News – Politics – Opinion – Podcasts
Kevin P. Tyson 
WWe, for those who eschew both Arabic numerals and Roman numerals A modest proposal: since reading the Roman numeral II has apparently become a load-bearing skill our political class can no longer be trusted to perform, let us retire the old notation entirely. Henceforth, the present conflict shall be denoted by Euler’s number, taken to … Read more
Last August, the Claremont school district stared into a five-million-dollar hole, and the community did what communities do. People wrote checks. People ran fundraisers. People rallied for the kids. The athletic department, in particular, became a cause celebre. Cut the sports? Unthinkable. Sports build character. Sports keep kids off the streets. One of the loudest … Read more
And So Should You, Whether You Agree With It or Not Last week, roughly a hundred protesters gathered at the New Hampshire State House to denounce the Free State Project. Their complaints were familiar: the FSP is “radical,” its participants are outsiders bent on “dismantling” public education, and their influence on state politics is illegitimate. … Read more
If the 2026 GOP primary is going to be more than “pick your favorite pre-owned senator,” the conservative and liberty wings need to ask both Scott Brown and John Sununu some direct, specific, uncomfortable questions. Questions for Both Candidates Scott Brown Specific Questions Scott Brown is the former Massachusetts senator who won the 2010 special … Read more
I am introducing CSBTP V1, the first version of the Claremont School Board Transparency Project research assistant. CSBTP V1 is built to make it easier to navigate board packets, minutes, policies, and related documents, and to connect local records with statewide context from NHDOE data. It is designed to help the public and stakeholders ask … Read more
Yes, it is time to paraphrase Martin Niemöller I am not a Christian. I am not religious at all. When I describe myself as a Jew, what I mean is that my mother was a Jew. Her mother came from Kraków. My grandparents and many of their cousins emigrated on the eve of World War … Read more
New Hampshire House Democrats reacted to the leaked “segregated schools” chat the way modern politics trains people to react: treat a sloppy phrase as a full confession of racial intent, denounce it as a moral abomination, and then declare the conversation over. Democratic leader Alexis Simpson called segregation “a living scar,” “built through violence,” and … Read more
America has a charming habit: we rediscover “states’ rights” every time the federal government starts doing something our faction hates. The principle stays in the closet until it matches the outfit. In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus staged the classic: state power deployed to frustrate federal authority, wrapped in the language of “public order.” When … Read more
There is a particular kind of political jiu-jitsu that shows up every session in Concord: take a word conservatives like, twist it 15 degrees, and use it to do something conservatives should hate. HB1512 is that move. The bill would let a town hold a referendum to decide whether families in that town may access … Read more
One privilege bestowed on me as an accident of birth that I share with few others is that I am the child of genuine, unrepentant Stalinists. And you thought being raised by wolves was tough. I started consuming the Marxist canon at the age of thirteen, and I was, and remain, a quick study. As … Read more
How power quietly shifts when no one’s watching A mafia and a school board seem like total opposites. One rules through fear and secrecy; the other is supposed to represent voters in the open. But look more closely at how decisions are made, and a strange similarity emerges. In both cases, a small, organized group … Read more
TLDR: The people who could be punished have been. Chasing more scalps won’t bring the money back and will burn cash we don’t have. The real failure is structural: the board slid into oligarchy. Everyone who played along shares responsibility, and recovery starts when we admit that, take a moral inventory, and rebuild the machinery … Read more
There are very few memes that are as dumb and insulting as this one. It works because people conflate Antifa with being antifascist and therefore being pro-democracy, albeit while having a very hazy notion of what the term democracy means. An old friend, whom I have known for more than half a century, posted this … Read more
Claremont’s fix starts with sunlight, not another check I was born long ago and far away in the East Tremont neighborhood of The Bronx, which, in the early-to-mid 1950s was a dense, modestly priced, prewar landscape of five- and six-story walk-ups organized around a lively Tremont Avenue retail spine; bakeries, kosher butchers, candy stores, and … Read more
Judging by the passion in the room, you might conclude that sports, not literacy, are the real core mission of public education.
The City of Claremont is in a tough spot. The district’s teaching staff has not been able to produce students educated to an acceptable level of proficiency for quite some time.
Claremont’s School Board School District Meeting Disaster
Introduction: A System in Survival Mode Parents in the Claremont School District (SAU6) are living through a crisis that can no longer be brushed aside as a temporary budget hiccup. The district is not merely facing a “tight year.” It is confronting a full-blown financial collapse brought on by years of mismanagement, structural deficits, and … Read more
Introduction In his polemical essay against school vouchers, Andru Volinsky trades on well-worn tropes: that public education is a pillar of democracy, that vouchers threaten social equity, and that the Civil Rights Movement should be invoked to shield the status quo. Yet this rhetorical sleight-of-hand obscures deeper truths. Public education in America was not built … Read more
I am concerned by the large number of my longest-standing friends who have made statements to the effect that Biden’s lying and then pardoning his son is morally acceptable because who wouldn’t lie and pardon their own child. Viewed through the narrow lens of familial responsibility, this might make sense. But if one steps back … Read more