Daily Archives: November 9, 2021

The future of America depends on abandoning the illusion of neutrality.

Tom Klingenstein is right in his latest speech. I might quibble over small details, but what matters is that Klingenstein is indubitably correct about many big things: above all, that the Right cant reverse the tide of wokeism until it begins to minimize the influence of libertarianism. As he says, Libertarian-influenced Republicans tell the wokesters: You can live your way, just allow us to live our way. To which the woke respond: You must live our way or we will punish you.

If there is one lesson we must draw from the experience of the past few decades, and especially of the past few years, it is precisely this one. There has never been, and there will never be, a neutral American public square. It is a fantasy that we could ever or should ever make cacophonous debate and disagreement our only true ideals, leaving each to penetrate the mystery of human life on his own, or to figure out whether there are two genders or 107. One claim or other will coercively predominate.

Yet neutrality is precisely the visionan illusion, reallyunder which much of the establishment Right has labored and continues to labor. Klingenstein, with his characteristic lucidity and forthrightness, sees through it.

Thisshouldntbe that hard. All it requires is taking an unflinching glance at U.S. society as it exists today, rather than as the libertariansor better yet, right-liberals or conservative liberalsmight wish it to be. The claim that there are more than two sexes, or that 1619 is Americas true founding, is enshrined as public dogma. Americans who reject it risk being unpersoned by Big Tech, fired from their jobs, treated as domestic terrorists by the national-security apparatus, and so on.

It matters little that much of this coercion is meted out by private firms rather than governmental actors. This meaningless formal distinction is one of the right-liberals most enraging sleights of hand; whatever their subjective motivations in insisting upon it, objectively, it puts them on the side of the soft totalitarians.

The right-liberals flash as badges of honor their various commitments: to neutrality, to pluralism as a very-high good, to a society defined above all by disagreement. But really, they are marks of a great and craven abdication. For at least two generations, they have garnered prestige and profitable sinecures of various sorts on the promise of doing no more than perpetuating the endless discussion of liberalism. The right-liberals have asked voters for political authority, while determined not to exercise it on the side of truth. The wokes, meanwhile, are definitively ending the discussion, and they seek office to wield raw power.

My generation of right-wingers has a clear task, and it is to follow Klingensteins call to sideline right-liberalism and libertarianismmore than that, to bury their sclerotic institutions, abandon their illusions, and expose the ugly material realities churning behind their tired watchwords and slogans.

Read the rest here:
Save AmericaReject Libertarianism - The American Mind

American science fiction writer

Poul Anderson

Poul William Anderson (November 25, 1926 July 31, 2001)[4] was an American science fiction author from the 1940s until the 21st century. Anderson wrote fantasy novels, historical novels, and short stories. His awards include seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.[5]

Poul Anderson was born on November 25, 1926 in Bristol, Pennsylvania to Scandinavian parents.[6] Shortly after his birth, his father, Anton Anderson moved the family to Texas, where they lived for over ten years. Following Anton Anderson's death, his widow took the children to Denmark. The family returned to the United States after the outbreak of World War II, settling eventually on a Minnesota farm.

While he was an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, Anderson's first stories were published by John W. Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction: "Tomorrow's Children" by Anderson and F. N. Waldrop in March 1947 and a sequel, "Chain of Logic" by Anderson alone, in July.[a] He earned his B.A. in physics with honors but became a freelance writer after he graduated in 1948. He placed his third story in the December Astounding.[7]

Anderson married Karen Kruse in 1953 and moved with her to the San Francisco Bay area. Their daughter Astrid (now married to science fiction author Greg Bear) was born in 1954. They made their home in Orinda, California. Over the years Poul gave many readings at The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore in Berkeley; his widow later donated his typewriter and desk to the store.[citation needed]

In 1965, Algis Budrys said that Anderson "has for some time been science fiction's best storyteller".[8] He was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) in 1966 and of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), also in the mid-1960s. The latter was a loosely-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors led by Lin Carter, originally eight in number, with entry by credentials as a fantasy writer alone. Anderson was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972.

Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy.[9][10] The Science Fiction Writers of America made Anderson its 16th SFWA Grand Master in 1998[11] and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2000, its fifth class of two deceased and two living writers.[12] He died of prostate cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. A few of his novels were first published posthumously.

See the original post:
Poul Anderson - Wikipedia

Photos and story by Philip Casper.

Spike Cohen, 2020 Libertarian Vice Presidential Candidate, visited The Firing Pin in Bergen to raise money for the Erie County Libertarian Party in an event called Shoot Guns With Bazookajew. Duane Whitmer, Erie County Libertarian Party Chair helped facilitate the event and while there, Spike introduced himself to everyone at the shop and listened while many voiced their concerns about the state of affairs in NY, and the United States as a whole. Topics ranged from vaccine mandates to gun control, to widespread government overreach.

Cohen stated We arent going to be able to set NY free if we continue to vote for the people that got us in this mess. Republican, or Democrat. There is an alternative out there, and this is it. You are the power. Whitmer, who recently ran for Erie County Comptroller said Bringing a pro-second amendment candidate to one of the biggest defenders of the second amendment in the country was a wonderful experience and Im glad to be a part of it. Im thankful for the guys at The Firing Pin for all they do.

Pat Kimball, owner and lead instructor of First Line Defense delivered a safety message before everyone entered the range, and gave brief one on one training sessions to promote safe, and proficient firearm handling. The libertarian party believes that every person has a right to arm themselves in self-defense.

Originally posted here:
Libertarian VP candidate visits The Firing Pin with message of limited government - The Batavian

The school promises forbidden courses to students. Photo: PBS/YouTube

In 1971, the televangelist Jerry Falwell embarked on an ambitious new venture. With the help of Elmer Towns, a Christian academic, he founded a new institution of higher education: Liberty University. Falwell had grand dreams for his new school, as his official biography on Libertys website makes clear: Not only would it function as an ideological factory for churning out new conservative activists, it would do so on a grand scale. Falwell wanted the school to grow to 50,000 students, a goal the school says it has now achieved. Liberty wasnt Falwells first educational experiment, either. Hed previously founded a K-12 school as a segregation academy. Before wokeness entered the right-wings lexicon, desegregation was the enemy of the hour.

Decades later, the right remains fixated on education, agitating over the alleged prevalence of critical race theory in public schools and the hysterical excesses of college liberals. Race and gender are still animating concerns. Enter Bari Weiss, a self-styled tribune of the people, with an announcement that parallels Falwells earlier foray into higher education: She, too, is starting a university with some help from her friends. The unaccredited University of Austin is dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth, proclaims a post on Weisss Substack. Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences, wrote the universitys new president, Pano Kanelos, citing the controversial academic Eric Kaufmann.

Kanelos is half-right. There is a free-speech crisis in higher education, but it exists on campuses like Libertys, where students and faculty have long complained of censorship from zealous administrators. My alma mater, a Christian university much like Liberty, actively restricted the content we could publish in our student newspaper; a trustee once complained that I had used the phrase reproductive rights in an article. Years later the school confiscated copies of an independent student publication. Nevertheless, Kanelos ignores these examples to single out Yale and Stanford and Harvard. In these top schools, he queried, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth once the central purpose of a university remains the highest virtue? Kanelos implies the existence of a past where the university was once free of donor pressure or administrative cowardice or, more to the point, pesky student activism. But this history only exists in his imagination. Universities have always been fraught places, where the free exchange of ideas often results in intellectual turbulence.

Its precisely that intellectual turbulence that Kanelos, Weiss, and their comrades seek to escape, much as Jerry Falwell did in the 1970s. Falwell was no outlier. The right has long dreamed of alternatives to traditional higher education. The televangelist Pat Robertson founded Regent University for similar reasons. Michael Farris, the founder of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, founded Patrick Henry College in 2000 to shelter homeschool graduates and funnel them into Republican politics. Hillsdale College has assumed a sharply right-wing political identity over time, and rejects federal funding as a matter of principle. (A Hillsdale professor sits on the University of Austins board of advisers.) These schools exist as laboratories for right-wing thought; they are committed not to free expression but to indoctrination. The University of Austin will be no different.

Consider the parties involved. As a student at Columbia University, Weiss developed a censorious reputation of her own.A campus organization Weiss co-founded did demand that the administration change the departments curriculum and make it easier to file complaints against professors, measures that would have affected certain scholars responsibilities and duties, as well as their future job prospects, the writers Mari Cohen and Joshua Leifer observed in Jewish Currents. Weiss and her fellow activists targeted Arab professors for speech they deemed hostile to Israel, efforts shes since downplayed to better portray herself as a campaigner for free expression. A University of Austin founding faculty fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has called Islam a nihilstic cult of death and has claimed that violence is inherent to the religion, which bodes ill for any Muslim who might wish to attend the new university. The new universitys positions on sex and gender arent hard to guess, either. Another fellow, the anti-trans academic Kathleen Stock, voluntarily resigned her position at the University of Sussex, claiming that student protests curtailed her own academic freedom. Put another way, Stock found free expression a bit too lively to tolerate.

Others linked to the university stand accused of crossing professional lines with female students. One, Joshua Katz, received a year-long suspension from Princeton University over an inappropriate relationship with an undergraduate woman. Another, Joe Lonsdale, has been accused of raping a woman he mentored, an allegation he vehemently denies. Lonsdales nonprofit, Cicero Research, is fiscally sponsoring the new institution.

So what rights will a University of Austin student actually possess? They cant count on a right to free expression, that much is clear. The presence of Lonsdale and Katz raises further questions about the universitys position on due process for survivors of sexual misconduct. Students wont even benefit from an intellectually diverse faculty. Survey the schools website, and you wont find a single leftist scholar. Nor should we expect to find one. Lonsdales nonprofit, Cicero, says its committed to free-market based solutions to public policy issues. And as a private institution, the University of Austin will retain the broad freedom to censor students and faculty as it sees fit as does Liberty and my alma mater. What weve got, then, is a Bible college for libertarians. Those disturbed by progress will find shelter on campus. Pledging freedom from wokeness, the University of Austin actually seeks freedom from free exchange. There is a soupon of social liberalism, which extends no further than equality for LGB people and not to trans people and which is too inadequate to greatly distinguish the school from other conservative institutions. In this university, Falwell would see kindred minds. Theres nothing new here.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

Visit link:
Whos Afraid of Higher Education? - New York Magazine

Ludwig von Mises

by Bruce Majors

Virginia had electionsthis week that garnered no media coverage: internal elections for offices in the Libertarian Party of Northern Virginia.

Voters and the media pay little attention to Libertarian and other smaller party candidates except when they poll well enough to look like spoilers. That happened in the 2013 gubernatorial election when Robert Sarvis won 5% of the vote, tilting the election, many Republicans believed, from their candidate Ken Cuccinelli to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, and in the 2016 presidential presidential campaign when Gary Johnson at one point polled in the double digits.

Libertarians played no such spoiler role in 2021, yet in off-year elections some 150 of them were elected to local offices across the country, mainly in smaller rural and suburban jurisdictions doubling the number of elected Libertarians. (None were in Virginia.) Perhaps more significantly, Libertarians have been redefining themselves. In the past, the party had a left-leaning streak that stressed such ideas as legalizing all drugs, opening the borders to immigration, and eliminating taxes. Over the past year, though, the Libertarian Party has experienced an internal revolution led by a group called the Mises Caucus.

Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian Jew, fled the Nazis and became a professor of economics at New York University. There he founded a school of free market economics dubbed Austrian economics, along with his Nobel Laureate student Friedrich Hayek, author of the oft-cited book, The Road to Serfdom. (Austrian economics is a specialty of the economics department at Northern Virginias George Mason University.) The ideas of Mises, Hayek, and the Austrian economists have seeped out of the libertarian movement and infiltrated mainstream thinking among conservative Republicans and even some decentralists on the Left.

One of Mises chief concerns were how governments manipulated interest rates and money supplies by creating money and credit and government debt, which he argued causes business cycles. He also explained how government has imperfect knowledge about supply, demand, and opportunities in the economy, information captured by changing prices, and, so, cannot effectively plan an economy.

Hayek wrote more widely on social, political and philosophical topics, and argued that as government planning and intervention creates economic failure, leading to the rise of dishonest, grifting, and brutal politicians who will look for scapegoats to blame for their failed policies.These ideas may be abstract to most people, but they explain what Americans are seeing in the wreckage of the Biden economy.

To outsiders the Mises people might look Trumpian, or at least like a right-populist movement, compared to the left-libertarians. Most Mises libertarians would reject this characterization, pointing to, among other things, their radically pro-free trade advocacy. But they do tend to emphasize private property and free market economics as the core of their politics. Many entered the libertarian movement by working on campaigns for former Congressman Ron Paul, a gold bug and promoter of Austrian economics, who was actually the Libertarian Partys presidential candidate in 1988. However one might describe the Mises Caucus, it shares with many conservative groups de-platforming attacks from Facebook and other tech titans for wrong thought posts about COVID and other policies.

The Libertarian Party has had a decades-long internal struggle between coastal elite campaign consultants and think tank executives, often working in jobs funded by Charles and David Koch, and other libertarians who do not work professionally in politics and the media. The latter have long decried the former as variously Beltway libertarians (the Kochtopus, Craniacs, after former CATO Institute executive Ed Crane) or as liberaltarians because of their alleged need to ingratiate themselves with the Democratic media establishment. In the 1980s these outsider libertarians were led by Murray Rothbard, another Austrian economics professor who was a student of Ludwig von Mises. The professional libertarians sometimes belittle the competenceand messaging of their rivals.

On Saturday 50-odd Libertarian delegates elected new officers in an online convention, and a Mises or right-populist trend was discernible. It looked as if, as in many states, the Mises Caucus had conducted a recruitment drive, persuading Ron Paul fans and others who were not previously in the Libertarian Party to join and become delegates at state and local conventions. (One long-time local Libertarian activist and former LP candidate for Virginia state delegate summed it up: Im not anti-Mises, but I am concerned about a bunch of what are essentially random people populating the entire board.)

Like the Virginia general election, where the GOP routed Democrats, several offices were taken for the first time by candidates who were women or African American.

Jake Berube, a lantern-jawed advertising sales man for conservative media sites like Human Events and the Washington Examiner, was elected chairman over incumbent Adam Theo, a government contractor who had just run as one of several independents for Arlington county council. Theo had identified himself in his race as a progressive libertarian, emphasizing issues like eliminating qualified immunity for law enforcement.

Josie Gallagher, a tax consultant for small businesses and a Ron Paul fan was elected vice chair for Arlington and Alexandria, over Alex Pilkington, a paralegal at the (in)famous Democrat-affiliated law firm Covington and Burling and a former CATO Institute intern who said open immigration would be a primary area of focus.

C.J. Cunningham, another Ron Paul fan, was elected vice chair for Fairfax and Falls Church. Dan Ford, a veteran and the only African American running, was elected vice chair for Loudoun County. William Ogle, a physicist who made his Mises affiliation explicit in his campaign speech, was elected treasurer over Theo associate Katie Wilson. James Waddell was elected secretary and Henry Baraket, an immigrant from the Middle East who said he had fled tyranny and appreciated liberty, was elected as the boards at-large member. As the aforementioned long-term activist summed it up: I dont know anything at all about these guys. Literally never heard their names before today.

Just as Virginias off-year election predicts the 2022 midterms, another long-term activist participating in the convention says it predicts what will happen at the Libertarians statewide convention later this year: Obviously the notable thing is a clean sweep by the Mises Caucus folks. It speaks to the general trend of rapid increase in the size of the Mises Caucus and many small l libertarians joining the Libertarian Party. Based on today, Id anticipate overwhelming support for the Mises Caucus at the statewide convention in a few months. The Virginia Libertarian Party holds its convention in February in Glen Allen.

So, a new caucus is pulling new members into Virginias third largest party, which has shown itself able to affect Virginia elections. But are they just doing this to take over another state party, and its delegation, so they can decide who the Libertarians run as a Presidential candidate in 2024? Or will they use their new recruits to actually run in local and state offices in Virginia?

Northern Virginia resident Bruce Majors has written for The Hill, the Los Angeles Times, Reason, and other publications. He writes a Substack column,The Insurrection.

Excerpt from:
The Rise of the Mises Caucus - Bacon's Rebellion

In this week's Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie gather to berate one of the most expensive legislative packages in U.S. history and discuss some significant takeaways from last Tuesday's elections.

Discussed in the show:

1:52: That $2.1 trillion (yes, trillion) infrastructure bill that just passed.

20:35: Lessons from last week's elections.

29:05: Weekly Listener Question: I'm an attorney. All of my colleagues and I are fully vaccinated, yet we wear masks in the office. We are all required to be vaccinated. I hate it. Your response would be to find another job. I think Peter just had the audacity to suggest that switching employers is similar to going to a different restaurant because you don't like the spaghetti at the Olive Garden. For me, libertarianism is more than just a paradigm for government. It's a life philosophy. I am weary of the idea that anything goes, even if it's bad, as long as it only happens in the private sector. I am writing this email using a ridiculous pseudonym because I would not want my employer to know that I read and listen to Reason. They could fire me if they associate me with anything that looks un-woke; is this OK with you? Sure, I could quit my job. But any other job will have the same requirements. That doesn't really represent choice. Out here in the real world, you do not get to choose your job so easily. I do not have the option of being a professional libertarian. So I jab and mask, so I can keep making enough money to help my parents, no matter what I believe or what I wish to do with my body. This is OK with you?

41:53: The unveiling of the OSHA/vaccine mandate specifics.

51:58: Media recommendations for the week.

This week's links:

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today's sponsors:

Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Regan TaylorMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve

View original post here:
The Infrastructure Bill Makes Building Back More Expensive - Reason

There are two basic views of society and the role that politics should play in it. The traditional libertarian view, as embodied in America's founding(albeit imperfectly), sees government mainly as a referee that applies the laws equally to all citizens.

In thisview, the public square is a neutral place, where a tightly restrained government allows people to live out their lives largely as they chooseeven if they make seemingly boneheaded choices. The government adjudicates disputes among private parties, provides some public services, and tries mainly to keep people from harming one another.

The second view, which has long been common among progressives and now amongpopulist conservatives, is that there is no such thing as neutrality. In that way of thinking, the role of government is to advance the "public good," and officials should have all the necessary tools at their disposal to force people to behave (economically and culturally) as they should.

That view is even more traditional, as it harkens back to the days of kings, potentates, and marauderspeople who recognized nothing beyond their own power to exert force. The problem, of course, is that the "public good" is in the eye of the beholder. Someone has to make that call.

Even the most authoritarian Americans recognize the primacy of elections, even if they concoct bogusvoter-fraud theoriesto justify their attempt at stealing them. But there's much debate over what powers an election confers upon the winners.

According to the libertarian view, it shouldn't matter all that much who happens to become the president, governor, or city council member because those politicians are granted only a limited amount of authority. Unfortunately, those limits have eroded, and now elected and appointed officials (especially during the coronavirus) grab as much authority as they can.

That has turned politics into an endless grudge match, given the stakes always seem so high. The rhetorical fervor has convinced many Americans that they must always be active in politics, lest their way of life and religious faith get cast onto the dustbin. Even before Donald Trump, progressives have portrayed every GOP victory as the harbinger offascism.

Conservatives have done something similar in recent years. The author of the infamous "Flight 93" column published during the 2016 election argued that the race was the equivalent of that hijacked commercial airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania. Voters could charge the cockpit or die because a Hillary Clinton presidency would be "Russian Roulette with a semi-auto,"wroteMichael Anton.

Given these stakesreal or hyperbolicwe shouldn't be surprised that increasing numbers of Americans view every election as a do-or-die situation. If Republicans win, we'll soon be goose-stepping down Main Street and giving the Treasury to billionaires. If Democrats win, we better prepare for a life in the gulags, as socialists cancel Christmas and hand the country to Mexico.

Two recent news stories show how this politics-as-endless-culture-war is playing out. The Washington Post reported on a fracas in Kalispell, Mont.an historic town on the outskirts of Glacier National Park. This is one of the most beautiful locales in the country, yet the idyllic community is embroiled in vicious political and cultural divisions. The city, and the state, once exuded a friendly, tolerant attitude.

"Hostility over the November election, the coronavirus, and social movements have left a trail of bad blood among old-school Republicans, backers of the former president, increasingly vocal Democrats and out-of-state transplants, convulsing everything from the school district and the public library to daily interactions," according to the article. "Our community is going through a divorce right now," Mayor Mark Johnson told local officials.

I've seen it in my own community and elsewhere. And no place is immune from the hostilities. The Atlantic's Peter Wehner reported on the widening political divisions within American evangelical churches. "The aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset that characterizes so much of our politics has found a home in many American churches," hewrote.

This divide is the result of what many observers refer to as the"politicization of everything."I was always interested in politics, at least since my teenage years, but don't remember every single thing that we did leading to knock-down, drag-out political debates. I always had beloved friends and relatives with a variety of political opinions.

I don't know what we do (beyond, on a personal level, refusing to segregate ourselves into political tribes), but I know what not to do. In a recentcolumn, Sohrab Ahmari argued that to save America, we must reject libertarianism. He called on conservatives to reject the "illusion" of neutrality and exercise political authority "on the side of truth."

Whose truth? Whomever has thepower, I suppose. As exciting as it may sound to grab power and vanquish our enemies, I'd suggest that the only way to save America is to recommit to its original principles.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

Continue reading here:
Politics Is Rotting Brains and Making Everyone Mad - Reason

A new university is being created by a group of academics and media personalities who, unlike you and the university you work or study at, care about the truth:

And, might I add, they care about it fearlessly:

Featuring a number of figures who have fearlessly quit previous jobs rather than be around people who disagreed with them, the University of Austin promises to be fiercely independentfinancially, intellectually, and politically, by being funded via a libertarian think tank.

It will have a physical campus in Austin, Texas, because its good enough for [thinkers as radically different from one another as] Elon Musk and Joe Rogan.

The full curriculum is still in development, though it appears the universitys first offering will be a summer program entitled Forbidden Courses:

You know, this very morning my students and I discussed the value of sex in a good life, the question of whether incels and others should have a right to sex, and why this is a question worth asking. In order to cover controversial questions like this, I teach this course on my own time, in secretlike most other professors of moral and political philosophy. (We meet in the Great Books room of the library, since no one goes there anymore.) It is so refreshing to learn that a university will finally have the guts to put something like Contemporary Moral Problems in its course catalog.

The University of Austin aims to start an undergraduate college in 2024. In the meanwhile, there are plans to launch MA programs in several fields, including: Entrepreneurship and Leadership, Politics and Applied History, and Education and Moral Panics.

* * * * *

Okay, okay, okay. Some of you will have not liked that ( ) at all.

You can read the announcement of the creation of University of Austin from its president, Pano Kanelos, here.

In all seriousness, I think there are multiple reasons to favor experiments in higher education, so if the University of Austin survives its over-fertilized beginnings and blossoms into something beyond a safe space for status-quo warriors, that would be great. As an experiment in higher education, the University of Austin does not strike me as all that radical. (Jason Brennan of Georgetown University has his own reasons for thinking that, which he shares here.) But it has some very talented and, Im sure, well-meaning people involved, so well see. In the meanwhile, whatwouldconstitute a radical experiment in higher education?

Related: Illusion and Agreement in the Debate over Intolerance

Read more from the original source:
Experimenting with Higher Education - Daily Nous

In my middle school classroom, I had some simple rules and mantras: Dont lie, cheat, or steal. Cant is a swear word. Be respectful of one another. Its not you as a person but your behavior Im disappointed in.

Those principles should apply to the grown ups in the school district, too. The continued infighting, dishonesty, dysfunctional leadership, climate of fear and retaliation, cronyism (and possible misuse of millions of dollars in public money for select contractors) was and is unacceptable. Enough is more than enough. The agenda item to remove Clark County schools Superintendent Jesus Jara last week was sorely needed and past due.

I know the seven trustees care about the students, parents, staff, and community. But you wouldnt know it because Jara's so-called leadership created mistrust and divisiveness, leading to a paralyzing situation in which nearly no one was acting in the best interests of the districts children.

Sometimes, you can fix whats broken. Sometimes you shouldnt even try. In 2019, Jaras appalling behavior, ill-conceived actions and lack of proper and professional communication prompted a vote of no confidence by administrators. Their letter stated, and I quote, You are selfish and without moral code or compass.

The following year, Gov. Sisolak said Jara tried to "mislead" the public and blame others for his own poor decisions. State Superintendent Ebert said that as a leader in education, Jara had a responsibility to set an example, adding that blatantly altering the truth is not only a bad example, its a disservice to our educators. Speaker Jason Frierson said to Jara, The Trustees will do nothing, and you will be the benefactor of their failure to act. By your own behavior and dishonesty you have neutered yourself and rendered yourself universally ineffective.

Enough was enough, even back then.It should have been dealt with by the trustees. An opportunity to act arose again this past summer, but instead, fourtrustees voted to extend Jara's contract.

If you need more evidence of a problem, consider that no fewer than 26 cabinet-level administrators left before the current buyout. That much turnover is indicative of leadership and management problems. Notably, some who resigned were people Jara brought with him from Florida.

Then theres the concern about the hiring of overpriced, out-of-country companies, and paying businesses to produce materials that our teachers could easily have produced. (This still needs to be investigated despite Jaras termination.)

There are longer-term issues in play, too. As a body, the board essentially has been neutered since former Superintendent Carlos Garcia persuaded a majority of former trustees to give up their policy making authority, rendering them subordinate to the superintendent. Dont be fooled into thinking it was a good idea. The calculated policy change was first pushed by a national advocacy group, starting in Florida and under the guise of training and supporting non-traditional superintendents. Trainees of that program? Former Clark County school Superintendents Garcia, Jones, Martinez and Jara.

The current trustees now have an opportunity to undo the board governance policies, which truly are a lot of gobbledygook. I hope they do.

They also need to choose an interim superintendent. That person and the one subsequently hired need to have experience, integrity and true leadership skills. They need to listen to each concerned group including teachers, students, parents, administrators, support staff, community leaders, legislators and retired staff. Out of that, they need to adopt a cohesive vision and carry it out, working collaboratively with peers.

Its well past time for our long public school nightmare to end.

Chris Guinchigliani served in the Clark County School District for 30 years as a special education teacher. She also is a former Clark County commissioner.

More:
Trustees need to shake off the recent Clark County public school nightmare - The Nevada Independent