Dumber, Meaner, and Drifting Out to Sea

From America’s failing schools and ICE dragnets to Gaza’s forced evacuation, institutions crumble, human infrastructure is discarded, and the tide of cruelty keeps rising.

Good morning! America is not sending its best. Not in the classroom, not in law enforcement, and certainly not in the halls of finance.

Let’s start with the report card from hell. The National Assessment of Educational Progress has confirmed what teachers, parents, and employers have been saying for years: our kids are slipping fast, and the floor just gave out. Twelfth graders posted the lowest math and reading scores ever recorded, with nearly half of seniors flunking below basic math. Science, meanwhile, fell back to 2009 levels, and in the process erased the one bright spot from 2019, when girls and boys were finally performing at the same level. Now the gap has reopened, not because boys are soaring ahead (they aren’t), but because girls’ scores slid backward, putting them once again behind their male peers. Thirty-five percent of seniors can still read at a “proficient” level, which is another way of saying nearly two-thirds cannot. These are the students about to enter an economy that runs on AI, climate science, and supply chains, and they’ll be walking in with fewer skills than the class before them. “We can’t not pay attention,” warned one official. But if the Education Department’s been gutted, libraries defunded, and classroom hours sacrificed to book bans and prayer rallies, who exactly is going to pay attention?

While America’s kids are being shortchanged, America’s government is doubling down on cruelty. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has officially tossed out the paperwork requirement that once forced officers to justify an arrest. For more than a decade, they had to jot down the target’s name, address, and criminal history before kicking down doors. Now? Just show up in a Home Depot parking lot and call it a day. Stephen Miller reportedly threatened to fire field office heads who didn’t hit a quota of 3,000 arrests a day, so ICE got creative. Forget precision, dragnet arrests are faster. A judge briefly blocked the roving patrols in Los Angeles, arrests plummeted, and then the Supreme Court, ever eager to help, restored ICE’s right to stop people for speaking Spanish. The administration insists these are “targeted” operations, redefining “targeted” to mean “anyone breathing in the wrong ZIP code.”

In Chicago, that doublespeak has been christened “Operation Midway Blitz.” Homeland Security has flooded the city with agents operating out of a naval base, claiming to go after “the worst of the worst.” Four arrests in, immigrant neighborhoods are reporting empty sidewalks, shuttered businesses, and families too afraid to walk to school. Local leaders call them abductions, not arrests. “This is not normal,” advocates remind us, and yet Trump boasts the city is about to learn why it’s called the Department of WAR. LA activists are now sharing playbooks with Chicagoans on how to confront ICE raids head-on, urging neighbors not to vanish indoors, not to let their streets be surrendered to federal patrols. Terror is the point, and resistance is the only antidote.

Democrats, bless their procedural little hearts, are filing briefs in court to at least slow the president’s march toward militarizing city streets. Nineteen senators have joined Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit against Trump’s federalization of National Guard troops in Los Angeles, warning the Ninth Circuit that we’re one ruling away from normalizing domestic troop deployments as campaign props. The brief points out that the last time a president federalized the Guard without a governor’s consent was when Lyndon Johnson had to protect marchers from George Wallace’s thugs in Selma. Trump, naturally, is deploying troops against marchers, not to defend them. Schiff calls this “a line in the sand,” though from here it looks like the tide’s already coming in.

And if you thought the clown show was confined to ICE and the Guard, enter DOGE, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which stormed Social Security like a frat on spring break. A ProPublica exposé lays it out: tech bros and hedge funders arrived with slogans about “quick wins,” ignored the agency’s actual modernization needs, and left behind chaos, staff departures, and chatbot call centers proudly counted as “zero-minute” wait times. A junior coder’s spreadsheet about outdated death records was spun into Musk’s vampire tweet about seniors over 120 collecting checks, then repeated by Trump to Congress and the nation. Actual fraud prevention? Ignored. Legacy code? Untouched. Disability backlogs? Still years long. But DOGE got their headlines, and Trump got his talking points. Efficiency, like everything else, was just another grift.

And then there is Gaza, where the destruction is no longer just military but existential. Israel has now ordered the full evacuation of Gaza City, a metropolis that once held nearly a million people, as it prepares to occupy what little remains. Families have been told to march south toward al-Mawasi, a so-called “humanitarian zone” that is already overcrowded, under-supplied, and itself scarred by bombings. Aid groups warn the journey is impossible for many, those who can’t scrape together the money for transport, the sick and elderly, the hospital patients who cannot be moved. Famine still stalks Gaza; hundreds have already died of starvation, and still the exodus is demanded.

Only a fraction, about 50,000, have managed to leave. The rest sit under bombardment, their homes, schools, and clinics treated not as infrastructure to preserve but as obstacles to be leveled. The assault on Gaza is not only the pulverizing of buildings, but the erasure of civic life: no electricity grid to repair, no hospitals to return to, no schools for children once the dust settles. It is the systematic dismantling of the scaffolding that makes survival possible.

Israel frames this as a fight against Hamas, against “terror towers.” But when every tower is reduced to rubble, when every corridor of daily life is made unlivable, it’s clear that human infrastructure itself has become a target. What is being destroyed is not just a city but the possibility of a future within it.

Finally, lest we forget the private sector’s contribution to national decline, the New York Times has published a forensic look at JPMorgan’s long, lucrative friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Despite repeated internal warnings, the bank kept him on as a client for years, processing over a billion dollars, handling suspicious cash withdrawals, and even setting up accounts for the young women he cycled through. Executives knew; they looked away. It wasn’t until 2013, after his convictions, lawsuits, and endless smoke, that JPMorgan finally cut him loose. Now the bank has paid hundreds of millions in settlements while insisting they didn’t really know what they knew. As with ICE, as with DOGE, the story is the same: red flags everywhere, ignored until the damage is done and the courts force an admission.

So there you have it: a nation failing its students, terrorizing its immigrants, militarizing its cities, outsourcing Social Security to Elon’s hype men, and still laundering money for predators. America, dumber and meaner by the day, and calling it greatness. And beyond our borders, Gaza offers a devastating mirror: a city ordered to evacuate, its hospitals and schools turned into rubble, its human infrastructure deliberately unraveled until survival itself becomes the battleground.

On a lighter, more personal note, thank you all for the warm birthday wishes. Marz and I escaped to the beach, where the Pacific did its best impression of a baptismal font and left us both soaked but laughing. A reminder, amid the wreckage, that joy and solidarity are still possible.