Scamnation
Disability accommodation abuse, follow-ups on my NYT op-ed, mutual support groups and more in this week's digest.
Check out my NYT op-ed on property tax abolition if you didn’t already read it. It is supposed to be in the print edition today. My op-ed was also used in the lead in to a Fox & Friends segment with Gov. Ron DeSantis about his property tax plan.
Also, if you are in the Nashville area, I’ll be speaking next Wednesday evening on institutions, elites, and future of civic life, looking at the decline of leadership in America. Just click through to the link to buy tickets.
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NYT Follow-Up
A reader emailed me in response to my Times piece with this anecdote about property taxes and Republican suburbanites:
I’ve meant to Reply on some other topics, but this one really struck me because my hometown, Hanahan, SC (a growing bedroom community that is a “red dot” in a sea of blue around cosmopolitan Charleston, SC) voted overwhelmingly in 2020 in favor of a multimillion dollar bond referendum to fund expansions and improvements to our parks and rec. The centerpiece, The Hawks Nest, is a gorgeous multi-acre complex where my kids play rec sports, my family picnics, and my local F3 group holds free workouts.
And while I don’t think an anti-property tax push would drive me from the GOP at this point (the current Left is just too far gone for me to responsibly consider it), with a wife and three kids I’m well-past my college Libertarian phase too. It’s not that I need any less money of course, but as long as it’s transparently earmarked and spent for causes that directly benefit my community - good schools my kids attend, green spaces we can relax and play in, well-equipped and staffed police/fire/etc. to keep us safe - I’m willing to pay a premium, including in property taxes.
And in my recent piece here on inequality, one commenter share this story:
I came across two old ticket stubs while going through things at the house. The first stub was from the 2006 Ohio State-Michigan game, 19 years ago today. That was a 1 vs. 2 game. Face value was $59 in section 26A. In 2024, that same ticket was $347.
The second stub was a 1997 ticket for the Cleveland Indians-New York Yankees game in Cleveland. I went with my grandma to that game and sat in the upper deck in right field. The face value of that ticket of the two prior American League champions: $6. That section is now a party plaza for large groups.
You want to see price inflation, old ticket stubs will show it.
French Center-Right Local Leaders Are Pro-Investment
Bloomberg CityLab had an interesting article talking about how center-right controlled local governments are big promoters of investments in public goods, services, and amenities.
The author, David Zipper, is a good guy but is definitely a lefty. He unfortunately frames the piece as about cars, but it’s actually about, as I said, public investment in quality of place. Try to look beyond the polemical gloss.
The Riviera, or Côte d’Azur, is tucked into the southeastern corner of France, running along the Mediterranean Sea to the Italian border. The area has long been a magnet for visitors: Over 5 million people visited Nice alone in 2024, more than five times the population of the entire region.
In 2024 Politico dubbed the Riviera “France’s Florida,” noting the conservative politics of its many affluent retirees as well as the legacy of resettled pieds-noir (“black feet”) who fled Algeria after that country’s independence in 1962. The Riviera’s electorate landed eight points to the right of the national vote in the 2022 presidential election. (Paris was 27 points to the left.) Conservatives dominate senior positions, leading the regional department as well as major cities including Nice, Cannes and Antibes.
Despite the region’s political complexion, local leaders in the Riviera have happily limited urban driving while encouraging people to bike, walk and ride transit. Nice opened a tram network in 2007 and booted cars from Avenue Jean Médecin, a major shopping thoroughfare. Visiting the city, I strolled along the Promenade du Paillon, a ring of parks featuring fountains, gardens, and a playground in the shape of an octopus, which was constructed a dozen years ago atop the site of an old bus station and parking facility.
A few miles to the west lies Cagnes-sur-Mer, another Riviera city led by a center-right mayor, which recently revamped its coastal promenade to establish a protected space for pedestrians and cyclists. In Cannes, center-right mayor David Lisnard has overseen an array of urbanist-friendly projects, including pedestrianizing Rue Hoche, a teeming shopping street, and revamping seaside Boulevard de la Croisette with new dedicated lanes for buses and bicycles.
In a 2018 interview, Lisnard said that economic development motivated his reforms, noting that “the quality of public spaces is [a] criterion for regional competitiveness and helps stimulate private investment.” Hermans, who has been a transportation planner for the city of Nice as well as the Riviera region, said such thinking was common among local leaders — and justified, since visitors could easily spend their money elsewhere. “If you want to attract tourists, you need an attractive city,” she said. “Nobody’s going to sit and have a coffee in a parking lot.”
Click over to read the whole thing.
Scamnation
The Atlantic has a great article on how students at elite universities are scamming the disability accommodation system (gift link)
Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology. The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school’s low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.
Accommodations in higher education were supposed to help disabled Americans enjoy the same opportunities as everyone else. No one should be kept from taking a class, for example, because they are physically unable to enter the building where it’s taught. Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.
The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.
“You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” one professor at a selective university, who requested anonymity because he doesn’t have tenure, told me. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.”
Click over to read the whole thing.
This is another example of our society’s shift from a high trust, pro-civic culture to a low-trust, scam-oriented one.
As with money, bad practices drive out good here. Anyone who doesn’t take advantage of disability accommodations is putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. This produces a big incentive for everyone without a strong internal moral code to wrangle the same exceptions for themselves.
As with other things, we should expect this to percolate out from the elite to everyone else.
It’s another example of the implication of the collapse of the old Christian moral framework that I frequently discuss in my work. Note that this started to hockey stick up at about the dawn of the Negative World.
Share Your Feelings With the Group
The New York Times had an interesting story (gift link) about a group of women who’ve had a semi-structured friendship/therapy group for over 40 years.
The members of this impossible-to-get-into club have logged a combined 330 years of marriage. Among them, they count 15 children, 27 grandchildren (with one on the way), assorted professions and innumerable tears shed, hands held and assurances given that none of life’s difficulties will be faced alone.
In Long Island community centers and therapists’ offices, they have met on approximately 880 occasions and talked, in the strictest confidence, for some 80,000 minutes about pacifiers and timeouts; about feeling overwhelmed by careers and feeling undervalued without them. They have discussed empty nests, dying parents, tensions with adult siblings, marital conflicts, parenting grown children — oh, the worry never stops — retirement, aging, illness and even the death of one of their own.
This is “Group,” a generically named, remarkably devoted circle of friends.
Group is six women, all in their 70s and each married for a half-century. They have been gathering on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month (minus July and August) for 44 years. Over 90 minutes, they share with each other — and a paid facilitator — their worries, struggles and triumphs. It is not, clinically speaking, group therapy. But it is also not a social gathering.
“We are not swapping recipes,” said Miriam Caslow, 74. “This is hard work.”
Click over to read the whole thing.
I’m not sure exactly how I feel about the structured nature of these meetings, but it works for them. This is the kind of community that is so lacking for many in today’s world.
It my experience it’s not uncommon for Boomers to have friends that they have connected regularly with for over a decade. For example, a couple that has a standing dinner night with another couple every Sunday night or something.
Younger generations don’t seem as likely to have things like this that are durable for the long term.
Best of the Web
Justin Lee, an editor at First Things magazine, has a new collection of Christian themed horror stories out called A Prisoner’s Cinema. I haven’t read it yet but I believe he’s trying to write something that is primarily good fiction, yet explores Christian themes (rather than being merely Christian fiction). Check it out.
American Institute for Boys and Men: Why society offers less sympathy when men fall behind - Frankly, I think some level of this is inevitable. It’s just one of the many “double standards” that arise from our human nature as two separate, asymmetric sexes.
NYT: The Case for Ending a Long, Mostly Good Marriage (gift link)- It’s every bit as insane as you’d expect from the title. They are technically still married, with her husband keeping her on his health insurance and providing here with financial support - while she is having sex with other men. He’s a literal cuck.
Pew: 12th grade girls are less likely than boys to say they want to get married someday
Christianity Today: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Evangelical Vatican’ - A very interesting article about Colorado Springs. You’ll notice that the hubs of evangelicalism tend to be peripheral cities, far from the citadels of culture: Colorado Springs, Grand Rapids, Lynchburg, Virginia Beach.
Jeff Giesea: Is Donald Trump the first Zoomer president?
New Content and Media Mentions
This week I received mentions from American Reformer, Charles Haywood, and Rod Dreher, in addition to the Fox News hit I listed above.
New this week:
The Most Important Invitation I’ll Send This Year - My Christmas appeal for you to join my Member community.
Me in the NYT: Abolishing Property Taxes is a Bad Idea - My new piece in the New York Times on the growing calls by some in the Republican party to abolish property taxes.
Who Is Worse? Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes - Some observations from an anonymous guest contributor
My podcast this week was with Tim and Lydia McGrew on how the gospels pass the historical test.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
Don’t forget to join my Member community today at a significant discount. It’s for one more week only, so don’t miss your chance.