Woke Big Tech Launched Crusade Against Free Speech

The technological revolution once promised a new era of expanded democracy and enhanced opportunity. Instead, we face today a reality that blends the worst aspects of George Orwell’s Big Brother and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World controllers.

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Cosmopolis or Bust?

Three decades ago, author Steve Toulmin published a book in which he argued that the cosmopolis constitutes the true “agenda of modernity.” Driven by increased trade and movement of peoples, it would create a universal order that “binds all things together” on the basis of Enlightenment ideals.

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Teachers Unions Have Turned Our Schools into Woke Brainwashing Camps

You have to be utterly delusional – or a member of a teacher’s union – to think that the US education system isn’t a total disaster. The most recent National Assessments of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”) found barely a quarter of students are proficient in reading, geography and American history. Read more

Why Are Americans Becoming More Stupid?

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Winston Churchill. And judging by the state of education in America, it seems both of those empires could soon crumble. The dysfunction is evident from top to bottom: from Ivy League outposts down to the secondary schools. Both are producing a generation that is ill-informed, illiterate and innumerate. In other words, a generation increasingly ill-suited to function as productive citizens in a democracy.

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Downtown San Francisco is Beyond Redemption

The recent announcement that Ian Jacobs, a scion of the famous Toronto-based Reichmann real estate clan, was coming to buy upwards of $900 million of San Francisco real estate, has offered the beleaguered California city a rare moment of hope. Some suggest that we could see a repeat of New York’s recovery from its nadir in the 1970s, during which the Reichmanns made a fortune gobbling up depressed buildings shortly before the city’s resurgence.

Yet any effort to restore San Francisco’s appeal will need more than an infusion of vulture capital. The city’s problems are essentially demographic and political, and have transformed San Francisco from an icon to a disaster zone, particularly as workers opt for remote work. The city’s office vacancy rate continues to rise, now surpassing 35%, the highest in its history.

To be sure, San Francisco has been losing its middle class for decades, replaced initially by young single people, many of whom are tied to the tech industry. But as early as 2015, the city began losing net domestic migrants as growth shifted to the further exurbs.

Since the pandemic, the city’s population has dropped and its social problems, long festering, have become a running sore. That’s likely why up to 10% of San Francisco’s residents have left the city — far more than in New York. “A lot of people have had it,” Heather Gonzalez, a longtime Democratic activist and mother of two, told me. “We have had neighbours and an elderly grandfather beat up on a bus and my kids have to watch people poop in public on Market Street. This is what we have to go through.”

Yet there is some hope, Gonzalez suggests. She points to the recent recall of ultra progressives including the District Attorney and three school board members. There’s also been a concerted effort by moderate Democrats to root the radical Left’s hold on the party as well as an effort to replace several far-Left members of the Board of Supervisors.

Amid a severe budget deficit, these efforts are critical. The city’s understaffed police department is almost certain to lose the battle for resources with the city’s dominant and fervently Leftist public employee unions. That the city now suffers the second highest violent crime rate in California illustrates just how important this battle is.

These reform efforts finally have some backing now from the tech oligarchs, who in recent years have been indifferent or even supportive of the progressive agenda. This has roiled the Left-wing activists who see any movement backed by the billionaire class as a hostile takeover.

Yet even if the city somehow regains its ballast, Reichman may be looking at the wrong places to invest. Although the office market may recover, the movement of business out of the state continues in a way far more profound than in New York back in the 1970s.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo: Ken Lund, via Flickr under CC 2.5 License.

‘Decolonized’ Universities Dividing Canadians

For generations, education has been a primary means to make countries like Canada and the United States stronger, more productive, and self-confident. Now the education system is not only failing to perform its primary mission for young people, but increasingly works to undermine and divide nations.

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Trudeau has Weakened Canada — and by Extension, the Entire Free World

At a time when the western world desperately needs some backbone, Canada seems to be swaying. It appears to have moved away from its long-term commitment to protect our now wobbling western civilization. Read more

Let America Sprawl

Americans, with little help from government, are reinventing themselves and boosting their prospects by settling in less expensive, less regulated regions where rents and house prices are more affordable.

Much of this is taking place in “red states,” leading some to link this movement to a conservative ideological agenda. But this is not primarily a political movement. It is a reflection of a largely apolitical grassroots and market-driven trend.

America’s Geographic Pattern

American history has been defined by its vastness. Colonial America provided an outlet for Britons hemmed in by scarce land, enclosures, and aristocratic domination. The early America republic was largely shaped by an epic expansion to the West, driven both by immigrants and by domestic migration from the more heavily settled, class-bound coastal areas.

Through the 19th century, millions migrated further into the interior of the continent, even to the so-called “great American desert” that Daniel Webster, among others, considered inhospitable to human habitation. Ultimately, the path of manifest destiny extended to the Pacific coast, shifting political power, economic, technological, and cultural influence from its historical northeastern base.

Today’s American geographic trends favor the South, the intermountain West, and the desert Southwest. In the past decade, five southern states — Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina, along with Arizona in the west — exceeded the growth in all of the other (44) states and the District of Columbia, according to the Census, notes demographer Wendell Cox. This pattern has accelerated since 2020, with southern states gaining 1.7 million, while the other three Census regions (Northeast, Midwest, and West) all had net domestic migration losses. In 2023, southern states accounted for 87 percent of all U.S. population growth.

Over recent decades the settled areas of the northeast and the West Coast have become ever more expensive and highly regulated, driving both businesses and people away. Recently the net losers include green “utopia” Oregon, and California, blessed by nature but also now the most heavily regulated state and among the highest taxed. Those running California managed to create a situation where housing prices have soared, even as the state has lost population.

The Triumph of Suburbia

The emergence of the New America is not just a move to red states but includes population shifts within blue states. In California, San Francisco and Los Angeles may be experiencing declines, but outlying areas such as the San Joaquin Valley and the Inland Empire continue to grow, a trend expected to continue for the next several decades.

Read the rest of this piece at National Review.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: suburban sprawl in Southern California

Multi-culti Reckoning

The explosion of support for Hamas’s assault on human decency could well turn out to be the high-water mark of the progressive Left. The authoritarian multicultural ideology generated on campuses and transmitted dutifully by the established media has reached its apex and may now begin to descend.

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Across America’s Cities, Voters Are Driving Out Progressives

Is sanity finally returning to America’s blue cities? The places that incubated inept policies such as “defund the police” and “sanctuary cities”, but welcomed open-air drug use, are beginning to have second thoughts. Read more