debate, which will resume in earnest before the November 17 shutdown deadline, is largely symbolic. America’s biggest fiscal challenge lies in the unchecked growth of federal health care and old‐​age entitlement programs.

Repeated shutdown fights and continuing resolutions have gotten us no closer to reforming Social Security and Medicare, which are responsible for 95 percent of long‐​term unfunded obligations.

A nonpartisan commission, modeled after the successful Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC), is our best hope for reining in unsustainable health care and Social Security spending growth, before a severe debt crisis forces more drastic and painful measures.

Cato Editors

Erec Smith, a Visiting Scholar of Politics and Society at the Cato Institute, is the co‐​founder of Free​Black​Thought​.com and the author of A Critique of Anti‐​Racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment. In a September 19 interview on CSPAN’s Booknotes+, Smith discussed his work and commented on several controversial topics, including racism and DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. Below are excerpts from the interview.

Asked about his favorite writers as a young man, Smith said, “Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass were my favorites [of the 19th century]. … Emerson’s self‐​reliance was a big motivator when I was in college as an undergrad. It resonated with me. … He has a wonderful essay titled ‘Self‐​Reliance,’ and he goes through life saying here’s why we shouldn’t have to depend on others too much. … We have knowledge ourselves. We should live life, you know, get out of the library and go out and live life. … I liked his grit, I liked his moxie, and I like what he was saying about self‐​reliance. Unfortunately, I think it’s something that is starting to wane in society today.”

Frederick Douglass is “an amazing story,” Smith said. “An escaped slave who became the most famous speaker of the 19th century. I could put ‘arguably’ in front of that, but no. If you look at the speaking engagements he had, the newspaper articles, he was in demand. People wanted to hear how this black slave escaped and became so eloquent.

“Well, he did it because of self‐​reliance. Hard work, knowing what he wanted to do, and going for it. Being pragmatic. And he admired Emerson for that. … They were inspirations for how to go out in this world and succeed. If Frederick Douglass can escape slavery and become the person he was, there’s no excuse for me not achieving my goals. What’s more, self‐​reliance is one of my favorite attributes, along with individuality – two things that Emerson embodied.”

Explaining his co‐​founding of Free​Black​Thought​.com, Smith said, “Free Black Thought is a non‐​profit focused on displaying viewpoint diversity within black America. There’s this idea that black people think alike, that they agree on certain interpretations, they agree on certain goals, things like that. They share the exact same values, attitudes, beliefs – and that is not true. So, Free Black Thought is out there to dispel that myth, and provide a voice for black writers, and poets and artists, who aren’t represented in mainstream media.”

After criticizing a speech by an academic who argued that learning standard English was wrong, Smith said he got a lot of pushback, people writing that he was “not a real, authentic black person, that I had a colonized mind, and I wasn’t as enlightened as everybody else about race relations in America and things like that. It got pretty vicious. It spilled over into social media. That motivated me to focus on the rhetoric of anti‐​racism and to fight race‐​essentialism, and to carve out free black thought.”

Smith: “There are certain people out there who don’t agree with me. It’s interesting when white people tell me I’m not being black correctly. That’s always fun. … I’ve been accused of white supremacy because I value things like self‐​reliance and individualism. I value learning as many dialects as you can, especially the one that’s the most common certainly in the professional spaces. Because of that I am [described] in quote/​unquote the white ways of knowing, and therefore a danger to the black community. And when white people tell me that it’s really disquieting, and infuriating, if I’m to be honest.”

When asked what he says back to those critics, Smith said, “It hasn’t really happened to my face. It’s happened on social media. I’m not entirely sure it would happen to my face anytime soon. But I remind people of the hypocrisy coming from a lot of anti‐​racist scholars, activists, what have you, who insist that we believe black voices – but not mine. They insist we should embrace the lived experiences of black people – but not mine. So I point out that hypocrisy and they typically have nothing to say.”

Smith was then asked to define certain phrases from his book.

Smith: “Systemic racism is the idea that racism, they say, is baked‐​in to American society and to American institutions. The idea is that these institutions are built with the oppression of minorities in mind. Certain policies are made so that white people maintain superiority. And every disparity in race relations is because of this systemic racism. Right? Every problem is because of this systemic racism and nothing else. That’s the idea.”

Asked if he sees systemic racism actually happening, Smith replied, “I don’t typically see it actually happening. But that’s the nature of it, if you ask the people who believe in it. It’s supposed to be hidden, insidious. It’s something you have to look for. And if you don’t see it, then you are suffering from false consciousness. You have a quote/​unquote colonized mind….”

Asked what white supremacy means to him, Smith said, “White supremacy is the act of maintaining supremacy by people of European ancestry. It is aligned with Enlightenment values like self‐​reliance and individualism, primacy of reason, rule of law. All these things are derived from people who derived from Europe, a.k.a. white people, and therefore, because of that connection, they are already considered inherently racist. A lot of people go so far as to say these things are worsening racism because they help hide it.”

Smith was then asked if he believes there is white supremacy and he said, “No. [People] who are most adamant about white supremacy are the ones that tend to have the least interaction with white people. They tend to be people who grew up in predominantly black and predominantly Latino areas and didn’t really meet and interact with white people until later on in their lives.

“I grew up in a predominantly white area and went to a very diverse school with many white people and black people around me. I liked it, I was proud of it for that. … At a young age I realized that white supremacy was not really legitimate. I was sitting in class and I looked to my left, and the white kid to my left was eating paste and I said, ‘He’s superior to me?’ (Laughter.) This is clearly a myth. … White supremacy is not the bogeyman, the specter that some people say it is.”

As for Black Lives Matter, Smith said, “I love the term. But the organization has some flaws, as most people are starting to realize. Forget about the financial issues they’re in. They’re coming from a particular ideology that I think is not conducive to improving race relations. That ideology is based in Marxist thought. They call it critical theory, or critical social theory. It basically — it takes Marx and instead of proletariat bourgeoisie, it’s [garbled] and project that on society and move from there. It’s based on that idea and I think it’s profoundly flawed.

“… A lot of black people feel like me. They don’t speak up because it doesn’t seem to be in their best interests. They like their jobs. They like being part of a community, whatever, and they don’t want to rock the boat. They understand the flaws in the logic of organizations like BLM.”

Commenting on DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, Smith said, “The terms came from the civil rights movement in the 60s. … However, the definitions we have now are derived from a critical social justice mindset, and those terms have changed. … [Today] diversity means diversity of bodies but not viewpoint. … Equity means equality of outcome not equality of opportunity. … And inclusion is basically tantamount to censorship. You can’t say anything that might offend a minority or — they call it micro‐​aggressions. If you ask someone where he or she is from, that is considered inherently racist, whether consciously or unconsciously. So, these things are not quite what they used to be.

“That makes all the difference because that leads into the redefinition of other terms, like racism, for example. That can only be a white person discriminating against a black person, regardless of the white person’s socio‐​economic status or a black person’s socio‐​economic status. … Racism can only be done by white people. If I am discriminatory against people because of their white skin, that’s just discrimination, that’s just prejudice. Racism is something different.

“Most Americans don’t know that. Yet their DEI officials in their workplace or their school, or something like that, are abiding by those definitions, which is part of the reason why they can get away with it.”

To listen to the interview, click here.

Colleen Hroncich

I recently toured Freedom Learning Academy in Overland Park, Kansas, and was really inspired by what I saw there. Josiah Enyart was a public school teacher and coach for more than 10 years. Over time, he started to get a bit disillusioned by what he was seeing in his school. But it was really when his oldest child entered public school and started having some issues that he began paying closer attention to what was happening.

Then Covid hit, and the district’s mask and vaccination policies were the final straw. He pulled his kids from the district and decided to homeschool them. Other parents found out and wanted Josiah to teach their kids, too. He quickly remodeled his basement and launched Freedom Learning Academy in fall 2021 with 15 students. Word continued to spread, and he had 18 students by the end of the year—with nearly 80 on a waitlist.

With so much interest in his school, Josiah was scrambling to find a bigger location. But it’s hard to find a place that can work for a variety of educational needs, including classrooms, a community space, and outdoor space. Eventually he found a church that was happy to let the school come in on weekdays for an affordable price. Because of the trouble with finding a location, many of the interested families had already committed to other educational options. Despite the delay, Freedom Learning Academy had 36 students in the first year in the church and almost 50 the next year.

Freedom Learning Academy is registered as a Non‐​Accredited Private School in Kansas, which Josiah likes because it gives him a lot of flexibility and freedom from government intrusion. It is strongly influenced by Montessori principles, like self‐​directed learning with lots of hands‐​on activities. Teachers strive to maintain a homeschool‐​like atmosphere with one‐​on‐​one attention and giving students time to explore topics in depth and move at their own pace.

FLA uses Kansas state standards as a guide because Josiah believes it will help students when they transition to other learning environments, but students can move up and down as needed rather than being locked into a certain level based on their age or grade.

So far, Josiah’s experiment seems to be working. Enrollment has grown each year, and he hasn’t lost any students. “The families at FLA have been greatly impacted by our school,” he says. “With FLA, they have found a safe community that supports parental rights, hard work, strong character, good decision making, and a desire to build up every child in their academic and social skills through meaningful and engaging work mixed in with the opportunity to experience nature and participate in society.”

Josiah isn’t just bullish on FLA; he’s bullish on the sector as a whole. “Alternative education models like home‐​school, micro schools, and hybrid schools are the wave of the educational future,” he explains. “They are the only way I see us strengthening our country and maintaining the family values that shaped our country’s success that so many hold dear. It is a leap of faith. It is a lot of change if you’ve only been in public or private school, but it is worth it.”

To any would‐​be education entrepreneurs, including parents and teachers, who are considering starting a new learning environment, Josiah is very encouraging. “There are so many people willing to help and support your endeavor to improve education and the lives of those involved. The more options we can provide for parents, the more successful this next generation of leaders will be. We need to rebuild the bedrocks of our society: Strong family values, virtuous behavior, and skilled and knowledgeable individuals with the ability to collaborate, problem solve, and think critically. Alternative education is the answer.”