Spectator Life

In the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a moment when leaders across the political spectrum should be dialing back the rhetoric and fostering unity, Randi Weingarten has charged ahead with her divisive agenda. As president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), she has doubled down on promoting her new book, which brands conservatives as "fascists." This inflammatory approach comes at a time when the nation is reeling from violence, yet Weingarten shows no signs of restraint. Her recent appearances underscore this troubling pattern. On MSNBC, while hawking her book, Weingarten suggested the US is under “Nazi occupation,” claiming she now wears a paperclip as a symbol of resistance.

For much of my life, fitness wasn’t optional. I was held to very specific standards and tested to confirm that I was adhering to those standards. I was a hockey player. In college, and briefly, in the minor pros. Most seasons began the same way: a searing battery of strength and conditioning tests – on-ice sprints, off-ice endurance runs, bench press, squats, pull-ups, all to termination. Scores aggregated and ranked, from first to last. Personal value was assigned to the scores. Coaches took notice. I trained accordingly and drew a portion of my self-worth from being fit. That mindset would serve me well after school, when I joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee. I was medically discharged before commissioning, but while I was in, fitness wasn’t optional.

“DON’T TAKE TYLENOL,” the President advised pregnant women, forcefully, in the Oval Office yesterday afternoon, because his Administration now says that acetaminophen causes childhood autism. Trump said it at least a dozen times. Also, he said, don’t give Tylenol to your children after they get a shot. Speaking of shots, President Trump said, kids shouldn’t get their Hepatitis B vaccine until they’re 12, because Hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease. In addition, he recommends breaking up the MMR vaccine into three separate shots, because that’s a lot of liquid. “It’s a fragile little child and it looks like they’re pumping it into a horse,” he said. It was a typically eccentric Trump event. The main three speakers were Trump, RFK Jr., and Dr. Oz.

Once upon a time, there was a hugely successful children’s author named Robert Munsch. His books (more than 70!) sold in many, many copies; he became famous, and people gave him top awards like the Juno and the Order of Canada. They even named schools after him. More gloriously yet, he became the most stolen author in the Toronto Public Library. He was in high demand as a storyteller, and children from everywhere used to write him letters. And he would write back, often with personalized stories (which they loved) featuring them and their classmates. Like all of us, he had his sorrows. He and his wife lost two children, which led him to write one of his best-known works, Love You Forever. Eventually they became adoptive parents of three.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and recently-fired CDC director Susan Monarez exchanged “testy” words about vaccines in a Senate hearing today. That should come as little surprise. Paul has long been a vaccine skeptic, if not an outright opponent. The day started with Monarez telling Congress that RFK Jr. tried to get the White House to fire her because she refused to “rubber-stamp” approve a schedule of HHS vaccinations. “He just wanted blanket approval,” Monarez said. “If I could not commit to blanket approval to each of the recommendations I would need to resign.

It seems that every few years America rediscovers that its children can’t read. In 2024, only 30-31 percent of eighth graders were deemed proficient in reading, and our numbers in history and math are even worse. Since 2020, no state has reported improvement across subject areas.It’s tempting to blame “the pandemic” for these declines, but in reality, Covid only accelerated trends that were already underway. For decades before 2020, US students were struggling to reach proficiency, and the truth is that the problem isn’t today’s culture-war skirmishes over pronouns, politics and school closures. It’s the more mundane question of how children are taught to read, to count and to remember.Let’s take phonics, for example.

If, as Shakespeare observed, “all the world is a stage, and all its men and women merely players,” no place is that truer than the modern American university. In the first study of its kind, 88 percent of Northwestern and University of Michigan students admitted they “have pretended to hold more progressive views than [they] truly endorse to succeed socially or academically.” While the phenomenon of college students pretending to be more liberal than they actually are to make life easier for them as they attend these hotbeds of radicalism is not surprising, the true scale of it is. But how have we got here? If you’re looking for a single explanation, I’m sorry to disappoint you. The modern college environment is a perfect storm of several factors working together.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s quest to prove himself President Donald Trump’s most destructive Cabinet member continues apace.  On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services abruptly announced that “Susan Monarez is no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” She had been nominated to the key post in March, and actually served in it for less than a month. Shortly after that, Monarez’s lawyers issued a fiery statement asserting that she had neither been fired, nor resigned, and was being targeted by Kennedy for refusing to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives,” and help him weaponize “public health for political gain.

A terrifying thing appeared on my Twitter feed this morning. Secretary of Health and Human Services and bear-fighter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he’s “teamed up” with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for the “Pete & Bobby Challenge.” This, unfortunately, is a fitness challenge. Even more unfortunately, it involves doing 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups. Most unfortunately of all, they want us to do it all in five minutes or less. You might take heart that in the gym-based, sweat-soaked motivational video that accompanies the Tweet, RFK Jr. takes a whole five minutes and 25 seconds to complete this challenge. However, keep in mind that he’s in his seventies, and does the entire challenge in jeans.