It's the day after Election Day, and Democrats are casting about—as they did in 2016, as they have so many timesbefore—for an explanation for what just happened.
What Happened Last Night in Virginia Glenn Youngkin speaks during a campaign rally on November 1, 2021, in Leesburg, Virginia. (Chen Mengtong/China News Service via Getty Images)
It's the day after Election Day, and Democrats are casting about—as they did in 2016, as they have so many times before—for an explanation for what just happened.
NerdWallet filed for an initial public offering, revealing revenue that grew 32.3% year-over-year in the first half of 2021, reaching $181.6 million.
The company has not released a target range for its share price, but it is seeking a $5 billion valuation, according to reports. NerdWallet was valued at $669 million in 2015 and has raised an estimated $159.8 million from private investors, according to PitchBook data.
Credit Karma, a close competitor to NerdWallet, was acquired by Intuit in a $7.1 billion cash and stock deal in 2020, which was about 7.3 times its 2019 revenue.
One year ago #Brazil's #Pix @PicPay #MobilePayments platform didn't exist. Now half the population uses it— and ~$89 billion has already moved through the network—showing just how quickly adoption of digital payments can spread.
Pix's @PicPayisa Mobile Payments System which allows fast money transfers over smartphones. In the 11 months since it was launched by Brazil's central bank, it has become ubiquitous in the South American nation.
It's already been used at least once by 110 million Brazilians and about $89 billion has moved through the network. Brazil now registers more instant transfers than the U.S.
All that's needed to send cash to someone is a simple key they've set up, such as an email address or phone number. Similar to the privately owned Zelle in the U.S., Pix works through multiple apps from banks and other digital wallet services.
In July, Pix broke its own record of 40 million payments in one day. Most of those were person-to-person transfers.
One of the goals of the Central Bank of Brazil in launching Pix is to get more people inside the formal financial system. "We want to offer an infrastructure able to meet all the needs of our society, especially in those sectors where needs are not currently met,"
The country is particularly fertile ground for digital payments: Brazilians spend more time on social media than people in any other country in the Western Hemisphere and have the fifth-largest online population, according to GlobalWebIndex.
Pix is following a well tread history in Brazil. In recent years, fintechs such as the Warren Buffett-backed Nubank have drawn customers away from traditional Brazilian banks. Nubank is eyeing an initial public offering that could give it a market value of $55 billion.
@UBS estimates $19 billion of Evergrande's liabilities are made up of outstanding offshore bonds. A potential default could spread to markets outside China as it has huge, high-interest offshore bonds— some with rates as high as 15%.
Here are some basic numbers on Evergrande to give you an idea why many consider it to be #TBTF—Too Big To Fail.
Current liabilities equivalent to ±2% of China's GDP.
It has more than 200,000 employees, who themselves and many of their families have invested billions of yuan in the company's WMPs.
More than 800 projects under construction, more than half of them halted due to its cash crunch.
Thousands of upstream & downstream companies rely on Evergrande for business, creating more than 3.8 million jobs every year
Here's Caixin’s take on the current situation.
How Evergrande Could Turn Into 'China's Lehman Brothers'
For the past two months, hundreds of people have been gathering at the 43-floor Zhuoyue Houhai Center in Shenzhen, where China Evergrande Group's headquarters occupy 20 floors. They held banners demanding repayment of overdue loans and financial products. Police with riot shields had to be on site to keep things under control.
The demonstrators are construction workers at the property developer's housing projects, suppliers providing construction materials and investors in the company's wealth management products (WMPs).
SINGAPORE—China's antitrust regulator is preparing to impose a roughly $1 billion fine on food-delivery giant Meituan for allegedly abusing its dominant market position to the detriment of merchants and rivals, according to people familiar with the matter.
The penalty could be announced in the coming weeks, and Meituan would be required to revamp its operations and end a practice that has been dubbed "er xuan yi"—literally, "choose one out of two," the people said. Such exclusivity arrangements have forced many small businesses to pick sides in China's competitive retail industry.
Meituan, with a market capitalization of about $170 billion, has raised billions of dollars from global investors and is China's third-most valuable publicly listed internet company after Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The Beijing-headquartered firm operates an online marketplace for millions of restaurants and other mer-chants, and is the biggest provider of food-delivery and related services in China. It also offers hotel bookings and sells groceries online.
Mexico joined the hawkish band of Latin American central banks by unexpectedly raising interest rates.
Traders Bet Rates to Rise Much More Than Officials Signal
Brazil has already hiked too this year and Chilean policy makers this week considered acting as well. Traders are now bracing for more aggression as inflation pressures pickup.
Alejandro Betancourt one of the #Bolichicos that pulled off one of the most famous scams in #Venezuela, has been trying to reinvent himself and brighten his image, his past darkened by #corruption and #MoneyLaundering probes on both sides of the Atlantic.
A Reuters Special Report
A power tycoon, while Venezuela goes dark, brightens his image abroad
"SUNGLASSES KING": Since his power bonanza in Venezuela, Alejandro Betancourt invested more than $300 million in properties and ventures abroad, including Spanish sunglasses company Hawkers. REUTERS/Antonio Heredia/El Mundo
Alejandro Betancourt won power plant contracts worth $2 billion in Venezuela. Many of those plants failed, and the deals sparked criminal probes, while Betancourt reinvented himself in Europe. Previously unreported bank, court and corporate documents show how.
The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing? | The Spectator
Niall Ferguson on the cultural despair in American institutions [as they] "increasingly succumb to the plague of 'wokeism' — an illiberal ideology that originated on elite campuses but is now prevalent everywhere from Californian public schools to the Central Intelligence Agency."
He continues, "I am not so gloomy, because I believe that woke ideas are profoundly unpopular with the electorate as a whole and that the Democrats' adoption of slogans such as 'anti-racism' and 'diversity, equity and inclusion' will ultimately backfire when it becomes clear to more people what they mean in practice."
"There is a kind of low-level totalitarianism detectable in many institutions today — from elite universities to newspapers, publishers and technology companies — which reveals that practices such as informing, denunciation and defamation can all flourish even in the absence of a one-party dictatorship."
The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?
"I've mortally offended Putin by surviving": why Alexei Navalny keeps fighting | The Economist
"Violence quickly grows old," Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote. "After only a few years it loses confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally – since violence can conceal itself with nothing except lies, and the lies can be maintained only by violence."
It's an idea that still resonates. Putin's regime continues to rest on the twin pillars of fear and lies. Navalny has staked his life on pulling down that edifice.
“In Russia, speaking the truth has always been a political act.”
Excellent piece from the Economist's Russia correspondent on Navalny.
Q1 saw a marked increase in early-stage funding, with $39 billion invested in nascent startups, up from $25 billion in the fourth quarter and $22 billion in the first quarter of 2020. The Q1 figure marks an all-time global high for early-stage funding, per Crunchbase data.
Is Early-Stage Venture Becoming A Growth Investor's Game?
Global venture funding hit an all-time high in the first quarter of 2021, per Crunchbase data. That sort of increase in venture funding is typically attributable to growth in late-stage funding.
But, along with a surge in late-stage funding, we also saw a marked increase in early-stage funding last quarter, with $39 billion invested in nascent startups, up from $25 billion in the fourth quarter and $22 billion in the first quarter of 2021.
The Q1 figure marks an all-time global high for early-stage funding.
Growth equity leads early stage
The most active investor leading at the Series A and B stages was, surprisingly enough, a growth-stage investor: Insight Partners, which led six Series A fundings.
"Putin's overt attempt to destroy a political opponent has a logic: If Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless."
Navalny Has a Lesson for the World
The Russian opposition leader is showing what courage means.
When Alexei Navalny boarded a plane to Moscow on January 17, he turned his life into a metaphor. He knew it, his wife knew it, and everybody else on the plane knew it. So did the millions of people who had watched his documentary videos, who had seen the witty interviews he did on the plane, who have since joined demonstrations in his name. So did the leaders of Russia, including the country's dictator and president, Vladimir Putin. This, Navalny was telling all of them, is what courage looks like.
Arable farmland is being bought up by institutions and wealthy individuals at a rapid rate. Why do investors want a down-to-earth asset class in their portfolios?
Project Helvetia, an experiment between the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub Swiss Centre, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and the financial market infrastructure operator SIX, successfully shows the feasibility of integrating tokenised assets and central bank money.
The project demonstrates the functional feasibility and legal robustness of settling tokenised assets with a wholesale CBDC (PoC1) and with linking a DLT platform to existing payment systems (PoC2) in a near-live setup.
The experiment should not be interpreted as an indication that the SNB will issue a wholesale CBDC.
"We've killed it," drawls a grand client at a fancy hairdresser in Delhi. "Covid came to India but we were so grubby and diseased it just bounced off, rolled over and died." The hyperbole elicits a round of chuckles, as it was meant to.
Such glibness might seem tasteless, considering an official national death toll of nearly 160,000, as well as ominous signs that India is on the cusp of a second wave that its vaccination drive may be too slow to suppress. Yet as a share of its nearly 1.4bn people, the tally is minuscule, despite a huge outbreak.
A national survey of blood samples suggests that by December some 22% of Indians had been exposed to covid-19, 30 times the official tally of around 11m cases to date.If that estimate is right and if India's fatality rate had been as high as, say, Britain's, there would have been some 10m deaths.
The Economist | Getting off lightly https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/03/13/india-seems-to-have-suffered-surprisingly-few-deaths-from-covid-19?frsc=dg%7Ce
If you are playing the odds, this is actually a good time to buy the dip if you haven't done so already.
From Ecoinometrics - March 08, 2021 - ecoinometrics.substack.com
The fact that Bitcoin seems to keep up with the rise of interest rates is definitely a good sign. This means that adoption remains the main driver of this cycle.
If you believe that to reach its natural market size (physical gold) Bitcoin has 10x more to grow then you aren't worried about the temporary rising yield situation.
I'm saying temporary because you have to guess that the Fed will have to do something at some point. By something I mean implement some form of yield curve control.
Apparently we aren't there yet. But if rising yields start causing serious problems for mortgages or trigger a new stock market crash then you can bet that as usual the Fed will act.
Let's monitor and see how this plays out.
Drawdown
I've just said that Bitcoin is doing fine in the face of rising bonds yields but it is true that we are still in a drawdown.
Of course drawdowns are not unexpected in a bull market.
Every time you get a sharp rise in price some people will take profit, you'll get a temporary correction and then we'll be back up until traders are exhausted again.
That's a natural function of the market, it doesn't mean that the bull phase of the cycle is over.
In that regard this dip is typical of what we have seen in previous bull markets:
A 25% drop that has so far lasted 15 days.
The last one in January was 30% and lasted a month.
As you can see on the chart below drawdowns in the 20% to 40% range can last anywhere between a few days to 3 months. So if you look at the stats and think about the fundamentals there is really nothing to be worried about.
Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret.
The Miseducation of America’s Elites | City Journal
By Bari Weiss
March 9, 2021 Education The Social Order
The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.
But the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join.
In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city.
By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.
For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.
“I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.
“They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin,” one mother says. Another poses a question to the group: “How does focusing a spotlight on race fix how kids talk to one another? Why can’t they just all be Wolverines?” (Harvard-Westlake has declined to comment.)
This Harvard-Westlake parents’ group is one of many organizing quietly around the country to fight what it describes as an ideological movement that has taken over their schools. This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen of these dissenters—teachers, parents, and children—at elite prep schools in two of the bluest states in the country: New York and California.
The parents in the backyard say that for every one of them, there are many more, too afraid to speak up. “I’ve talked to at least five couples who say: I get it. I think the way you do. I just don’t want the controversy right now,” related one mother. They are all eager for their story to be told—but not a single one would let me use their name. They worry about losing their jobs or hurting their children if their opposition to this ideology were known.
“The school can ask you to leave for any reason,” said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. “Then you’ll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you’ll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer.”
One private school parent, born in a Communist nation, tells me: “I came to this country escaping the very same fear of retaliation that now my own child feels.” Another joked: “We need to feed our families. Oh, and pay $50,000 a year to have our children get indoctrinated.” A teacher in New York City put it most concisely: “To speak against this is to put all of your moral capital at risk.”
Parents who have spoken out against this ideology, even in private ways, say it hasn’t gone over well. “I had a conversation with a friend, and I asked him: ‘Is there anything about this movement we should question?’” said a father with children in two prep schools in Manhattan. “And he said: ‘Dude, that’s dangerous ground you’re on in our friendship.’ I’ve had enough of those conversations to know what happens.”
That fear is shared, deeply, by the children. For them, it’s not just the fear of getting a bad grade or getting turned down for a college recommendation, though that fear is potent. It’s the fear of social shaming. “If you publish my name, it would ruin my life. People would attack me for even questioning this ideology. I don’t even want people knowing I’m a capitalist,” a student at the Fieldston School in New York City told me, in a comment echoed by other students I spoke with. (Fieldston declined to comment for this article.) “The kids are scared of other kids,” says one Harvard-Westlake mother.
The atmosphere is making their children anxious, paranoid, and insecure—and closed off from even their close friends. “My son knew I was talking to you and he begged me not to,” another Harvard-Westlake mother told me. “He wants to go to a great university, and he told me that one bad statement from me will ruin us. This is the United States of America. Are you freaking kidding me?”
Photo: Olga Kurbatova/iStock
These are America’s elites—the families who can afford to pay some $50,000 a year for their children to be groomed for the eating clubs of Princeton and the secret societies of Yale, the glide path to becoming masters—sorry, masterx—of the universe. The ideas and values instilled in them influence the rest of us.
That is not the only reason this story matters. These schools are called prep schools because they prepare America’s princelings to take their place in what we’re told is our meritocracy. Nothing happens at a top prep school that is not a mirror of what happens at an elite college.
What does it say about the current state of that meritocracy, then, that it wants kids fluent in critical race theory and “white fragility,” even if such knowledge comes at the expense of Shakespeare? “The colleges want children—customers—that are going to be pre-aligned to certain ideologies that originally came out of those colleges,” says a STEM teacher at one of New York’s prestigious prep schools. “I call it woke-weaning. And that’s the product schools like mine are offering.”
The parents I spoke with for this story are savvy and smart: they realize that it’s bizarre—at best—for a school like Harvard-Westlake to hold forth constantly about social justice as it drops more than $40 million on a new off-campus athletic complex. This is a school that sends out an annual report to every Harvard-Westlake family listing parents’ donations. Last year, the “Heritage Circle” group—gifts of $100,000 or more—included Viveca Paulin-Ferrell and Will Ferrell. A red paw next to Jeanne and Tony Pritzker’s names indicated more than a decade of cumulative giving.
Parents say that it is a school where giving more gets you more. Big donors get invitations to special dinners, and, most importantly, time and attention from the people in charge. Meantime, their children are taught radical-chic politics, which, of course, do not involve anything actually substantively radical, like redistributing the endowment.
“These schools are the privilege of the privilege of the privilege. They say nonstop that they are all about inclusion. But they are by definition exclusive. These schools are for the tippity top of society,” a young mother in Manhattan tells me.
Power in America now comes from speaking woke, a highly complex and ever-evolving language. The Grace Church School in Manhattan, for example, offers a 12-page guide to “inclusive language,” which discourages people from using the word “parents”—“folks” is preferred—or from asking questions like “what religion are you?” (When asked for comment, Rev. Robert M. Pennoyer II, the assistant head of school, replied: “Grace is an Episcopal school. As part of our Episcopal identity, we recognize the dignity and worth common to humanity.” He added that the guide comes “from our desire to promote a sense of belonging for all of our students.”) A Harvard-Westlake English teacher welcomes students back after summer with: “I am a queer white womxn of European descent. I use [ she | her ] pronouns but also feel comfortable using [ they | them ] pronouns.” She attached a “self-care letter” quoting Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Woe betide the working-class kid who arrives in college and uses Latino instead of “Latinx,” or who stumbles conjugating verbs because a classmate prefers to use the pronouns they/them. Fluency in woke is an effective class marker and key for these princelings to retain status in university and beyond. The parents know this, and so woke is now the lingua franca of the nation’s best prep schools. As one mother in Los Angeles puts it: “This is what all the colleges are doing, so we have to do it. The thinking is: if Harvard does it, it must be good.”
“I am in a cult. Well, that’s not exactly right. It’s that the cult is all around me and I am trying to save kids from becoming members.” He sounds like a Scientology defector, but he is a math teacher at one of the most elite high schools in New York City. He is not politically conservative. “I studied critical theory; I saw Derrida speak when I was in college,” he says, “so when this ideology arrived at our school over the past few years, I recognized the language and I knew what it was. But it was in a mutated form.”
This teacher is talking with me because he is alarmed by the toll this ideology is taking on his students. “I started seeing what was happening to the kids. And that’s what I couldn’t take. They are being educated in resentment and fear. It’s extremely dangerous.”
Three thousand miles away, in Los Angeles, another prep-school teacher says something similar. “It teaches people who have so much to see themselves as victims. They think they are suffering oppression at one of the poshest schools in the country.”
It seems to be working. One Los Angeles mother tells me that her son was recently told by his friend, who is black, that he is “inherently oppressed.” She was incredulous. “This kid is a multimillionaire,” she said. “My son said to his friend: ‘Explain it to me. Why do you feel oppressed? What has anyone done to make you feel less?’ And the friend said: ‘The color of my skin.’ This blew my mind.”
The science program at Fieldston would make any parent swoon. The electives for 11th- and 12th-graders, according to the school’s website, include immunology, astronomy, neuroscience, and pharmacology.
But physics looks different these days. “We don’t call them Newton’s laws anymore,” an upperclassman at the school informs me. “We call them the three fundamental laws of physics. They say we need to ‘decenter whiteness,’ and we need to acknowledge that there’s more than just Newton in physics.”
One of her classmates says that he tries to take “the fact classes, not the identity classes.” But it’s gotten harder to distinguish between the two. “I took U.S. history and I figured when you learn about U.S. history maybe you structure it by time period or what happened under each presidency. We traced different marginalized groups. That was how it was structured. I only heard a handful of the presidents’ names in class.”
Brentwood, a school that costs $45,630 a year, made headlines a few weeks back when it held racially segregated “dialogue and community-building sessions.” But when I speak with a parent of a middle-school student there, they want to talk about their child’s English curriculum. “They replaced all the books with no input or even informing the parents.” The curriculum no longer features classics such as The Scarlet Letter, Little Women, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Flies. New books include: Stamped, Dear Martin, Dear Justice, and Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass.
“The dean said to me, basically, it’s important to change with the times,” said the Brentwood parent. In a statement, Brentwood’s director of communications said: “Diversity, equity and inclusion are critical components of our education and our community at Brentwood School. The events of last summer created a call to action for all of us, in our school community and beyond.” Brentwood has announced a late-starting school day on March 10 for the lower school “due to our faculty book study of White Fragility.”
At Fieldston, an elective is offered to high school juniors and seniors called “historicizing whiteness.” At Grace Church School, seniors can take a course called “Allying: Why? Who? and How?” The curriculum includes a ’zine called “Accomplices Not Allies” that declares “the work of an accomplice in anti-colonial struggle is to attack colonial structures & ideas,” alongside a photograph of a burning police car. Harvard-Westlake, in its extensive antiracist plan announced this summer, included “redesigning the 11th grade US History course from a critical race theory perspective,” among many similar goals.
To question any of the curricular changes, parents say, is to make yourself suspect: “Every group chat I’m on with school parents, with the exception of my concerned parents’ group, they have a pattern of shaming anyone who shares anything remotely political or dissents from the group narrative,” one Brentwood mother wrote to me. “Once someone shames one person, many chime in agreement. The times I speak up to defend those they shame, they attempt to shame me.”
In this worldview, complexity itself is a kind of racism, nuance is a phobia, and skepticism merely a type of false consciousness. Ibram Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, plainly spelled out the logic on Twitter recently: “The heartbeat of racism is denial. And too often, the more powerful the racism, the more powerful the denial.”
One teacher told me that he was asked to teach an antiracist curriculum that included a “pyramid” of white supremacy. At the top was genocide. At the bottom was “two sides to every story.”
“‘Two sides to every story,’” he said. “That was on the racist pyramid.”
But the most important consequence of the woke ideology isn’t a lesser English curriculum. It’s that the ideology, which seems to touch every aspect of schooling now, has changed children’s self-conception.
Consider this story, from Chapin, the tony all-girls school on the Upper East Side, involving a white girl in the lower grades who came home one day and told her father: “All people with lighter skin don’t like people with darker skin and are mean to them.” He was horrified as she explained that that was what she had been taught by her teachers. “I said to her: that’s not how we feel in this family.” It’s worth taking a look at Chapin’s various affinity groups, which have become de rigueur at all of these schools. (Chapin did not respond to a request for comment.)
For high schoolers, the message is more explicit. A Fieldston student says that students are often told “if you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.” This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.
At Harvard-Westlake, the school recently administered the debunked implicit-bias test to tenth-graders. It was technically optional, but several parents I spoke with said that their children felt compelled to take it. One mother confided that her son said to her, “Mom, I just found out I’m a racist and I prefer White Europeans.” Her child is mixed race. “For my kid to come home and be told by his school you are a racist—I was aghast. I was so, so angry.”
A Brentwood parent says that she has tried, in small ways, to stand up to this. “They say I don’t understand because my skin is white.” Children like hers are being taught to give up ambition and yield positions that they might earn through hard work to others who are more marginalized. “My child is asking me obvious questions like: If I work really hard, shouldn’t I get rewarded?”
All of this “has made me think about race more,” said one teen boy in Manhattan. The curriculum, he explained, was trying to teach him to feel obsessed with his whiteness, the opposite of what his parents had taught him to do. Making students separate out by race in affinity groups is racist, he said. “MLK would condemn my school.”
Some students are rebelling, which, in this case, looks like becoming a Republican. But others go all-in on the ideology, which has created conflicts with parents who don’t. “The school has taken over as the moral guide, with me being the irritating person in the background who doesn’t really get it,” says one Harvard-Westlake mother.
So children learn how the new rules of woke work. The idea of lying in order to please a teacher seems like a phenomenon from the Soviet Union. But the high schoolers I spoke with said that they do versions of this, including parroting views they don’t believe in assignments so that their grades don’t suffer.
Photo: GeorgePeters/iStock
In Brooklyn, a STEM teacher known to be friendly among skeptical students laughed when he told me the latest absurdity: students told him that their history class had a unit on Beyoncé, and they felt compelled to say that they loved her music, even if they did not. “I thought: they aren’t even entitled to their own musical preferences,” he said. “What does it mean when you can’t even tell the truth about how music affects you?” One English teacher in Los Angeles tacitly acknowledges the problem: she has the class turn off their videos on Zoom and asks each student to make their name anonymous so that they can have uninhibited discussions.
No reliable survey data exist on free expression among high schoolers, but last week, Heterodox Academy published its annual Campus Expression Survey Report, which found that, in 2020, 62 percent of college students surveyed “agreed the climate on their campus prevents students from saying things they believe.”
Relying on word of mouth, parents are trying to suss out which, if any, of the private schools in their city avoid this ideology. They ask me what I know. “I don’t know where to move him to. I yank him and it’s the same thing. But I have a pit in my stomach about sending him back for third grade,” says a mother at Riverdale Country Day School in the Bronx, in a concern echoed by many parents. (Riverdale declined to comment.)
When I began working on this story, I didn’t feel that much sympathy for these parents. Some 18 million public school children have not set foot in a school in the past year. A study released in early December by McKinsey and Co. found that virtual learning hurt all students, but students of color the most: remote school set them back by three to five months in math, for example. Such numbers do not begin to capture the crippling effects, including suicidal ideation, that this past year has had on what experts are already calling a lost generation.
The parents in this story are not parents with no other options. Most have the capital—social and literal—to pull their kids out and hire private tutors. That they weren’t speaking out seemed to me cowardly, or worse.
The cynical answer for their silence is two words: Ivy League. “There are definitively rumors that the school has like, say, three picks for Duke and that if you stand up against this your kid will get blackballed,” says one mother.
Another explanation is groupthink and social pressure. “Sometimes the smartest people are the easiest ones to fool,” says a father who recently moved his son from one school to another that he judges to be marginally better. “If you made a decision to go on the board of Dalton having espoused all these leftist views forever and you want your kid to get into Harvard, you are not going to stand up and say, ‘wait a second, guys.’ You’re just not going to do it. Most people want to be members of the club.”
I think it’s true that many people would rather violate their stated principles than be iced out of their social network. But this is a situation that goes beyond getting shunted to a bad table at the Robin Hood gala. To resist this ideology is to go against the entire institutional world.
It’s not just Dalton, a school that has committed to being “visibly, vocally and structurally antiracist.” Bain & Company is tweeting about “Womxn’s History Month.” The Cartoon Network is imploring children to “see color.” Coca-Cola employees were recently instructed to “be less white.” You cannot buy or sell the newly problematic Dr. Seuss titles on eBay. This ideology isn’t speaking truth to power. It is the power.
Most alarmingly, the ideology is increasingly prevalent at the local public school. The incoming New York City schools chancellor is a vocal proponent of critical race theory. In Burbank, the school district just told middle- and high school teachers to stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. The Sacramento school district is promoting racial segregation by way of “racial affinity groups,” where students can “cultivate racial solidarity and compassion and support each other in sitting with the discomfort, confusion, and numbness that often accompany white racial awakening.” The San Diego school district recently held a training in which white teachers were told that they “spirit murder” black children.
“I don’t mean to get emotional, I just feel helpless,” said one mother through tears. “I look at the public school and I am equally mortified. I can’t believe what they are doing to everybody. I’m too afraid. I’m too afraid to speak too loudly. I feel cowardly. I just make little waves.” Another tells me: “It’s fear of retribution. Would it cause our daughter to be ostracized? Would it cause people to ostracize us? It already has.”
I have a friend in New York who is the mother to a four-year-old. She seems exactly the kind of parent these schools would want to attract: a successful entrepreneur, a feminist, and a diehard Manhattanite. She’d dreamed of sending her daughter to a school like Dalton. One day at home, in the midst of the application process, she was drawing with her daughter, who said offhandedly: “I need to draw in my own skin color.” Skin color, she told her mother, is “really important.” She said that’s what she learned in school.
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