Hello and welcome, dear reader, to Tuesday, May 26, 2026. Yes, Tuesday, not Monday. Thin pickings on National Observances today. My calendar program says it’s National Paper Airplane Day, National Blueberry Cheesecake Day, and World Red Head Day (Which reminds me of a particular Sherlock Holmes story).
1538: Geneva expels John Calvin and his followers from the city, forcing him to live in exile in Strasbourg for the next three years.
1647: Massachusetts bans priests from entering the colony. An odd history, given the state is heavily Catholic today, following Irish and Italian immigration in the 1800’s to the 1940’s.
1805: Lewis and Clark first sight the Rocky Mountains.
1857: U.S. slave Dred Scott and family freed by owner Henry Taylor Blow, only 3 months after U.S. courts ruled against them in Dred Scott v. Sandford.
1897: Dracula, by Irish author Bram Stoker, is published by Archibald Constable and Company in London.
1908: Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Murdock and children become the first family to travel across the United States by car, driving from Los Angeles to New York City in a Packard Thirty in 32 days, 5 hours, and 25 minutes
1922: Vladimir Lenin suffers a severe stroke that leaves him partially paralyzed and severely limits his ability to lead the Soviet government
1924: President Calvin Coolidge signs a law restricting immigration.
1927: Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company produce the last (and 15 millionth) Model T Ford / Tin Lizzie.
1930: The Supreme Court rules that buying liquor does not violate the Constitution.
1941: American Flag House (Betsy Ross' Home) given to the city of Philadelphia.
1967: EMI rushes to release The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
1975: "Rhinestone Cowboy" single released by Glen Campbell (Billboard Country Song of the Year, 1975).
1989: American radio broadcasters go silent for 30 seconds at 7:42 a.m. to honor the radio industry.
Birthdays today include: Mary of Teck, Queen of Great Britain and consort of George V; Al Jolson, American-Lithuanian jazz singer and silent film actor (Mamie, Swanee); John Wayne, actor (True Grit, Rio Bravo, Big Jake); Robert Morley, British actor (Marie Antoinette, The Young Ones, How the Other Half Loves), Laurance Rockefeller, CEO (Chase Manhattan Bank); Peter Cushing, actor, (Dracula, Star Wars, Doctor Who); Peggy Lee, Pop singer; James Arness, actor (Gunsmoke, Island In The Sky); Miles Davis, jazz musician, trumpeter and composer (Kinda Blue; Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet; Sketches of Spain); Jack Kevorkian, pathologist and right-to-die activist; Joe Altobelli, baseball utility (Rochester Red Wings, Cleveland Indians, Minnesota Twins); Brent Musburger, sportscaster; Levon Helm, drummer and singer (The Band - "Up On Cripple Creek"; "The Weight"); Aldrich Ames, American CIA officer convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union; Ray Ennis, British rock guitarist (Swinging Blue Jeans - "You're No Good"); Stevie Nicks, singer-songwriter (Fleetwood Mac); Hank Williams Jr, country singer-songwriter; Jeremy Corbyn, British politician (Labour Party leader 2015-20); Philip Michael Thomas, actor (Miami Vice – "Tubbs"); Sally Ride, first American woman to go to space, Lenny Kravitz, Musician; and Helena Bonham Carter, actress (Harry Potter, Fight Club, The King's Speech).
If it is your day as well, have a happy one.
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Long-time readers of this column will know that I’m a long-time supporter of removing the government from the educational process. From “Eric’s Axioms”:
The biggest single mistake that we have ever made as a country, a culture, a people… Was to turn the education of our young over to the government. Do we really expect a taxpayer-funded, government-run system to properly teach young minds full of mush the founders' concepts of limited government?
So you can imagine a blurb on Instapundit from PJ Media’s Stephen Green caught my eye this morning, which contained an X post from Margot Cleveland:
By 1900, the United States had achieved a 90% literacy rate largely by using McGuffey Readers in one-room schoolhouses. But, yeah, NYC’s problem is it’s not spending enough money. pic.twitter.com/hrgJcxILk1
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) May 25, 2026
This confirms what we already knew: When government — especially Democrat-run government — faces a problem, it reaches for one tool and one tool only: your money. The thing is, it doesn’t solve the problem.
Look at the numbers. USA Facts reports the Federal Department of Education burned through $268 billion of taxpayer money in FY 2024 alone. The President is working on bringing that number under control, but the powerful teachers' unions are working to defeat those efforts.
Of that obscene $268 billion sum, LingoBright confirms a mere 18% — $49 billion — actually reached K-12 students. Washington and the teachers’ unions swallowed the rest. And the return on this multi-generational plunder? Literacy scores have cratered every major benchmark below since the early 1990s. Decades of runaway spending. Zero results. Children who can't read their diplomas, but they know all about climate change and how white males are the locus of every problem in the world, and that our only hope is socialism. If people could actually read, as one commenter put it, we’d not see people who don’t know that the recent travesty on Orwell’s Animal Farm is a complete reversal of Orwell’s storyline. Sexual mutilation without parental notification. That's the legacy of government education. But in looking at the history of the thing, how could it have gone otherwise?
Back in 2022, Brad Thompson wrote:
The primary objectives of America’s new Prussianized education system were fivefold: first, to replace parents with the State as the primary influence on the education of children; second, to elevate and promote the interests of the State; third, to substitute America’s highly individualistic and laissez-faire social-political system with one that was collectivistic and statist in nature; fourth, to create a new kind of citizen, whose primary virtues would be self-sacrifice, compliance, obeisance, and conformity; and, fifth, to Americanize and Protestantize the teeming hordes of Irish-Catholics who were coming to the United States (and then the waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. after the Civil War from southern and eastern Europe).
To achieve these goals, the single most important task of the new government schooling was to disconnect the natural ties between children and their parents.
The primary objectives of America’s new Prussianized education system were fivefold: first, to replace parents with the State as the primary influence on the education of children; second, to elevate and promote the interests of the State; third, to substitute America’s highly individualistic and laissez-faire social-political system with one that was collectivistic and statist in nature; fourth, to create a new kind of citizen, whose primary virtues would be self-sacrifice, compliance, obeisance, and conformity; and, fifth, to Americanize and Protestantize the teeming hordes of Irish-Catholics who were coming to the United States (and then the waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. after the Civil War from southern and eastern Europe).
To achieve these goals, the single most important task of the new government schooling was to disconnect the natural ties between children and their parents.
Horace Mann, the 19th-century godfather of American government schooling, summed up the anti-parent premise of state-run education in these terms: “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”
If these goals and the results do not qualify as things to be avoided at all costs, I don't know what does. Our current government-run education system is nothing short of cultural suicide.
It is time, folks. Let's work to get the government out of the schools.
Thought of the Day: Interesting that Biden’s 87,000 new IRS agents never found ONE Somali Fraud case. Not one.
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