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Education is the number one thing we need to improve in Mississippi.
That’s why MCPP just launched “Move Up, Mississippi”, a campaign aimed at changing our education system for the better.

Mississippi education is only going to improve if we accept the truth about how things really are:

Rather than getting better, the rate of chronic absenteeism in Mississippi schools has got worse.  
 
In 2022-23, over 100,000 students regularly skipped school, up from 70,000 in 2016-17.

So, what’s the solution?
 
What we need is school choice.  Mississippi is now surrounded by states that have school choice.  It is transforming education for the better.  Let’s not get left behind…..

School Choice would mean every family gets to decide where their share of the state education budget is spent.  It would mean that the values being taught in your child’s classroom would have to align with the values of Mississippi families.

To find out what school choice would mean for you and your family, visit moveupms.com

Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama have done more to improve education in 12 months than Mississippi has achieved in 12 years.  Sign up and join our movement if you believe it is time to change that!

Tax reform is on the agenda.  This is excellent news for our state!

To prosper, Mississippi must create a tax environment that is friendly to both businesses and families.

We have moved in the right direction in the past three years.  According to the Tax Foundation, Mississippi now ranks as the 20th most business-friendly state in terms of tax.
 
This improvement in our state’s tax competitiveness is a consequence of the Reeves-Gunn tax reforms.  Under Governor Tate Reeves and Speaker Philip Gunn, Mississippi passed legislation to cut the state income tax to a flat 4 percent and allowed businesses to fully expense capital spending. But the tax burden in Mississippi is still too high. 

Our state is surrounded by states, such as Tennessee, Alabama and Texas, that have a lower tax burden than we do.  Even Louisiana manages to tax less than us.

Fortunately, we have some state leaders that recognize this.  Speaker Jason White is hosting a Tax Policy Summit in September to look at what might be done.  Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann has announced a study group in the Senate to look at fiscal policy, with the ultimate goal, he says, to “lower the tax burden and ensure taxpayer dollars stay in taxpayer pockets”.
 
Mississippi’s House of Representatives also has a select committee on tax reform, which had its first hearing this week.

To be blunt, the House select committee hearing the other day was a big disappointment, especially seeing as we are a supposedly conservative state. Much of what I heard sounded like special pleading from vested interests to increase taxes, not cut them.  I wondered at times if Bernie Sanders was in the room. 

The hearing on tax reform began with a witness making the point that Mississippi needed to spend more money to build more road infrastructure.  The conversation then became about the best way to do so; raise sales tax, tax gas more or charge motorists per mileage. 
 
Not raising tax revenues was described as a “failure to invest”.  Spending more tax dollars would pay for itself, it was asserted. Any serious review of tax policy in our state should not start with special pleading.  It should start with the basic facts about the shape of Mississippi’s public finances. 

The number one fact about Mississippi public finances is that we have a substantial budget surplus.  That is to say politicians in our state have more of our tax dollars than they currently know what to do with.
 
How could we change the tax system to allow people to keep more of their own money before politicians figure out ways of squandering the surplus?  That is where the select committee ought to have started. 

What kind of tax reforms are feasible depends on the extent to which our budget surplus is cyclical or structural.  In other words, is the budget surplus a temporary phenomenon, caused by growth at this stage in the economic cycle?  Or is the surplus a surplus not withstanding fluctuations in economic performance?
 
This matters because if the surplus is temporary, tax reform will need to be phased in carefully to avoid having to put taxes back up again, as did Kansas. Failure to consider if our budget surplus is a blip or a longer term phenomenon allows those opposed to significant tax cuts to lazily claim Mississippi cannot afford more tax cuts.   (Note how when the Senate Leadership was trying to water down the Reeves-Gunn tax cuts in 2022 they were able to get away with the claim that we would be ‘like Kansas’.)

Having established what Mississippi can - and cannot - afford in terms of tax cuts, the select committee should then consider what type of tax cuts. 
 
One possibility would be to cut the grocery tax.  This would be a relatively small but symbolic cut, which is why it tends to be favored by the Senate Leadership which is lukewarm about any significant reduction in the size of government in our state.

Another possibility would be to phase out the income tax altogether.  This would be a big and bold step, and would need triggers and thresholds to ensure it was not done ‘like Kansas’.
 
“But who will pay for our roads, Carswell!”, I hear you say.  “The witness who said we need to invest in infrastructure had a point, no?” I agree. 

There are some things, like roads, that our state government does need to do. As and when we need to raise tax revenue for specific projects, like road building, then our lawmakers should propose ad hoc tax increases to pay for it.
 
Arkansas asked voters to approve a specific increase in sales tax, for a ten year fixed period, to pay for key state infrastructure.  In other words, tax revenue was raised for a purpose.  Taxes were not raised on the pretext of special pleading and then kept at the elevated level forever. What is very odd is to allow the special pleading of vested interests to be used as an argument for raising the tax burden, in a conservative voting state, and in front of a supposedly conservative-run House committee.
 
If Mississippi is going to achieve meaningful tax reform, those considering it need to be less Bernie Sanders, and more Ronald Reagan.  The lobbyists might not like it, but the voters will.

Waiting for my suitcase in the arrivals hall at Jackson airport the other evening, it occurred to me that the luggage carrousel was a pretty good metaphor for Mississippi politics. Like suitcases on a carrousel, many leaders simply sit on the conveyor belt of state politics, waiting their turn to get moved along to the next role.

Too often leaders are carried along by time and process, rarely offering any vision as to what our state should do differently. 
 
This explains why Mississippi conservatives have achieved less in 12 years than Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama have accomplished in the past 12 months.  Louisiana did not even have a Republican governor this time last year, yet they’ve already passed universal school choice.

Things could be about to change if House Speaker, Jason White, has his way. 
 
This week, White announced that he will be hosting a Tax Policy Summit on September 24th to take a deep dive into the prospects for Tax Reform. 

My friend, Grover Norquist, will be speaking, as will Gov Reeves, as well leading conservative figures from the state legislature.

Having a conversation in public matters because in the past the leadership in our state Senate has done what it can to head off tax cuts.  Bringing the facts of what can and cannot be done into the open makes it far harder for anyone to keep finding new excuses to oppose actual conservative policy. 

Sunshine is the best disinfectant against the putrid politics of backroom deals.  We have seen far too many backroom maneuvers used to kill off good conservative policy in this state. 
 
Back in 2022, Mississippi passed a law to cut the state income tax to a flat 4 percent.  This $525 million tax cut, driven forward by Speaker Philip Gunn and Gov Reeves, benefited 1.2 million taxpayers and their families.  But we must not forget how some in the Senate fought against it – not in the open, of course. 

Weak Senate leadership has a history of opposing conservative proposals in our state.  Seldom do they have the courage to come out and explicitly kill off conservative measures.  Instead, they do it on the sly. 
 
The Senate leadership maneuvered to stop anti-DEI legislation in 2024.  I don’t recall anyone coming out and explaining why they opposed anti-DEI law.  They just killed it in committee with a nudge and wink. 

For three years in a row, the Senate leadership has killed off attempts to restore the ballot initiative.  Again, those against resorting the ballot lack the courage to say they are against it.  They killed that, too, on the sly. 

Rep Rob Roberson’s excellent school funding reform bill, perhaps the only big strategic achievement of this year’s session, passed despite attempts to scupper it by some in the Senate.  (Part of the backroom deal to get the bill passed was to change its name.  It really was that petty.)
 
When the Senate leadership wants to oppose an authentically conservative policy, they follow a now familiar pattern. 

A reason is cited as to why what is being proposed can’t be done.  School choice, we were once told, would be unconstitutional.  An anti-DEI law, it was implied, was unnecessary because there was no DEI on campus.

Once that excuse is shown to be nonsense (there is no constitutional bar to school choice, DEI is rampant on campus), another excuse is promptly conjured up.  And on it goes.

Each time the Senate leadership opposes conservative policy this way, I wonder what their alternatives are.  The answer is that most of the time there are none.  It is pretty low grade to oppose ideas simply because they are not your own. 
 
Eventually, of course, a suitcase that sits on the carousel for too long ends up in lost luggage.

As a direct consequence of the 2022 Reeves-Gunn tax cuts, Mississippi is now starting to see a flood of inward investment into the state.  

Every time you hear about a new factory opening up in our state, remember who and what helped make it happen. I am very optimistic that this Tax Summit could see further progress to make our state more competitive. 

Great news!  The University of Mississippi has just announced it will be closing its DEI department, the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement.  
 
The University’s DEI department has been the driving force behind “Pathways to Equity”, a five-year university wide strategic plan committed to equity and racial justice. 
 
Under “Pathways to Equity” everything at the university – including curriculum content – has been increasingly managed through the prism of intersectional ideology.

According to public records requests that MCPP submitted, Ole Miss is still spending millions on its various DEI initiatives.  The head of the Division of Diversity, Shawnboda Mead, alone is on $246,881 a year.
 
If Ole Miss really is going to dismantle the apparatus of woke ideology, great.  I fear, however, that what we have here is merely a rebrand.
 
Chancellor Glenn Boyce, who made the announcement about the name change in an email, must surely sense that the political climate is changing.    Alumni are increasingly reluctant to donate to what they perceive as ‘woke’ academics who despise their values. 

Boyce seems to be trying to head off anti DEI legislation.

Until now, Mississippi’s liberal Senate leadership has been able to block various bills that would tackle DEI in our public universities.  However, the Senate leadership is increasingly weak, if not yet a lame duck.

Mississippi’s weak Senate leadership failed to block school funding reform in the last session, despite every effort.  The weak Senate leadership will only grow weaker in 2025 and may not have the strength to keep blocking anti DEI law.

Boyce perhaps senses this, and has cooked up a deal with the good ole boys to try to head off the anti DEI legislation we need.

Governors in many nearby states have taken effective action against DEI ideology, issuing Executive Orders.  Curiously our Governor has chosen not to take any action against ‘woke’ ideology despite mountains of evidence action is needed.  This is puzzling.

I suspect this may change.  The urge to appear on Fox News or get noticed by Team Trump may soon exceed the desire to keep in with university bureaucrats. 

The rising generation of Republican leaders in our state, such as State Auditor, Shad White, are clear that they want to see an end to using public money to promote divisive, race-based DEI ideology. 
 
Chancellor Boyce’s move seems to me as much an attempt at deflection, as it is a serious effort to root out woke ideology.  What the university really wants is to head off legislation that would outlaw the promotion of an ideology that is increasingly commonplace among third rate academics in our public universities.  

University administrators across America have made a Faustian bargain with their ultra progressive faculty.  They tip toe around the cultural Marxists on campus, allowing them to promote extreme leftist ideology, in return for a quiet life.

University administrators have appeased the ‘woke’ monster in the hope that it might eat them last. 

This is why the Division of Diversity might be going, but it is to be replaced by a new Division of Access, Opportunity, and Community Engagement.  The new Division will be run, it has been reported, by the same head who ran the old one.  
 
Mediocre academics at the Department of English will, I suspect, continue to “embrace diversity, inclusion, and equity as central to the scholarly mission” while “recognizing the ongoing legacies of systemic inequity within the institutions of our academic field”. 
 
Nothing in Boyce’s announcement suggests he is about to get serious about rooting out ultra leftist academics that hold tenure.  If there is any new commitment to ensuring intellectual diversity at Ole Miss, I must have missed it.  Far easier to keep feeding the monster, rather than confront it. 

If Boyce was serious about ending DEI, he would commit to running the university on the principle of equality – treating every person equally – not equity – the idea that outcomes should be manipulated to tackle perceived or historic disadvantages.

What is encouraging is that Boyce and his team are not seeking to defend DEI from first principle. 
 
In just three years, DEI has become indefensible. 

Here at MCPP we will keep punching the bruise until this deeply divisive, extremist ideology is no longer being pushed on young minds using your tax dollars.  The moral case for discriminating against some of today’s students because of what happened before they were even born has collapsed. 

Mississippi’s weak Senate leadership might not appreciate our efforts to end DEI, but so what?   The values we teach the next generation of young people in America are vastly more important that the feelings on any ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politicians.

I am not convinced that rebranding the DEI department is going to be enough to stave off legislation. I doubt that all the free tickets to all the football games will be enough to prevent change.

In order to fix a problem, you first need to accept that you’ve got a problem. In order for families in our state to get the education their children deserve, we need state leaders to recognize that right now they aren't getting a good enough education.
 
Instead, what we get is propaganda about the Mississippi education ‘miracle’. The other week the Mississippi Department of Education published the results from the 2023-24 Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP). Relying on this data to tell you about education in Mississippi would be like leaving it to your child to mark their own homework.
 
Sure enough, having marked their own homework, the Mississippi education bureaucracy told us that “student achievement has reached an all-time high” in math, English and science. Just as you get inflation in the economy, you get grade inflation in the education system. MAAP scores are used to help rate schools and districts A-F. There has been a dramatic fall in the number of D and F rated districts in recent years. This is not because those districts are no longer failing, but because even failing districts get given better grades.
 
A more credible measure of student performance is the national benchmark, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This data tells a less flattering story. 

Education standards are bad - and they are not getting better! The claim by the Mississippi Department of Education that Mississippi “students have made faster progress than nearly every other state” is ridiculous. The truth is that during the COVID lockdowns, standards as measured by the NAEP plummeted in other states, but barely changed in ours. This meant our relative position rose, but without any significant improvement in outcomes. 
 
Officials know all this, yet still present a misleading picture of what has happened in the belief that you will be impressed. Equally implausible is the idea that we should celebrate record high school graduation rates. One in four Mississippi public school students is chronically absent from school. Worse, the number of kids regularly not showing up to school has skyrocketed from 70,275 in 2016-17 to 108,310 in 2022-23.
 
Honesty about the true state of education matters because self-congratulatory propaganda is one reason things don't get fixed. Mississippi has been run by supposed conservatives for over a decade.  In all that time, we have seen remarkably little progress towards the kind of big strategic changes we need. In 12 months, Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana made more progress towards school choice than Mississippi managed in 12 years. Why?

A lot of it is down to leadership. Politicians merely looking to progress along the conveyor belt don’t need any vision. They simply aim to “go along to get along”. Mississippi is now surrounded on three sides by states that have universal school choice. In every case, change took courage and vision, not self-congratulation. One of the reasons why Arkansas’ Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Louisiana’s Jeff Landry and Texas’ Greg Abbott are regularly on Fox News and are emerging as conservative leaders with a national profile is because they have shown the tenacity to fight for school choice in their own states.

Another part of the problem is that too many have an interest in exaggerating the impact of those reforms that have happened. This may be understandable, but laws passed almost a decade ago are not enough to improve education outcomes today.

Our job at MCPP is to push forward conservative policies based on true conservative principles, not dubious press releases. We aim to ensure that conservative leaders in this state finally commit to universal school choice. We are on a mission to ensure that anyone telling you that there has been an education ‘miracle’ looks ridiculous. Only school choice will do.

Elections are underway for the Mississippi Supreme Court.  Five candidates are competing for a seat in the Central District, some of whom I heard speak at the Neshoba County Fair recently.  There’s a similar election taking place in south Mississippi. It’s easy to take it for granted that ordinary people are able to elect judges in our state.

Judges have to decide complex legal questions dispassionately.  This sometimes encourages commentators to ask if we should allow ordinary voters to elect judges in the first place.
 
“Do voters know enough to elect Mississippi judges?” ran one headline last week.  Given all the complexities and the fact that most voters have only a limited understanding of the law, surely it should be left to experts to decide who is best qualified to sit on the Mississippi Supreme Court?

If you want to know why ordinary people in Mississippi ought to retain the power to elect their judges, look across the Atlantic.  On a brief visit to my native Britain, I was appalled at what’s been going on.
 
There have been widespread riots in towns and cities across England over the past couple of weeks following the murder of three young girls in Southport at a Taylor Swift dance class. 

The UK authorities are now alarmed that a sizeable number of Brits are extremely agitated about mass (often illegal) immigration.  Tens of thousands of illegal migrants have been allowed to flood into the country on small dinghies from France.  1 in 27 people now living in Britain arrived in the past two years.  4 in 10 foreign-born people in Britain have arrived in the past decade.

More ominously, perhaps, millions of Brits seem to have lost confidence in what many see as a “two tier” criminal justice system.  There’s a widespread sense that the police and the judiciary in Britain routinely apply different standards to different groups, including Muslims.
 
When, for example, (non-Muslim) Roma immigrants rioted in the city of Leeds last month, the police seemed to stand back.  A mere handful have been charged. Contrast that to the way police this week arrested and charged people for saying obnoxious things online.  In Cheshire, the police arrested a woman for an inaccurate social media post.  

The official in charge of public prosecutions in Britain declared that he has a team of “dedicated police officers scouring social media” to arrest people for posting things that are “insulting” or “abusive”.  He even threatened to extradite people to the UK for sharing such material online.
 
Unable to police the streets against violent robbery, the clowns running Britain today are arresting people for being rude online.  Having failed to keep illegal immigrants out, they are threatening to import foreigners into the country against their will for what they re-tweet.

How did Britain end up in such a sorry state?  To a large extent it is a story about the corruption of Britain’s judiciary.
 
Mass immigration has become an explosive issue in Britain because judges have routinely thwarted attempts by successive governments to control it.  In 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 the British people voted overwhelmingly to cut immigration to less than 100,000 a year.  This has not happened because judges have systematically prevented elected governments from controlling the country’s borders. 

British judges only ever seem to rule in favor of those who enter the country illegally being able to remain, ruling on the basis of what they think the law should be, not the laws Parliament has passed.
 
Britain, a once orderly, high-trust society, has become increasingly lawless because judges have routinely failed to apply sentences that ordinary Brits would regard as just.  It is so commonplace for violent robbers and rapists to be given community sentences, rather than go to prison, it is seldom even reported anymore.  Only last month, it was announced that even violent offenders would be released from prison after serving 40 percent of their sentences.

Why are British judges so awful?  Because they are unaccountable to the public.

In Britain, judges are appointed, not elected.  Until 2006, at least the appointments were made by an elected minister, meaning there was at least some degree of democratic oversight.
 
Since 2006, Britain’s judges have been appointed by the Judicial Appointments Commission, a body obsessed about diversity, equity and inclusion, rather than justice.  Liberty and order in Britain are collapsing as a consequence. 

Back in Neshoba, it was refreshing to watch wannabe judges having to connect with the people that they wanted to serve.  They talked of their record of service.  They gave the audience a good sense of their values.  Watching the process of judicial elections, I realize it would be impossible for Mississippi, with elected judges, to end up in the absurd situation Britain is now in.
 
Keep it that way.  Elect your judges to safeguard your liberties.   Bar some very exceptional circumstances, such as when a city descends into dysfunction (Jackson?), elected judges are better than the alternatives.

On October 7 last year, ordinary civilians in Israel were the victims of extraordinary savagery.  Hamas terrorists killed young people at a music festival, often in gruesome ways.  Families were slaughtered in suburban homes. By any civilized moral standards, there ought to be overwhelming sympathy for a country subjected to such savagery. 

Instead, throughout the Western world, we have witnessed endless anti- Israel protests. Why? Part of the reason is demographics.  In Britain, for example, in 2001 there were one and half million Muslims.  Today, there are almost four million. 
 
That is not to say that every — or even most — British Muslims are anti- Israel. But it does explain the scale and size of some recent protests. So, too, on American university campuses.  There have been frequent anti-Israel student protests, often at so-called elite universities.  It is perhaps not a coincidence that there has also been a rapid rise in the number of students with Middle Eastern backgrounds at such universities. 

Again, not every student from the Middle East is necessarily anti-Israel.  But the reservoir of potential anti-Israel student protesters is certainly larger than before. 
 
The rise in anti-Israel sentiment in the West clearly can’t only be about demographics.  Many, if not most, of those protesting against Israel are not those with a Middle Eastern background, but those on the political Left. 
 
Why then do those on the Left have such animus towards Israel?  Why do they seem to suspend ordinary moral standards whenever Israel is involved? When it comes to Ukraine, for example, those on the political Left – correctly in my view – see Ukraine as a brave country, rightfully taking a stand against a vastly bigger aggressor. 
 
So why don’t they see Israel that way? Israel wasn’t just attacked on October 7.  From the Six Day War to the Yom Kippur War, Israel has been on the receiving end of relentless aggression. Israel, a country smaller than Vermont, is surrounded by larger foes intent on destroying her and eradicating her people, as Hamas showed us a few months ago. 

Progressive opinion in America and Britain is of the view that the government of Ukraine must not try to accommodate Russia or make concessions.  So why do they demand that Israel call a ceasefire? London, Washington and Berlin are full of leaders who want to supply Ukraine with weapons.  Why then do many also demand that America and Europe stop giving Israel the tools to defend herself? 
 
The last time there was unequivocal support for Israel in the West was during the Entebbe raid in Uganda in 1976.  I remember the morning of the Entebbe raid well.  A young child at the time, I happened to be living close by in Kampala. When Israel pulled off a daring rescue mission, freeing the trapped hostages from the hijacked Air France plane at Entebbe — where Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother Yonatan lost his life — there was rejoicing across the political spectrum. 

Today, when Israel attempts to rescue her hostages in Gaza she is treated by many media outlets with scorn. Look at how posters of Israeli hostages held in Gaza have been torn down in cities throughout Europe and America. 
 
As my friend Douglas Murray has pointed out, when a cat or dog goes missing in London or Paris or New York, people will often put up a poster about the missing pet.  If we saw someone take down a poster about a missing pet, we would be offended.  We’d know it was wrong.  Where is the outrage against those removing posters of the Bibas kids? 
 
One reason Israel is held to a different standard is anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a famously shape shifting virus.  At one time, Jews were hated for their religion, then for their race.  Today, it seems to me, it is for their nation. Israel is loathed by many progressives because as a country, Israel embodies the notion of national self-determination.  For many centuries, Jewish families toasted each other at Passover with the phrase: “Next year in Jerusalem.” 
 
And then in 1948, almost miraculously, it came true. National self-determination offends elite opinion formers.  They revere supranationalism instead.  They venerate the UN, the ICC and the EU. Progressives prefer laws made by international treaty over those passed by elected national legislatures.  Progressives prefer fealty to rules made by the global community over obligations to an actual community. 
 
Israel’s success offends the Left not only because she is a national state, but because she demonstrates the success of Western society. If all cultures were of equal worth, why then does a small state that could fit inside Vermont produce so much enterprise and innovation? If there is an equivalence between cultures, why has post 1948 Israel seen such success amid a sea of Middle Eastern failure and autocracy? 
 
Those who loathe Israel don’t just hate the Jewish nation state, they despise all nation states – including another phenomenally successful Republic, started not in 1948 but in 1776. If they merely hate Israel, why do they burn the American flag?  America and the Western way of life is their intended target. Whether we like it or not, those of us who love America, who see Western culture as a sublime human achievement, have no choice but to side with and support Israel, against those who seek to destroy us all. 
 
Those who hate Israel hate us too.

Donald Trump wants school choice.  The GOP adopted school choice as part of their 2024 platform.  Most important of all, parents in Mississippi overwhelmingly support school choice.
 
So why do some Mississippi ‘conservatives’ oppose school choice?

Republicans have held the Governor’s mansion in this state since 2004.  They have held the Senate since 2011 and the House since 2012.  In all that time they have made remarkably little progress towards giving families control over their child’s share of education tax dollars.  Why?

Firstly, too many lawmakers in our state have been unwilling to pick a fight with local education bureaucrats.  Just as turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving, local education bureaucrats tend not to support the idea that families should have control of their tax dollars. 

Once families in our state are given control of between $7,000 – $9,000 per child each year, those families will be able to allocate the money to a school of their choice.  School superintendents, many of whom are paid more than the Governor, would lose the power to allocate that money the way they want. 

If we are to overcome these kind of vested interests, Mississippi needs leaders who will lead on school choice.

Instead, many officials in our state prefer to indulge the myth of the Mississippi education ‘miracle’ – the fantasy that we are seeing spectacular gains in education outcomes.

We aren’t.  One in four students in our state is routinely absent from the classroom.  Four in ten fourth graders cannot read properly at even basic level.  It is nonsense to pretend that there has been a dramatic improvement in education standards in our state. 

The Mississippi education ‘miracle’ is a narrative born of convenience, not fact.  It suits elected leaders who want us to believe that on their watch things are improving.  It flatters those in the public policy space to imagine that this or that reform they helped implement years ago, before today’s fourth graders were even born, is somehow helping young people learn.

What the myth of the Mississippi education ‘miracle’ actually does is reduce the chance that we make the changes our state needs.

To be fair, many politicians pay lip service to school choice in various speeches.  They like to cite their support for Charter Schools.

Although a law was passed a decade ago to allow Charter Schools, the administrative state in Jackson has done all it can to stifle the growth of Charter Schools.  The Charter Authorizer Board has rejected 80 percent of new school applications.  Fewer than 1 percent of schools in Mississippi are Charter Schools. 

The question needs to be asked why officials have done so little to change this?

 
The only significant progress made recently was the 2024 school funding reform which gives every student a personalized education budget that reflects their needs (and in which MCPP was heavily involved).  But what good is a personalized budget for students if they cannot spend it at a school of their choice?

Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama have made more progress on school choice in the past 12 months than Mississippi has managed in the past 12 years.  Our neighbors did so because their state leaders were honest about the true state of education, and the need for change.

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas made school choice her priority, not just a name check item in her speeches.  Louisiana managed to pass school choice legislation a few weeks ago despite only having had a Republican governor for a year.

Due to their honesty about the true scale of the task, all three neighboring states now have universal school choice programs that give mom and dad control over their child’s share to education funds. 

Parents in Mississippi will start to notice once they see families in neighboring states using school choice. 

Team Trump might start to notice those opposing school choice at a state level, too. 

Failing to make progress on school choice won’t just harm the careers of Mississippi students.  It could damage the careers of any ambitious local leaders wanting to find favor with a future Trump administration in Washington DC. 

Real conservatives support school choice. 

Had Donald Trump tilted his head the other way, the bullet that clipped his ear would have killed him.  America was half an inch away from a major civil crisis.

We don’t yet know the full details of this assassination attempt, but it is clear that Donald J Trump has been demonized by his opponents for years.

Of course, in politics you sometimes say negative things about your opponents.  But the rhetoric aimed at Trump has often gone far beyond normal political back-and-forth.  Trump’s opponents have set out to delegitimize him.

After losing to Trump in 2016, Hilary Clinton described him an ‘illegitimate’ president.  Spurious allegations emerged suggesting he was somehow a Russian agent.  Every effort was made to undermine his administration, often from within.

When Trump began to re-emerge as the Republican frontrunner in this election cycle, a number of prosecutors suddenly started to bring cases against him.  Odd, that. 

It seems to me that as in a Banana Republic, he was being persecuted through the courts for political reasons, as much as he was being prosecuted for breaking the law.

Now comes an assassin’s bullet, which narrowly missed Trump but did kill a fifty year old father attending a political rally. 

We don’t yet know what motivated Trump’s would-be assassin, but we do know enough to ask where this growth of political extremism comes from. 

The decline of religion means that politics has become, for many, a substitute belief system. 

“When men choose not to believe in God” my fellow Englishman, GK Chesteron, once observed, “they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

People need a sense of purpose, a framework that explains the world and their place in it.  Without religion, many have adopted a belief system called climate change.  Others a system called intersectionalism.  Their place in the cosmos, they start to imagine, is defined in terms of where they sit in a hierarchy of victimhood. 

Once you think this way, those who share your world view seem virtuous.  Those that don’t become the ‘deplorables’.  Anyone who just happens to have a different point of view is suddenly a moral affront.   Such people must be no platformed. 

Instead of viewing elections a process for deciding who holds office, they are seen as a Manichaen struggle of good against evil.  Once you think this way, the ends begin to justify the means, with calamitous consequences.

Too many Americans are willing to always think the worst of fellow Americans, and it’s not just progressives who look for the worst in conservatives. 

Take what happened in the wake of the attempted assassination.  Many commentators appeared to almost want to find evidence of incompetence, or worse, conspiracy.

An apparent hesitation by Secret Service marksmen in engaging the gunman was somehow sinister, it was suggested.  Commentators without much experience of close personal protection were quick to inform us that the female Secret Service agents could not handle their weapons properly. 

Really?  Why assume the worst?  Why not start from the position that what we witnessed were professionals under intense pressure, making life and death decisions, and doing the best they could? 

I’m an immigrant that looks at America as an outsider.  Born in Britain, and raised in Uganda, I came to America by choice (and good fortune). 

I don’t look about me trying to find fault in my new home.  I see instead an extraordinary country that it is a great privilege to be part of.  I see the most hospitable, friendly, and innovative people on the planet all around me.  I believe so strongly in the things that make America special so much, I even wrote a children’s book about it. 

Each time I meet an American for the first time it never occurs to me to wonder if they vote Republican or Democrat.  To me, they are just American, and all the better for it.

We need to stop looking at each other through the prism of politics.  It’s not good for us, for our politics or for America.

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